I wanted to put a note here – many of you have no doubt heard from other authors that printed books across the board, but especially for self-published authors who use KDP Print, will be going up in price soon.
This is a result of Amazon increasing the price of printing (due to the ongoing trend of increased costs of printing).
However, for all of my current titles, that is all five Sword of Dragons titles and all three Chronicles of the Sentinels titles, those price changes in printing costs will have a negligible impact on what royalties I earn with each title – approximately 15 cents each.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a bad business person, but I don’t see a need to pass those ‘expenses’ onto the readers at this time. The only markets that MIGHT see an increase are some overseas markets, because of how little I already make from those markets (thanks, Amazon…)
But for U.S. customers, prices will remain the same!
As of today, my triple-book release is nine days old! Still very new :) But now that all of the hard creation process is done (you know, writing, editing, creating covers, formatting, etc), the truly hard part for me begins.
Marketing my books.
I would say “as a self published author, this is especially important,” but let’s be honest, this is vital for ANY author. You may have created this extremely awesome and wonderful book for people to read…but how do you get the word out?
With the original books 1 and 2, I fell considerably short in my efforts. And I didn’t take advantage of social media, which is probably one of my biggest mistakes.
I bought ads now and again on Amazon, but that was it, and I was never consistent. I got tables at conventions, gave my cards out to everyone I could, but that can only take you so far, and I’m starting to discover that handing your card out does very little (not to say I’ll stop doing that.)
So now I’m pushing harder, and trying things I hadn’t tried before for marketing.
Photo by Beck Wasik
Among them? Facebook and instagram ads. I just started them after a photo session of the eBook editions (thank you to my wife Beck for taking and editing this photo, it turned out beautifully,) so we’ll see if it works out. I also updated my facebook author’s page with a ‘shop now’ button and tagged my products, which is a feature I never knew you could do!
I’m also heavily pushing my first book on Amazon ads.
Already I’m quite happy with how the books are doing in the Kindle Unlimited store. I’ve had record numbers of reads for multiple days! Each book is already doing far better than the previous books ever did. Hopefully I can keep this going and build some more momentum!
I cannot over emphasize how important marketing is to success with your books. Don’t spend so much time and effort on it that you never get your next book written, but don’t dismiss it, ESPECIALLY if you’re a debut author and no one knows your name yet. Get the word out. Get your name out there.
And then get to work on your next book! Because if you hook readers, they’re gonna want more!
I’ve done a lot of the back-end work for marketing now, so I feel like I’m ready to focus on book 3 of the series again. In fact, this week I already started work on it again! But more on that later :)
For now, I hope the beginning of everyone’s holiday season has gone well!
If you talk to just about any business person, most of them agree on one thing – marketing is vital to the survival of most businesses! But what is marketing, exactly? And how does it apply to self-published writers?
The initial answer seems obvious – pay for advertisements. Amazon KDP and KDP Select is probably most self-published authors’ best avenue, though it isn’t the only one.
However, there’s more that a writer can do than just paid ads, and I myself am brewing up plans for future marketing efforts! Not to mention, in today’s blog, a very special reveal is at hand… ;)
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First lets talk about a couple of other marketing actions you can take as a writer.
T-Shirts!
Yes, you read right. T-Shirts. T-Shirts can be one of the best marketing tools you have outside of internet ads, and it can be surprisingly affordable!
For me, initially it was just an idea to wear a shirt myself with my novel’s cover on it, but you can use them in more ways. Have a pre-order going through a venue like Kickstarter? Make a t-shirt one of the tiered bonuses! Got a table at a convention? Have some t-shirts on hand to sell or even give away as part of a bonus if they buy your entire set or something.
Or even just have a method of selling them to any would-be hardcore fans!
If you’re thinking to yourself “I’m a no-name author, why would anyone want to buy a shirt of my books?” You might be surprised. Someone somewhere could fall in love with your novels, and want to proudly show off their fandom! But they can’t do that unless you have a way for them to do so.
And one thing I will say: make sure the shirt is incredible and eye catching, just like your cover should be! Sure you could take your front cover and slap it onto a T-Shirt and voila, insta-fan-material. However, my friends at Guildhall Galatea and Color Me Impressed have shown me the value of a design geared towards a T-Shirt, rather than a book cover, and the results speak for themselves!
Not only am I excited to wear the shirt, but I’m hoping people may want to order some for themselves!
And yes, you’re seeing that right…while not the full cover, you just got to see more of the cover for the upcoming “Rise of the Forgotten,” the 2nd edition of book 1 of the Sword of Dragons series!!! :D :D :D
Maps and More!
When I was a teen, I remember buying the video game Everquest, one of the earlier MMORPG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.) One of the coolest things that came with it was a cloth map of the world of Everquest!
I’ve since lost that cloth map :( But I never forgot it, and started collecting other fantasy maps, especially from the Elder Scrolls. I’ve wanted to find a way to offer maps to readers (other than just including them in the books) and finally have an avenue.
Low resolution, low quality print test, but still impressive!
While chatting with the folks at Guildhall Galatea and Color Me Impressed, we started talking about possibly printing my maps on cloth. I immediately loved the idea, so I went right out and found some material that looked good, and we did a test print. And while it is a low-res, small test print, I was highly impressed with the result!! As such, full-sized, full resolution maps of Edilas and Devor will be printed soon :)
What can I do with these? I’d love to either include them with box sets of the books, or find a way to have them on sale separately. Plus, at conventions, they would help me stand out from all other other authors! And if I really do a kickstarter as a way to preorder, then these maps can be one of the tiered rewards!
This is just the beginning, however. I don’t want to say too much in case everything doesn’t work out, but there may be some other incredible goodies on the horizon to accompany the Sword of Dragons :D
That’s all I have for today, everyone, but I am so excited about all of this! I hope you are too, and I hope my fellow authors out there get some ideas or inspiration from these examples
Thanks for reading!
-Jon Wasik
Trials and triumphs of writing, finding an agent, and publication.
A Writer at Heart 