I spent some time looking at that old bugbear marketing before I officially released The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom. I decided to utilise one of the recommendations regarding doing a book-launch. It was a very simple idea; give the book away for free.

The eBook market is saturated. Thanks to fifty Shades of Grey is wallowing in low quality offerings from people who pend more time dreaming about making it big than they do learning the craft of writing. It does not seem to matter how good your own work is, getting it noticed remains the first major obstacle. When I published The War Wolf in 2013, I quickly sold over 1,000 copies. My last book, Mesozoic, has been out for over a year and is nowhere near that figure. Readers who have expressed an opinion like the book. It is a fun read that, like all my novels, is well researched. That is not enough to get it noticed, however.

With The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom I decided to try and do things a little differently. I uploaded the book to Amazon without any fanfare. A keen-eyed reader did spot the book but agreed to ‘forget’ about it until I did the official launch. Doing this allowed me to sort a few things out, mostly to do with the layout of the book after transferring it from Word to the Kindle format. Some critics love to mention formatting problems when they have read an eBook. It also gave me time to design an advertising campaign. I used the usual social media platforms, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and posted a ‘coming soon’ notice in each for several days. Through KDP I set a 3-day period when The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom was free to download. On the evening before the first day I saturated Twitter with tweets announcing the books pending availability for free download. I also paid for an advertisement on Facebook.

As the promotion window closed, I started looking at the results. They were not earth-shattering, but they were encouraging. 27 copies of The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom were downloaded. I also sold 2 copies of The War Wolf, 1 copy of For Rapture of Ravens, 1 copy of The Blade’s Fell Blow, 2 copies of Mesozoic, and a copy of Eugenica! I am very pleased with those figures. Okay, they will not put me on the New York Times best-seller list, but they do mean that I did something right in trying to get my work noticed.

The whole point of doing this is find readers for my books. In a very limited sense, I have therefore been successful. I need to build on this success. It would be wonderful if each purchase led to an honest and hopefully positive review of each book. There is no doubt that reviews are important to customers of vendors like Amazon, but they, like getting attention, are proving very difficult to achieve. I am, however, encouraged by these results. I laid out a little money and I will now look at investing a larger sum. There is no doubt that I am not a marketing genius, but I did something right and I need to examine what it was and if I can repeat it again. In one sense I am fortunate, I can design eye-catching images. In fact, I rather enjoy doing it. Marketing appears to be a necessary evil these days so maybe it is time that I applied myself to it a little more. I might not like the process, but I do enjoy the end results when they are positive.