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Life of Secrets: Ambassadors Wanted

I’d like to recruit some Ambassadors to help spread the word about life of Secrets when it launches. As an independently published author, there’s no publishing house marketing budget behind my books. I manage all the promotions myself. And word of mouth is a crucial part of that marketing. Ambassadors will have specific things they can help with. Read on!

Who should be an Ambassador?

Did you read Death of Secrets? Did you like it? Have you been looking forward to Life of Secrets? Are you comfortable telling other people that, including strangers and friends? If so, you’re the perfect candidate.

What do Ambassadors get?

You will get a FREE e-book version of Life of Secrets, and you’ll get it weeks before anyone else. (So, one more qualification for Ambassadors: you should enjoy reading electronically, whether on a Kindle, iPad, tablet, nook, your laptop, or whatever.)

Sounds great! What do I have to do?

Ambassadors commit to three things:

  1. Posting an honest review of the book on Amazon.com within 24 hours after the official launch date. This is the biggest, most important duty of an Ambassador. The most successful e-book marketing tools are all based on the number and average star rating of your reviews. It takes at least 4 to get listed in some places, and as many as 20 in others. I need reviews, and I need them quickly, in order to get started on the advertising campaign to sell the book. Remember: honest reviews. Ambassadors are not obligated to write a good review, or give it five stars, or anything like that. They only commit to posting a review that tells how they really felt about the book. The official launch date is likely to be the last week of June, so you’ll have  quite some time to read the book and craft your review to get it ready to post on Amazon.
  2. Sharing Life of Secrets posts on Facebook. This really helps increase the awareness of the book.
  3. E-mailing me any typos or edits you might find. The great beauty of electronic publishing is that mistakes can be corrected at any time, even after the book is published. Life of Secrets has already been worked on by very skilled editors, but the lesson I learned from Death of Secrets is that typos still crop up no matter how many times you think you’ve polished it.

Ambassadors are a fundamental part of my marketing strategy. I want to be clear about this: I am asking for your help. If you’re willing, and the above description sounds good to you, then fill out the form below and I’ll get you started!

UPDATE: Life of Secrets is published, so the Ambassador program is over now. Grab your copy on Amazon!

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BookBub lives up to the hype

For Indie authors trying to promote their books, the name BookBub looms very large. Once I finished blindly flailing about, I discovered that BookBub is the leading name in promotion of e-books by e-mail. I also learned that they’re hard to get in with. But eventually, they accepted Death of Secrets.

Bookbub has certain requirements: The price you give them has to be the lowest for which the book has been advertised anywhere else. It has to be a limited time special. Unfortunately, I had put Death of Secrets at $0.99 as a regular price starting in March, which made it hard to get listed in bookbub for that price.

I put the novel on free promotion, and paid BookBub $220 to list it. I also sent the free promotion to a few smaller e-mail lists that promote free e-books. As usual, I scheduled like a bazillion tweets over the course of the free promotion.

What happened?

Over the course of the free promotion (April 29-30) the book was downloaded 40,000 times. Let me repeat that: Forty Thousand. My previous free promotion had 5,700 downloads. So yeah, BookBub can move e-books.

But of course, those are all free. Your humble narrator makes zero. Obviously, it’s a great audience builder for the sequel, which is the main point at this stage of my writing “career.” But still, one yearns for entrepreneurial success as well.

Good news!

Amazon. of course, lists books based on their sales. So by spiking the downloads so hard, Death of Secrets was all of a sudden much more visible on Amazon to people who are looking for thrillers. What that means is, after a free promotion, there’s always a spike in paid sales. In this case, that spike was pretty impressive.

I set the price back to $2.99 after the free promo, rather than $0.99. (more on the pluses and minuses of the two price points in a later post). And at that price, the day after the huge free promo, 220 people bought Death of Secrets. In the intervening days, the number has grown to 320.

Since $2.99 qualifies for the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, I get roughly $2.05 per sale. That means, of course, that I’ve made $656 in royalties so far in May. Given that the BookBub promo cost $220, that qualifies as a smashing success!

Now, the trick is to keep the success going. I have a couple other promotions scheduled today and later this month. I’ll post again about how things develop.

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E-Reader News Today

Death of Secrets is featured on ereadernewstoday.com. As marketing opportunities go, this one may be the best I’ve encountered for self-published authors. I’ve sold about 49 e-books since the listing went live at around 9am mountain time — in less than 11 hours, in other words. And honestly those didn’t really start coming in until around noon. So really it’s about 8 hours to sell 49 e-books. Based on my experience with Kindle Nation Daily / bookgorilla, it seems likely this surge will continue at least through tomorrow morning. If so, there’s a good chance that this promotion will exceed the success rate of the previous promotion.

What makes ereadernewstoday.com the superior promotion, though, is their price structure. As I understand it, I will receive a bill in a few days for 25% of the dollar amount I make in the first two days of the promotion. That makes it effectively a can’t-lose proposition from a return-on-investment perspective.

I’ll report in a week or so on whether this worked out as expected. If it does, I would say ereadernewstoday gets my strong recommendation for any indie author to use in promoting their work.