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Guest Post, marketing tip for ebooks, Writing tips

Guest Post:Tanisha William

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photo4 (1)3 Simple & Efficient eBook Marketing Tips Every Author Should Know

The ability to sell eBooks as an independent author has simplified drastically over the past few years. EBook marketing has become easier to handle due to readers’ interest in downloading books to their mobile devices, and helping drive the e-reading revolution. Taking on the right approach to marketing an eBook is critical to selling it to your potential audience, and as long as you understand a couple of factors pertinent to decision-making, you should be able to quickly drive more sales without even having to be a qualified marketing expert. The following tips will help you gain a better understanding of how you can implement better strategies for marketing eBooks, and how you can increase people’s interest in reading it.

Give It Away for Free
Whether they are commuting to work or back home, relaxing in their Malibu beachfront vacation house, or enjoying a cup of their favorite tea blend while snuggling near the fireplace, people are consistently looking for interesting materials they can read in their spare time. A great marketing strategy you should be using is giving away your eBook for a limited period of time, such as 30 or 60 days, before starting to charge money for it. Free eBook giveaways are typically best when it comes to generating word of mouth, as they enable your readers to familiarize with your writing style, and decide whether they want to read more of your work in the future.


According to eBook innovator Seth Godin, giving away your first eBook for free constitutes an excellent opportunity to market it. Godin encourages new authors to send their eBook to twenty closest friends, and wait for it to be shared further. “If each of those twenty people send the eBook further to another twenty people, then you will have 400 readers for your eBook,” he says. “And if those 400 will send it further to another 400, you will soon have eight thousand readers. If you manage to get a minimum of twenty thousand readers after having distributed the eBook for free, then you already have your own audience.”

Set the Right Price
An author’s work is definitely worth millions, but you cannot expect every single reader to be willing to spend that much on a few hundred pages they will likely finish reading in a couple of days. Even if your eBook takes on an interesting approach to a controversial matter, your potential readers will not be willing to risk spending much money regardless, especially if it happens to be your first published work. As such, selling it for a much lower price constitutes a good opportunity to get them to take a chance on your book. The point is convincing them of the quality of your book, so they will eventually become willing to spend more on your next one.
Darcie Chan, author of “The Mill River Recluse,” used the same eBook marketing strategy in order to get the audience to read her work. She lowered the price to a whopping $0.99, and she ended up selling several thousand copies a day. Although she did not make much money considering the low-price take she went for, Chan’s opportunities doubled since she now has an established fan base. Thanks to her success, she is extremely likely to receive a substantial advance from a major publisher, or sell her next eBooks at much higher prices.

Partner with eBook Blogs
In today’s ever-changing online environment, readers’ buying decisions are very much impacted by reviews published on specific eBook blogs. When you are marketing your eBook, getting it positively reviewed or promoted on one of these blogs is going to help you generate more sales, and earn much more from the first few months prior to publishing it. Most people who are actively seeking new reading opportunities are accessing these blogs on a regular basis, meaning that there is a very good chance to see yours featured there as well.


Many eBook blogs and websites enable you to get your eBook listed for free, but there are others that might charge you a fee, particularly if they generate large amounts of traffic every month. For example, Kindle Nation provides sponsorship opportunities for marketing eBooks that can go up to $400, offering you the chance to run web-based ads on other eBook-related websites, such as GoodReads or IndieReader.

In Summary
Marketing an eBook might be a time-extensive process that will require you to devote your resources to selling it to potential readers, and establishing your own audience. Thanks to the simplicity of the strategies we provided above, you should be able to get people to read your eBook – and become interested in your future ones – pretty soon.

Tanisha Williams is the author of two non-profit e-books “501c3 In 12-Steps” and “Simple Internal Controls That Protect Your Assets”. Her desire for more interaction with readers was the key inspiration behind the development of her latest business venture ChatEbooks (https://www.chatebooks.com/). ChatEbooks, launched in October 2014, harnesses the strengths of social media in order to help authors and their readers engage and connect within the context of the selling/reading experience.

 

Her contact information:

Website: https://www.chatebooks.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chatebookslaunch
Twitter: @ChatEbooks https://twitter.com/ChatEbooks

Editing, Guest Post, Writers

Guest Post:Editing

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shblogo1

Today we have with us a guest post from a dear friend of mine.  She is a talented editor and author. I wanted to showcase her talent.

Guest Post

Editing . . . Do I Really Need It?

As writers and authors, we all know editing is important. A couple of people will say that it’s really not needed, but come on now, you know that’s not true. If you want your books to shine, getting it polished and properly edited is a must.

There are some of us who don’t need extensive editing in order to get our work to the best standard it can be, while others need a couple passes before our book is ready to be unleashed to the world outside. There’s nothing more exciting than letting your baby go, and watching it take flight.

There are quite a few different options in which to edit a book. Basic editing allows you to take care of those pesky grammatical, typographical, and punctuation errors. Capitalization, spelling, vague wording, and missing words are also fixed during this phase of editing. Editors also look for repetition and awkward sentence structures.

If a more extensive edit is needed, an editor will look for all of the above, as well as fix inconsistencies, look for clarity in writing, and pay close attention to tone, tenses, and generalization. This will allow the editor to make changes based on what he or she feels is a must while still maintaining the author’s tone/voice throughout the edit itself.

