Recently I read John Locke’s kindle book, “How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months.” It’s well worth reading so you should check it out. Locke reveals exactly what his title promises. A few of my favorite tips are below:
1) You need to have more than one book. A complex marketing strategy to promote yourself won’t be as effective with one or two or even three books. Amanda Hocking, John Locke and other big time bestselling kindle authors have a series or two. Shoot for around 10 books. While this may seems impossible – it isn’t. Kindle books can be shorter – around 50,000words (or even less!). You could write a book in a month or two. You should still have your other books available, but don’t invest a huge amount of time in marketing until you’ve got more material.
The reason is because you want to develop a brand and loyal readers. Readers might pick up one book but probably won’t be “hooked” until they’ve read a few.
2) Loyalty Transference. this is Locke’s secret concept – I’m not going to tell you everything about it because I want you to buy his book, but basically you need to seek out like minded people who have already built up loyalty to someone else, and get them to transfer that loyalty to you. This doesn’t even have to directly relate to your book. Pick a cause you want to vanguard, a famous person you want to praise, a suffering or problem you identify with, and write a blog post about it. Make it a good post. Don’t pitch yourself or your book. Talk about the thing that you know people already have feelings about.
Ideally, your content will be polarizing; you will alienate some readers but attract others. That’s fine. It’s even OK to alienate MOST people – what you are doing is getting rid of those people who might not like your book, and attracting the people who probably will.
You don’t need LOTS of posts, you need a few, really good ones. Maybe just a handful. Your blog or website will have your contact and links to your books, so that after they finish reading your article, it’s easy for them to contact you or pick up one of your books.
3) Then, you use Twitter to find and drive people to you blog posts. Search Twitter or hashtags for the topic you’ve written about, find people interested in that topic, and contact them. Ask them to check out your post, and share it if you like it. Also make sure to get on Twitter frequently and support others – retweet their posts, visit their blogs and tweet about their articles. Everybody likes to have their content shared. If you do it for others, they will notice and appreciate you.
Why it works: You’re creating a system to drives traffic to your blog and gets them to feel something. If they like what they feel and agree with what you’re saying, they will feel a personal bond with you. Make it easy for them to contact you. Reply to all your emails. You’re not building customers or clients, you’re building friendships with like-minded people. If you’ve done this well, those people will gladly read your books and share them with others.
I’m a philosophy dropout with a PhD in Literature. I covet a cabin full of cats, where I can write fantasy novels to pay for my cake addiction. Sometimes I live in castles.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. There seem to be two schools of thought: 1) offend no one, play the author/protagonist who is essentially a neutral canvas for readers to project their desires/goals/wishes on, or 2) gun for your target audience no matter how many people you piss off along the way.
I exaggerate, of course. Most authors would fall somewhere between the two extremes. But the fact is you can’t please everyone. Nor do I want to please everyone — I want the right kind of people to read my books. It’s encouraging to see I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.
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