It’s a good idea to converse with your professional associates and co-workers when it’s fitting to do so; a great idea is to throw a festival to rejoice in the introduction of your Kindle work. Invite workers to the party who have a matching interest to your work’s topic. Think about visiting conferences with your work’s industry alliances.
Take a couple of tangible copies of your book or a paper ad for your Kindle version to give out to people. Keep in mind that you should be very cautious about how you approach this kind of advertising while conversing with people. You should NOT be very pushy and force your work on anyone; it’s considered unprofessional and this act could backfire and give you a horrible reputation—think of it like a website being designated as spam.
The key is to time when and how to act, i. e. if you trade contact information with an editor or publisher, be sure to contact them again in a suitable amount of time and write a sophisticated kind of letter that reminds them of your meeting so you can make sure they remember the correct person. Visit a few conferences if possible. Be vigilant in your networking and learning more data. You may also get more involved by volunteering in some conferences; you can assist in planning one or put on your creative thinking caps and participate in some other form for a professional society. By doing this, you will get “ brownie points” and not be ignored for your efforts, thus helping your reputation.
If you’re timid, you are going to have to realize that you have to put yourself out there. Think of it like acting. Practice acting to help ease into the process. It may help you out first to start assisting with things that need it at first to ease yourself into it. Speak to people and trade business cards when the chance happens.
Professional Image
Two groups that are great for published writers to join because they supply a multitude of professional related assets are PEN and The Author Guild. The Author’s Guild supports different and important issues for published authors like law-based services, rights’ protection, and just reimbursement. A part of this membership’s obligation is that book authors must have a work from an American publisher that is reputable and who obtains a percentage of the work’s sales with a large advance in which the writer is the copyright owner.
Unfortunately, if you only have a work on the Kindle, you don’t qualify; however, if you signed a royalty contract on your Kindle work with a reputable American publisher that has offered a major advance, then you would meet the criteria. Bear in mind that this type of situation happening is very improbable. Other types of writers that may qualify are contributors, translators, coauthors, ghostwriters, and freelance writers. PEN promotes open expression as its main foundation. According to its website, its members have published at least two books of “ literary character or one book of exceptional distinction.”
Here are some websites to some qualified societies that will help guide you:
- The Creative Penn: www. thecreativepenn. com
- John August Screenwriting Tips: http://johnaugust. com
- The Reading Edge Podcast: http://thereadingedge. com
- TeleRead: www. teleread. org
- PEN: www. pen. org
- The Authors Guild: www. authorsguild. org
- The Graphic Artists Guild: www. graphicartistsguild. org
- Publetariat: People Who Publish: www. publetariat. com
Blog Marketing
Remember that just having a mind blowing novel on Kindle does not mean you’ll automatically be triumphant and become rich. After your publisher has verified your account and it’s ready to go, then you’ll have the ability to blog right from Author Central for free by checking out the Blog tab. You can blog using two different methods; one method is to go to the “ Add an RSS feed” tab and put in the feed address, NOT the blog’s address. Or, you can click the Create a new post address and put in a fresh post straight to Amazon via the box that generates. To make an RSS feed using Blogger, visit your blog to sign in and click Customize at the top. Check that the “ Layout” tab is chosen and go to the link “ Add a Gadget.”
Next, include the “ subscription links” tool to your blog. Then, perform all the actions the directions state for initiating this process, which are easy as pie. This is the way to get a RSS subscription capacity included in your blog. To locate your RSS feed address, check out the blog subscription url, which is on your blog’s home page. Click on the url and find “ posts;” then, choose how you want your feed to look in its layout from the options given. The next page will showcase your feed address in a url. Copy and paste this url in the proper box at Author Central to begin extracting your blog feeds into your Author Central account. There will be a note giving caution that it may take up to 24 hours for brand new posts to appear on your author page.
Videos
Amazon has a very cool feature that lets authors upload videos. Go to the “ videos” tab to upload your work. The following formats are what is accepted to upload videos in: . wmv, . flv, . mpg, . mov, and . avi. A huge advantage to putting up a video on your author page would be for credibility and helping to subtly market your book, i. e. if you performed speaking expeditions, these will look great for your profile.
Another option would be to upload a video of yourself talking about your work without giving away too much to ruin it, the reasons for writing your work, and other things about your work that will incite excitement and suspense. There is something about seeing someone express their passion in “ person” vs. on paper alone that allows the reader to absorb it as well.
Amazon permits files that are at the biggest 500 MB. You should go to the “ content guidelines” url to check that your video meets the content qualifications. Making a video is not as complicated as it may sound because most new computers come with a built-in camera. Video-recording functions differ depending on the computer.
You can start by doing a search on your computer using the keywords “ video” or “ camera.” If you don’t have a camera built into your computer, then you can buy a latest webcam for as low as $8 from www. buy. com. You can also check out www. amazon. com to see if it has cheap webcams.
