Marketing

          Allan Guthrie was telling me all about how to market ebooks the other day. One of his novellas sold 35,000 copies on Kindle so he should know what he's talking about.

           I told him all I did was put comments and product links into the Amazon discussion threads, and he did not seem too impressed with that. Here's some of the advice he gave me.

            1) Don't ever write anything about ever having books rejected by anyone, or anything negative at all. It's maybe like selling cigarettes. You show pictures of happy people on horses in the great outdoors, but don't mention cancer. I've been rejected by every publisher in the world, just about, as has anyone who's tried to get stuff published over decades. But you don't tell anyone that.

            2)  Pretend that your books are new. This might be a bit difficult for me - well, I could lie - since I've put ten books up on Kindle in the past year, and no one writes books that fast. Also, I'd have to change the covers on two of the books since I've used pictures of the original covers. I thought the fact that they'd been published before would be a sign to a prospective buyer that they might have some quality, but this seems not to be so.

            3) He told me of these sites which might be useful. The Writer's Cafe at Kindleboards.com. Then there was the UK Kindle Users Forum, and Mobile Reads.

             4) He also said to get out there and interact with other kindle writers blogs and that it might be a good idea to leave reviews on Amazon of books which are like your own. Also, be alerted by Google Alerts.

              He gave me some very good input, but it would be time consuming, and I don't need the money, and I've taken a break from writing so I could concentrate on my meditations, and if I had a couple of hours a day to spend on the computer I'd rather write than market my ebooks. What I really need is some young person who likes computery things who would do this for me for ten percent off the top!