With the power of the internet and the popularity of ereaders such as the Kindle and Nook, the ability for writers to reach a large audience has never been more accessible. Many writers are now becoming self-publishers because of this opportunity. It only takes a little bit of time to upload a file and you have an ebook available on Amazon. The problem most writers then face is a problem of discoverability. While “Build it and they will come” makes a good quote in a movie, it is not a good business plan for authors. People have to find you and your books.
The reason that traditional publishers were very picky wasn’t because they had to find the perfectly written book (that’s what editors are for), but it was to find a marketable book. The traditional book publisher is in charge of marketing and they will be spending their own money and time and effort on marketing your book, in order to make up the profit for the advance they paid the writer. They need to be very selective in order to make sure as many books as possible make a profit.
Now that you are the self-publisher, your job now involves marketing too. You love writing, you’re a great writer, can’t you just write more books instead of spending time on marketing? If you want your book to suffer the same fate as your other books, barely making sales at all, then “Yes, just keep writing!” If you want your books to succeed, so that you can build up a strong fan base, that way when you do write more you have an eager group of readers just waiting to read what you are writing. To get to this point, you need to do some marketing.
Luckily, one of the best ways for you to market your self-published book is to give it away, at least on Amazon. While most authors look at the Bestseller lists to give them a gauge for how they are doing, most readers find their books on Amazon’s popularity lists, which can look quite a bit different than the bestseller lists. How can you show up on the popularity lists? By selling more books and by giving away more free ebooks.
Amazon’s algorithm for the popularity lists is based on book sales. They calculate free book giveaways as 10 downloads being equal to 1 sale roughly, for the purposes establishing the popularity lists. The more books you giveaway, the higher you will be on the popularity lists.
So how can you give away a bunch of free ebooks? By promoting your free promotion. There are a bunch of free ebooks sites, eBooksHabit.com, being one of them, that may feature your book on their site when it is free. Their readers download the books and that helps your popularity list rankings. Each of these sites has different submission procedures, and most of the sites are free. It just requires you to do the work to submit to these sites.
So, all in all, if you are a self-publisher, then marketing is your responsibility and it will require a lot of luck in order to get your book in front of readers if you don’t do any marketing at all. Since it is easy to giveaway ebooks, and since there are sites that can help you do it, all it takes is a little bit of hard work on your end in order to see some success.
This is a guest post from R.J. at eBooksHabit.com. eBooks Habit is a place that features 20-30 free ebooks for Kindle each and every day. Come visit us, and find a whole bunch of free ebooks with new ones coming at you each day. Or, if you are an author, let us know when you book will be free, and we will try to feature it!