Mike Dixon, author of Curtin’s Express has the following helpful/sobering hints:
- There is no good advice out there on the net. Those pretending to give advice are out to make money and supreme amongst them are those who talk about "viral explosions".
- My book scored 5 stars in the Claridon Review process arranged for me by Createspace (at a cost). As far as I can make out, neither Createspace nor Amazon will use this information to promote the book.
- Sales of my book have been abysmal. Interestingly, when I do make a sale, my Amazon ranking (based on 750k titles) jumps from about 250K to 40K and then takes about three days to fall back to 240K. That presumably tells you something about how many titles are being sold.
- I have tried social networking and figure that is a total waste of time.
- My best success has been with my two blogs:
- http://mikestales.wordpress.com and http//:shadymike.wordpress.com . I am giving away free ebooks on the latter in the hope that they will raise my profile as an author. As far as I can make out, the books are being taken up at about the rate of 50 a day. However, I do not always believe what other people’s computers tell my computer.
- My way of promoting the free ebooks is via
- travel magazines
- I have tried wattpad and have reached the conclusion that it is useless for promoting any novel that is not aimed at teenage girls.
- I am a member of goodreads. I can’t see how it is going to be an efficient way of promoting fiction.
- I’ve joined Lulu and Authors Den. The former is on the skids and the latter is an authors’ club of little interest to my sort of reader.
- Two days ago, I added a PDF of Curtin Express to my free books (see my blogs). I hope enough people will read it to create some sort of buzz on the social media - the kind that the "viral explosion" people chatter on about.