Interesting Links #2: Marketing!
Many of this week’s Interesting Links deal with book marketing.
A lot of writers hate marketing and think it’s a dirty word, but I don’t. The way I see it, there are people in the world who are looking for good books. I have good books. All I’m doing is helping people who are looking for good books to connect with my good books. Everybody wins!
-Kobo is now moving into the audiobook market: Have You Heard? Rakuten Kobo Launches Audiobooks.
-My original plan was to use Kindle Unlimited for the SILENT ORDER series, but popular demand from readers on other platforms changed my mind. But regardless of a writer’s publishing platform, it is always best to walk the straight and narrow way: You Can Win Without Cheating FFS.
-I’ve done a bunch of these, and they do add up when used in conjunction: 12 Ways to Keep Your Backlist Selling and Maintain a Steady Income.
-I figure that writing a good story with compelling characters counts. What do Readers Really Want: How to Write a Book to Market.
-I don’t think “enhanced ebooks” will ever take off, because an enhanced ebook is basically a computer game, and they’re separate categories: People Are Weird About Books, and Attempts to “Improve” or “Fix” Books in a Web Browser Prove It.
-Quite a lot of good marketing advice here: 45 Inspirational Marketing Tips from Authors.
-But! I liked this quote about advertising from The Passive Voice: “If anything, PG tends to be a bit more suspicious of advertisements in any medium because the ideas contained in the advertisement were presumably not able to rise to a higher level of visibility without someone paying money to cause the publication to give them more visibility.” Facebook Is Still In Denial About Its Biggest Problem.
-Given that I’ve seen exactly three people in my life who voluntarily bought Windows Phones, this was probably good advice: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he voted against Steve Ballmer’s $7.6 billion Nokia mistake.
-Publishers never used to compete for writers the way that ebook aggregators do: Announcing D2D Refer a Friend – Earn 10% of D2D’s royalty!
-I’ve been self-publishing for six and a half years now, so it was really interesting to read an experience that was very different from mine: Lessons Learned From 6 Years As An Author Entrepreneur.
-JM