Free Ways to Market Books

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I sold four Kindle copies of my poetry book for $0.99 this last time, and one other person downloaded and read a KU (Kindle Unlimited) copy. It's not much, but it is still encouraging. The first couple times I tried to give "Un-Clenched Emotion" away for free, there were no takers. Then I gave away 1, then 6, then 70! I tried some Amazon Advertising this time and wasn't very successful, but that's okay, marketing is a learning process!

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Of course, I use this blog to market. I'm not sure how successful it is. I do get a lot of traffic that you can see by looking at my counter. I'm not sure how I did it! Just showing up helps. I don't have much interaction, only 4 comments and no subscribers' through blogger, but people are looking and that makes me happy. Then I do have some subscribers on Goodreads that I just found out about. When I post my new blog posts on Facebook, I usually get a consistent 7 or 8 people who look. (My blog has a reports section, that's how I know). I want to thank all of you who do look at my writings! I have over 1000 X (formerly twitter) followers, but I don't get many looks from there. I'm working on being more active on X, there are a lot of authors helping authors on that platform. I'm not sure how many followers that aren't family or people I know on Instagram. It's a big sized number I think, but not so much as X. I don't get that much interaction with Instagram yet either. The Goodreads author program is also free and there are many groups you can participate in. I belong to some and have gotten a few reviews from there. There are a few people who also marked "Un-Clenched Emotion" as want to read. So Goodreads is also a good marketing platform. The cool thing is I don't have to pay anything for these platforms.

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There's a couple of other of things that aren't costly that I could do to market my book. I could create a separate Facebook page and invite those interested. It seems like so much work though, added to this. And then I could attempt to create a newsletter, but that seems like A Lot of work. You may have noticed, I'm not extremely consistent in simply writing this blog.  It takes awhile for me to come up with a subject to talk about and sometimes I just don't feel like doing it. If I make a newsletter, it's got to be consistent. And then, of course, I have no idea how to get subscribers. So there are a lot of things I do to market my book, and somethings I could be doing but don't.

Selling Indie Books

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First, for those of you are curious, I was once again unsuccessful in selling "Un-Clenched Emotion" for 99 cents. I had made 2 full price sales before that, so not the end of the world. Speaking of selling books, I recently sold to 2 other countries. Usually KDP reports shows how many sales you have a week (or how many Kindle Unlimited pages are read) a month, year etc. So I waited a week to check the reports, and those foreign sales were not on my KDP reports. However, I did get money in my bank account for those sales. All is good. Speaking of making money, for the first time since I published my book in 2016, I was emailed a tax form for the royalties on my book this year. What I made is in the extremely low double digits, but it was still exciting to get that tax form.

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I do believe in order to make money and more sales, I need to spend something on advertising. Previously I was questioning whether Amazon Ads was worth it. Now, I am pretty sure it is. Many Indie Authors that I am in contact with expressed their success with the program. I really need to take a closer look on how to use these ads. Amazon has a lot of guides. I looked at some of them and find them daunting. I have bought some marketing through other companies in the past. I have to say, never pay for social media shout outs. You can do that yourself for free. Many people on X (Previously twitter) will retweet your post for free, especially if you retweet their posts. Someone once even made an unsolicited post advertising my book on Instagram. You can get Facebook friends to help you too. I really need to make a Facebook page to promote my writing.

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I may soon have free advertising through Amazon. It has been said that if you have over 50 reviews of above a certain star rating, Amazon will put your book in their newsletter. I have strong doubts about this. I am not that far away from 50 reviews. My star rating is definitely high enough. I am hoping that I will be pleasantly surprised and get "Un-Clenched Emotion" in a newsletter because of this. For all of those Indie Authors out there, I wish you success in your marketing ventures. For curious readers, please leave reviews for those authors!