There is also the option of a more developmental edit. Here, the editor will make revisions as he/she sees fit. If something needs to be rewritten, the editor will do so, and make note of the change for you. The editor will also take a look at development of your character, story, plot, setting, and facts. The story’s pacing/flow is also scrutinized in order to make sure that action moves along, and doesn’t stall in certain places. Dialogue/proper word usage is also examined, and fixed accordingly.

We mustn’t forget about proofreading. This is definitely a must in order to ensure that nothing was left to chance with the edit itself. This is the final step before sending your book out for publishing.

There are times that with certain changes made, the story itself will change. Keep in mind that the changes an editor makes are just that – changes. An author doesn’t have to keep every change an editor suggests. If you feel that something suggested doesn’t mesh with the message you tried to convey, that’s fine. You don’t have to accept it. You can keep what you’ve written as is, and move on to the next portion of the edit itself.

Most of us assume that keeping most of the changes made by editor in your work is crucial. It’s not. View the changes made as a guideline, of sorts. Sometimes, an editor’s suggestions will allow you to take a look at what you’ve written, and view it in a different light. It’ll open up a slew of possibilities that you didn’t see before. Often-times, this will lead you to fix what you thought was wrong in the first place, and make it better than before.

Editing is needed in order to make your work better than it was before. Be it basic or extensive, it’ll definitely benefit you in the long run. Don’t disregard the option just because you might think you don’t need it. Take a leap of faith, and let a second set of eyes peruse your work before letting it loose in front of your intended audience. Sometimes, that extra step is all that’s needed in order to give your book that little polish and oomph so that it’ll shine in your reader’s eyes.

inkwell

Bio:

S. H. Books Editing Services was established in March 2013.

Our goal is to provide you with quality editing, book formatting, and proofreading services.

Authors know that it’s imperative to have a clear, concise manuscript when it comes to submitting their work to a publishing company. Those pesky errors/typos are sometimes hard to miss. A fresh pair of eyes in catching what you didn’t see before allows you to mold your manuscript just the way you want it to be.

That’s what we’re here for. We’ll avidly work with you to get your manuscript to where it should be, polishing your book to the best of our ability as we go along.

Links:

Website:http://www.shbooks.org/editingservices
Blog:http://www.shbooks.org/esblog
Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/shbookseditingservices
Twitter:https://twitter.com/SHBooksEditing
Google +:https://plus.google.com/b/100015188036335706104/100015188036335706104
Email:contact@shbooks.org

Guest Post, History, Merry Farmer

Guest Post: Merry Farmer

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Why History Makes the Best Stories: Part 2

Sharon invited me over to talk about why history makes the best stories. But you know, the magic of history goes even further than that. History doesn’t just provide us with the best plots, it gives us some of the best settings you can imagine.

I love the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” We tend to think that the years in which we live are either the most mundane, everyday kind of times or that they must be the most interesting, action-packed years since the beginning of recorded history. Neither are true, really. There have been some periods of history that have been smooth and uneventful and there have been some that were veritably bursting at the seams with excitement.

The history of the United States has been pretty much non-stop action, for example. That’s probably because we’re actually the new guys in the world. We’ve only been around for a couple hundred years. In those couple hundred years there have been wars, genocide, exploration, invention, and romance. I happen to be a big fan of the story of the American West. I’ve even started writing about it in my Montana Romance series. Few movements in history are more fascinating to me than the expansion of America westward. What kind of people got it in their heads that they needed to venture out into the wilderness? What would prompt someone to leave everything they knew behind to make a life taming that wilderness? What did the indigenous people who had lived on that land for generations think when pale foreigners started claiming their homeland as some sort of prize? How did the early pioneers make it through harsh winters and long droughts to build a thriving community?

It’s no wonder there is an entire genre of literature devoted to this time period. Westerns have been popular since they were contemporary fiction. Why? Because that period of history was just so dang interesting! It had everything that the very best novels need, from conflict to camaraderie and back again. The story of the West is one of epic voyages and the triumph of ingenuity. It’s also one of the bitter lows that mankind can sink to and the consequences of heartless governments.

Pretty awesome stuff, eh? There are worlds of stories just waiting to be discovered within the annals of history. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of writing about it. And I’ll certainly never run out of ideas!

 

Merry’s Author Bio

Merry Farmer is an award-winning novelist who lives in suburban Philadelphia with her two cats, Butterfly and Torpedo. She has been writing since she was ten years old and realized one day that she didn’t have to wait for the teacher to assign a creative writing project to write something. It was the best day of her life. She then went on to earn not one but two degrees in History so that she would always having something to write about. Today she is a giant History nerd and a hopeless romantic waiting for her own love story to start. Her first book, The Loyal Heart, is a swashbuckling Medieval Historical Romance involving a love triangle that will keep you guessing. Both The Loyal Heart and its sequels, The Faithful Heart and The Courageous Heart, are available wherever eBooks are sold. She has also begun a new Western Historical Romance series set in Montana in 1895. The first of that series, Our Little Secrets, is now available. The second, Fool for Love, will be released in early 2013. Merry is also passionate about blogging, knitting, and cricket and is working towards becoming an internationally certified cricket scorer.

Merry can be found here: http://merryfarmer.net/