Marketing my book
When you've published your book with Kindle Direct Publishing the next thing they expect you to do is advertise on the Amazon sites. The initial sales page set up is like their publishing - totally free until you get a sale. Even then, I think they're pretty reasonable giving the author 60% royalties less print costs for paperback and hardcover and 70% on eBooks - wow! Compared to traditional publishing and vanity publishing, they're great.
Unfortunately, marketing of a book is the hardest part of all! With traditional publishers they do all the marketing for you, the hard work, the social media, the emails, all done by themselves - at a cost of course! Nothing is totally free when marketing.
It's all well and good publishing a book and putting it on the shop floor ie in this instance the Amazon sales page, but that doesn't make people pick it out of the millions of other books and buy a copy. A sad fact indeed. That's where the cost comes into it.
Amazon will have you paying the highest prices for bids on advertising your book, believe me, I tried it their way and lost a lot of money (well a lot of money to me lol!)
Bryan Cohen's Ads Profit Challenge was like a breath of fresh air. He showed me how to spend less to be able to advertise more until the sales started to come in. 'The Profit Challenge' is exactly that - a challenge!
For me, the only sales still seemed to be from word of mouth and eventually mouths stop spreading the word lol! I didn't know what was wrong with my book. Why didn't anyone want to buy a copy to read?
Bryan Cohen's Ad School helped me identify where the problems could lie... The first port of call was getting the correct genres - a nightmare for me, it felt, because my book covers so many tropes.
Tropes are storylines for example, in 'Joan put on a happy face' you have tropes such as:
A young girl loses her mother at an impressionable age
A young girl marries an older man, a vagrant, an actor, against her fathers wishes.
A young wife and mother battles with post-natal depression while her husband works all the time.
A young mother uses play therapy to help her young son express himself
A young girl with poor self esteem fights her way into the world of adults, becomes an a travelling performer and a learns to become forceful woman, a woman to reckon with
A wife whose husband turns to drink and drugs and becomes lazy and irresponsible
A wife who is struck by her husband and left to die in hospital, taking their son with him.
A husband who kills his best friend and suffers with depression bordering on madness out of guilt
A husband who suffers post traumatic stress after leading his troupe of actors through wars and death as an immortal who wants to but cannot die!
The tropes go on... I had to start somewhere.
After that, they taught me how to look for other reasons for lack of sales and we looked at my book cover to begin with. This...
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