If you are an independent at anything then marketing is always going to be a necessary evil. I have tried it and not enjoyed the experience but as yet I still cannot afford to pay someone else to do it for me. It is curious that in the early days my books used to sell themselves, especially through Amazon, but that no longer happens anymore. The eBook market has been swamped since the success of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and with books of a very similar poor quality. Amazon themselves do not help the situation, but then they only appear to value money; it would be naïve to expect anything else.

Now that I have my own online shop, please see here, I am no longer entirely dependent on outlets like Amazon to sell my wares, but opening the store also placed the responsibility of advertising the fact squarely on my shoulders too. To that end I have been running a ‘Book of the Month’ promotion focused on my first novel, ‘The War Wolf’. To date it has brought 129 people to my store and sold 0, that is zero, books. My wife suggested that a month was too long a period in the fast moving world of social media and that a ‘Book of the Week’ might be a better idea. She also reckoned that my prices were too low at £1.99 per book. She is not a marketing guru but she is running her own business on eBay and selling more than I am so perhaps she knows what she is talking about?!

I am going to complete the ‘Book of the Month’ promotion but come 1st July I will be switching to a new ‘Book of the Week’ campaign. One of the attractions of this is that my books will rotate much faster as adverts, all of them being featured by the end of seven weeks rather than seven months. I am keeping a record of how well this marketing campaign performs so I will be able to see if there are any benefits to the changes I have made, which includes raising the prices on the eBooks from £1.99 to £3.00. The featured book will be offered at a 50% discount. My immediate aim is to grow my audience; becoming fabulously rich is going to take a little longer. I also intend to expand my marketing activities by exploiting the various social media platforms and Kindle Direct Publishing’s own advertising schemes. There are also a large number of book promotion websites out there to consider. None of them have returned great results previously, but my approach then was very ad hoc as I simply did not have the time to adopt a more disciplined method to it all. I have more time now and also more determination to succeed.

The new ‘Book of the Week’ campaign will begin with ‘Eugenica’ on 1st July 2023.