In my last blog, I announced that I had finally finished my novella, The Worth of a World, and I listed my next steps. Let’s see how far I’ve gotten:
First: Publish on Amazon, both e-book and paperback:
Not yet. I decided not to publish in e-book, to keep that as an exclusive for my email newsletter list. I do want to publish a paperback version, because I know quote a few readers are still preferring hard copies. I’m going to price it low, around $3.99 or $4.99, since it is a novella and I can still use it to introduce new readers to Star Riders. As soon as the cover is ready, I will do that.
Second: Run a sale on Amazon of Star Riders (probably $1.99) to gain some readers and hope that they are enticed to join the email list in order to get the prequel.
Not yet, but scheduled. I found out that Amazon changed the rules on sales since I last did one. Now you can only do a “Countdown Deal” once every quarter, and the current one just started September 18. So I’m planning on doing a sale October 2-9, and I’ve set up three promotions with Fussy Librarian, ManyBooks, and Bargain Booksy. They will each send out an email to their lists telling them my book will be on sale. I learned from my last free promotion to spread out the promotions so I can see how many sales result from each of those. So Fussy Librarian will be October 2-3, ManyBooks will be October 5-6, and Bargain Booksy will be October 8-9.
Next: Run other promotions of The Worth of a World.
This is where I’ve focused. Now that I’m signed up with BookFunnel, I can participate in joint promotions with other independent authors. These joint promotions are set up by an author who creates a theme and a graphic, sets up dates for the promotion, and files it with BookFunnel. Then other authors pick out promotions they want to participate in, by genre and other discriminators.
We all agree to include the promotions in our email newsletters, so it’s sort of cross-pollinating our lists. I’ve also posted these on my Facebook page. Each author is assigned a different link to the promotion, so they can keep track of how many times each author has shared it, and how many resulted in click-through. If an author doesn’t share much, they will probably have a hard time getting into future promotions. (so it would help me if you clicked on the links below. Pretty please?)
There are two flavors of promotions: Sales and Newsletter Building. Sales promotions simply tell people a book is for sale. I’ve joined a couple of these with Star Riders, but haven’t seen any results yet. Here they are (you can click on the graphics to see what books they include):
The Newsletter Building promotions are what I was looking for with The Worth of a World. This required me to upgrade my BookFunnel account from “New Author” to “Mid-Level Author”. With that, they will collect email addresses for me from people who click to get a free copy of The Worth of a World. Then I can export their email addresses into a spreadsheet that I can import into MailChimp and they’ve joined my email newsletter list. Here’s the promotion (you can click on the graphic to see all 28 books available for free):
In the four days so far, I’ve picked up 51 subscribers from this promotion, which almost doubles my list (woo-hoo!). I’ve also signed up for two more promotions in October, which I’ll include in my mid-October newsletter (I’m now trying to send out an email every month). I’m also reading Newsletter Ninja for tips on how an author should write newsletters; I’ll probably write a post on what I’ve learned sometime soon.
Finally: Go back to working on the sequel.
Yes, I’ve made a little progress on this, but most of my time has been spent on the promotions. Now that’s all set up, and I can focus again on the writing.
If you’re not currently a member of my email list (which is not the same as following this blog), there’s a link to the upper right of this post that says “Email Signup” (if you’re reading this on a phone or tablet, scroll down past the end of this post to see it). Or just click here.
As always, I welcome your comments or questions.
Rick A. Allen - SciFi Author 
One thought on “Promoting the Novella”