Self Publishing promotion update: (August 2024)

Here is my latest update on the various promotional activities I have undertaken to try to spread the word about my self-published books, and how successful or otherwise these activities have been.

1. Social Media

I joined a number of reader and author groups on facebook and did my best to contribute as far as possible. Most have very strict ‘no promotion’ rules but some do offer opportunities such a monthly post where people can post kindle sales or new releases. Apparently the way authors game these groups is to team up and then talk about each other’s books. Unfortunately I don’t have a team of author friends willing to big me up, so I just have to play by the rules. Where I was allowed to I advertised the kindle countdown sale for The Arid Lands and my ARC signups for Dragons of Dunmoray. The main benefit from joining these groups was the helpful advice on offer.

Other social media activities continued as normal.

2. ARC Readers

In the run up to self publishing my new book, Dragons of Dunmoray, decided that, rather than approaching review blogs, I would reach out for ARC (Advance Review Copies) readers. I set up an ARC signup form on google forms and included one important question – Why do you want to read Dragons of Dunmoray? This deterred non humans very effectively. I only had one signup who was clearly a bot.

So far I have sent out 20 review copies. Hopefully this will prove to be a better approach than my previous efforts of approaching review blogs directly.

3. Readers Book Club

The Arid Lands was chosen as book club read for April/May and the organiser sent out six free copies to the participants. There was lively discussion but then one of the participants warned everyone than Amazon frowns on authors leaving reviews for other authors’ books and will cancel your KDP account if they catch you. So this immediately killed off anyone leaving reviews for anyone else, which was a shame.

I did ask the participating authors if anyone would be happy to let me have quotes that I could use in my promotion, but nobody responded.

As of now this group appears to have fizzled out.

4. Indieverse awards

This has come to nothing and I won’t be pursuing it any further.

5. SPSFC4

I plan to enter The Arid Lands into SPSFC4. I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in SPSFC3 and although Red Rock didn’t make it past the first round I feel it raised my profile plus I discovered some fantastic new authors and books.

6. Kindle Sale

I ran a two day kindle countdown deal for The Arid Lands in June. Sales had tailed off over the preceding couple of months so I hoped that this would give it a boost. I did my best to promote it wherever I could but only picked up a handful of sales.

So in conclusion the approach I took to find ARC readers has been significantly better than pitching to review sites. Final tallies for how many ARCS I will send out at the proportion that translate into reviews are yet to be determined.