Festivals are fabulous. In Ireland, we have 143 of them every week. Some of them are small, such as the little-known Toenail Clipping Festival, which takes place in a short field in Leitrim on the first Friday of February at 11 o’clock. Some are larger, such as the annual feast of St. Patrick, which has…
Category: Sales & Marketing Techniques
Take the 3-Question Ad Results Survey
Originally posted on Nicholas C. Rossis:
Figuring out where to advertise your book is worse than standing in a betting shop, five minutes before a race. You have money in your pocket, but a limited amount of time in which to select a guaranteed winner, and the odds are not in your favor. I have…
Marketing Your Indie Book – A Rough Nautical Map In A Sea Of Advertising Options
So you’ve published your book! Congratulations! All your hard work is now… beginning. That’s right, folks: it’s now time to sell your book. So roll back your sleeves, grab a sweatband, pull on the waders and let’s go into the murky waters of indie book advertising. I got some lovely data from fantasy author and blogmate Nicholas C. Rossis, author…
Benchmarking Book Reviews, Or How To Untwist One’s Knickers
For a blogger, there’s nothing quite as sweet as gaggles of people getting their knickers in a twist over something. (Those of you who don’t blog yourselves probably don’t know that the blogging equivalent of Natural Law is a list, called “Things That People Get Very Angry About On The Internet”. Whenever we’re stuck for an idea of…
The Thin Skin of Self-Publishing
I usually spend January looking for new trends in the book world (or making them up, which is more fun), and I’m seeing an increase in pronouncements about self-publishing online. It’s probably a seasonal thing, as people sketch out their writing goals. But a lot of what I’m seeing lately has been negative, particularly below the line. Last year,…
HELP! EVERYONE IS WRITING A BOOK
Here is a very important quote, which every past, present or future self-published author needs to see: “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” (Cicero, c. something BC) Now, here’s the catch. There is no evidence that this quote ever originated from the lofty Ancient Roman philosopher more than…
A Little Overview Of The Irish Book Market
Recently, I’ve been using book sales data from the Top Ten Fiction Bestseller lists published by the Sunday Times, in an attempt to illustrate book-buying behaviour. I focused on UK data, because it’s such an important market and it carries a much bigger stick. But today I’d like to have a look at the Irish bestseller lists…
What Time Of The Year Should You Publish Your Novel?
I’ve been getting quite a few hits lately from search terms such as “when do I self-publish my novel?” and “when does a book need to be published for the Christmas market?” I already pontificated on the issue of self-publishing for Christmas in this post, but that only dealt with one time of year. Now I’d like to talk…
Lights… Camera…. READ! How Writing Goes Live
One thing which made the transition from my business brain to my bookish brain lately was a certain trend in the music industry, which now seems to be making inroads into the book industry. It’s all becoming more and more about live performance. Part of what I do for a living (my actual living, which pays…
Self-Publishing: It’s Not For Christmas
There’s a reason that the ‘airport novel’ or ‘airport paperback’ was defined as category of books all by itself. It’s the same reason that there are large bookshops in airports, and why newspapers publish pathetically useless holiday reading lists. It’s because on holidays, everyone reads more than usual: regular, occasional and infrequent readers alike. And…
Tara Sparling writes 