Tomfoolery

Its been a good week. Penny my editor and her daughter Amy have done a wonderful job of editing and proof reading Conversations with Tom. I've formatted it and loaded it onto Amazon so it is ready to fill all those pre-orders. We are still tinkering (Well I made a mess and now Penny is clearing it up!) on Createspace and hopefully the paperback will also be ready for the 5th of February. If you haven't got your copy yet you can order it now:
Conversations with Tom

The book was inspired by my cat Clicquot and I've now given Tom/Clicquot his own Facebook page as he has plenty more to say.
Tomfoolery Facebook page of Tom the cat
There is also still time to support my Thunderclap campaign:
Thunderclap

Competition time

A girl just can't win. Promoting a book is just one of the hardest things going. I wasn't getting anywhere so I resorted to paying for advertising. This had some good results. I wanted to do a big advertising blast around the start of December to get my free book up in the Amazon free book charts. Apart from paying 3 companies I wanted to promote the book myself on social media too. I got a list of one of the companies of groups to target on Facebook. I duly signed up to varies groups and posted about Language in the blood. I've now been banned from doing this until the 8th of December!!!! Of course Facebook wants a slice of the advertising budget too. So here is the competition I'm running. follow the link to win a paperback copy of Blood Ties (Language in the Blood book2)

Paperback giveaway
Good luck!

Facebook/Twitter versus Advertising

My recent flurry of activity is paying off. I know have over a 100 followers to my Language in the blood page and about 350 Twitter followers. The blog itself had over 5000 hits. Although this has raised my public profile, sales are still a bit thin on the ground. I decided to spend a little more on advertising. Not much, just about 14Euro's but I had heard good things about the two sites I'm using. Especially choosybookworm.com got rave reviews.
Tomorrow the 27th I'm giving my book Language in the Blood away FREE.
The giveaway is very low key and I won't tweet it and just mention this blogpost on Facebook, as I want to get a clear picture of how well advertising works. Advertising has a 199 free copies to beat!

Advertising

So far I've only spend money on paying my editor (who gave me a better than friends rate.) The rest I did my self. One day I will probably have to pay someone to redesign my covers as I'll be the first to admit that they are not great. I've just been of the opinion that, why waste money on something that nobody wants to buy. Since I published my first book in 2013 I've been steadily growing in confidence. I had some good responses and reviews. I'm now waiting for my 4th experience in indie publishing. On the 11th of July the Anthology 'You're not alone' will be out. I contributed a short story to this book.

 

  

So having grown in confidence over the last 2 years I thought I do another book promotion and actually pay for some advertising. I used Facebook post boost and I'm pleased with the results:

4,212 People reached.

61 Page engagements of which 50 website hits.

12 New Page like, but this is not all due to the post boost.

Twitter:

I've now started to build on my twitter network. I've not spend any money on this and it is very time consuming. It is still a dark art to me, but I now have a 164 followers and I use @roundteam so I find that my posts with #PDF1 #IARTG and #ASMSG get retweeted about 9 times. I'm still not convinced there is any usefulness to Twitter, but it is something I want to use and understand better.

Facebook

Twitter and Facebook were the only means I used this time to run my book promotion. I wanted to see how it did with putting a fair bit of effort in. I posted my promotion twice a day on Twitter and on 6 Facebook groups. Plus the boosted post that ran for 2 days before and 2 days during the promotion. 

The results

I managed to give 199 copies of Language in the Blood away. Of course I'm hoping this will lift the sales of the other books, but only time will tell. It is hard to say if my first foray into advertising can be called a succes, but it certainly provided more results than I had so far with promotion. I'll try a few more things with sites other authors have recommended and see how that goes. But for the moment I want to concentrate a bit more on actual writing!