Cameras are diverse, so you should invest some time in reading the directions to learn how to set it up and record appropriately. Trust me; this’ll save you a lot of heartache down the road if you just learn how to do it the right way from the start.
Take heed to the kinds of content Amazon does not allow to be posted:
- Obscene content or things that are offensive like nasty language or depicting other people in a bad way
- Promotions or advertisements
- Stuff that isn’t yours to use
- Personal data like phone numbers, mailing addresses, and website urls
- Data on buying and shipping stuff, costs, and other things related
- Commentary to information that is accessible on your author page and within book reviews
- Promotions for good reviews and votes
- Plot spoilers (why would you want to do that anyway?!)
Happenings
After your account is ready to go, you’ll be able to put facts regarding your speaking events, speeches, book tours, when you’ll be in bookstores, and other happenings under the “ events” tab. Amazon is a joint venture partner with a company called book tour: www. booktour. com. They follow author occurrences, so all new events you put in your author central page will be distributed with Book Tour; book tour also gives your info to other sites/resources to give you further exposure.
To submit a new happening, go to the “ create new event” section and input your description of the event, the location, the name of the work the event is correlated with, and the date and the time it’ll begin. Make sure to be very specific and use loads of details as you can in the description section.
Definitely state if you’ll be giving a speech on your book or similar topics because this will give you a wonderful chance to squeeze in advertising copy; the key is for it to be pertinent to the book and event bordering it. What you put in the description section needs to seduce readers into attending your event; events are a fabulous way to get exposure and demonstrate that you’re involving yourself as a professional in the marketing of your work.
More on Blogs
Creating a name for yourself on the Internet is of vital importance. Amazon has a blog option as mentioned earlier, but it’s relatively limited to the amount of exposure you can acquire than if you have a standard blog with one of the biggest free blog services on the net—WordPress and Blogger.
There is a big caveat to using a blog. You need to be honest with yourself and ask if you would want to keep posting to your blog at least once a week. A blog’s main purpose is to give consistent updates and if you’re not going to do that, there is no point in setting one up. It’s simple to run a blog, so that’s a good thing.
Here’s an example of a fantastic blog by the author Anne Mini below. Read her biographic information as well to get an idea how some of these concepts stated in this book tie together. www. annemini. com. This blog contains an immense amount of helpful information that Anne wrote about grammar guidelines, manuscript layout help, and tons of other things dealing with editing, writing, and the ever evolving realm of publishing.
Your blog does not need to just focus only on your work; you can write about your experiences with your path to publishing for the Kindle, problems you may have ran into (more than likely, others can relate), overall experiences with e-publishing, marketing your work, and other various experiences with agents, editors, or publishers.
Other ideas for topics include writing about your specialize subject of comfort and a multitude of other experiences you have on a professional level of writing. Doing this will help you form a professional profile and reputation that will only enhance your future sales.
Website
Before thinking about investing funds into magazine advertisement, you should first invest money and time into a website instead. It’s important to have one because so much information about yourself, works, etc. can be put on there. It’s ideal to have your website and blog all on one site, within the same domain name.
It is basically like your public identity as an author and a place that readers can easily check out for sources to things linked to your professional profile and work; it also helps that if someone wants to reach you that your contact info is on your site. You never want people to work too hard to be able to find you online because chances are that they will just give up and forget about it. Make it as easy as possible for people to find you online. For some tips on what to put on your site, it helps to look at how others did it first to get an intuitive idea. It will be easiest just to hire a freelancer or friend to build one for you too on www. elance. com
Here are some useful links that can help give you a lot of ideas:
- www. kevinprufer. com/index. html
- www. mdbell. com
- www. stephenking. com
- www. how-to-build-websites. com/lessonOne. php
Suggested Information to Include on your website
- Cover graphics
- ISBN
- Summary of work
- Publication date
- Target readership
- Teaser excerpt from the first chapter
- Info about how and where to purchase your book (Make sure this is clear and easy to follow)
- Commentary of your works
- Summaries of each work you’ve published
- Promotional excerpts by other people in the business
Don’t interweave information; this means to separate your author biographic data from your personal or other non-author career data. The exception is if your job relates to being an author, i. e. if you’re a librarian. Put in future dates and a chart of previous events like lecture or book tours (that you’ve attended or are scheduled to attend) that occurred.
As a final reminder, it’s very important to keep the material on your site fresh and update at least once a week. If you find yourself in a position to not have anything to think of writing, post news and events in the business from around the internet, or your feedback to a work you’ve read lately. Just be in the habit (which will put your readers in the habit of checking out your site) of doing this and it’ll be easy to continue after a while.
Aside from keeping readers keeping up with what you’re doing, it’s vital to having a lot of content on your site because this will increase the number of other sites that will link to your site; this linking is very helpful in helping to rank your site in the search engines. Making a positive impression with Google can never hurt, since it’s the biggest search engine at the moment.
Now, you have a great starting point to begin your quest to becoming an accomplished author on Kindle. There are many resources available to help. Go for it!
