Just found out from K-lytics that Facebook advertising has changed and become SO much more effective for book marketing. Previously, authors could only set interests, and Facebook would advertise to anyone with any of those interests. But that means you’re shotgunning your ad out to everyone, even though they might, for example, love Romance Novels but hate Vampire Literature. You’d be hoping …

I noticed something interesting in the book store last night. I’m pretty familiar with YA books, because that’s my genre and I stalk them on Amazon. So I know which ones have hundreds of 5 star reviews and which ones have under 100 reviews and a four star average. I’d been assuming that most people buy their books online, which …

This is the cleverest book cover / marketing / design I’ve seen in a long time. Somehow it’s a moving video/gif of the book cover, with two moving balls in the maze. How amazing would it be to have the scene of your book cover be a “movie” that actually moves, where pictures could dance or swim, faces could smile. …

  If you’re interested in publishing or self-publishing a book, you’ve probably got a lot of questions. There are so many tools, resources and services offering tips and information. How does it all work? How do you put a book together, get it out into the world, and get people to buy it? You might have questions like… How do …

Last year I started on online controversy with an article suggesting that indie authors shouldn’t pay for editing. What I mean in the post, which you should read (the comments too!), is that paying a lot of money to get a book edited may not be a smart business decision if your book isn’t going to sell. I also disagree with the …

An author friend of mine used a phrase this week I hadn’t heard before: he said I need to make sure “my also-boughts were clean.” If you just drive your friends and family to your book during launch, your book will start showing up next to whatever else they bought on Amazon recently. Also-boughts are huge drivers of Amazon. After …

Tonight I had a chance to sit down with Mark Coker of Smashwords, and he convinced me to put the books I’m working on for sale as preorders. Although I’ve heard Mark talk about preorders before, I wasn’t planning on using preorders as part of my marketing plan. This article is about what changed my mind, why preorders might be …

This post is about how I used book giveaways to build a big list of targeted readers before published my first novel – it really helped with hitting #1 and getting a bunch of book reviews quickly. However, after getting over 50K readers on my lists, I realized I wasn’t engaging them enough – I didn’t have an autoresponder series to …

I made this infographic to help authors figure out their author websites. If you like it, share it on Pinterest/Twitter/Facebook/Everywhere! SELL MORE BOOKS (without spam). I wrote a free book with all my best book launch and marketing tips - if your book isn't selling and you're not sure why, this will definitely boost your sales. There's even a free …

2018 UPDATES: Amazon has been doing “purges” of reviews and a lot of authors have seen hundreds of reviews deleted. Read this to keep Amazon from deleting your reviews. Also for a while Amazon was displaying the review with the most comments on top, instead of those voted most helpful… but that didn’t seem to stick, so the rest of this …