So, You Wish to Pursue an Indie Author

Self-Publishing Career?

 

By far one of the toughest challenges anyone will ever take on in life as a career is the self-publishing lifestyle. If you're one of those recently starting out on the journey then you have already experienced just how hard it can be to write and market those books at the same time.
In the first part of this series, we explored just a small taste of what it is like to pursue this type of career. In this second installment, I'll give you some inside information to shorten those headaches you probably develop from banging your head against the wall trying to find what works the easiest.
Well my friends, there are few easy solutions to what will work for you to sell thousands of books month after month. Your greatest ally is time. Yes time, because you have more of it than any other resource. What do you do with it? Do you waste yours? Do you invest it in learning? Do you just use all your time writing? Those are great questions to answer for yourself and surely, you can think of some more to ask yourself.
If you are a beginning Author with only a couple of books under your belt, the top advice that can be given is to continue to write more. If you're writing a second or third book already, you need to be promoting the first one(s). On my site, you can find many ways to promote and market those books. That material comes out of my books published on Amazon. Sure, you can call that a way of marketing. I offer you free advice from material out of my books. By the way, I have another new book coming out soon, SEO, What's my Rank?

If you are looking for ways to market books after you published them, then follow some of the steps listed here. Get you an author website going right away. Add a sign-up form on your landing page to gain an e-mail list of followers so you can reach out to them easier with a newsletter or a new book release. You might not convince everyone to sign but gradually the list will grow.
Many refuse to put all their apples into one cart, with that being going solo with Amazon. I don't care what anyone else might think. A new Author needs to learn and grow! That being spoken, Amazon has the best platform with the tools and goodies to help. There is too much to overwhelm a new Author trying to self publish on other platforms so that is why I personally recommend Amazon alone.
Over time, you can always move books to other self-publishing outlets or publish new ones over the various others. I guarantee you that the bulk of your sales will come from Amazon. Another thing that will help you is to keep track of everything that you do with each book.
Make you a chart sheet to record the Title, blurb information, publish date, etc. Include on this chart, all the sites that your book is listed online. You see, if you have a handy little chart like this on each book, it makes it much easier to reference all the information on that book in nanoseconds. This is great for when you need it in a spur of the moment to post the information on a site for a free book promo or to publish through a paid ad. It keeps you from having to open several sites at once trying to gather the information.
Seek out all the places or sites that readers are going to in search of what your book is about. That means you are looking for that reader audience where they congregate. If your book is a fiction novel, you want to scour the universal web for those readers in hopes of grabbing attention on your book. If it is a non-fiction book about cooking with recipes, you will be looking for those readers at websites about food preparation, cooking cuisine, etc. On the Internet, the sky is the limit because the web is never-ending.
You might find many opportunities to guest blog a post on a site once you randomly begin to seek out those marketing venues for your books. Most everyone that has a decent size following on their sites offer guest blogging to Authors in the hope that it helps bring more visitors to their websites.

Try to spend at least one hour each day marketing your books in some shape, way or form. You might spend it one day commenting on a few sites. The next day you could spend it on social media. The following day you could spend it on Author or book forums commenting on posts. These little things help establish you as an Author. Bookbuzzr is a great place to use to gain additional exposure for your books. Nifty tools there to help you get sales on your books. For a small monthly fee of a few bucks, you have an arsenal at your fingertips to help you in your marketing tactics.
It has already been mentioned in past post on my site about offering a new book free and the sites are there written on a post if you will do your research. Doing a little preplanning before a free promotion can net you a lot of free downloads of your book. Many sites request advanced noticed before posting your free promo. The negative side of the free promotion is the possibility of getting one star reviews but if you are so fearful of reviews, why bother to publish? At one time, the free promotion could net an Author with many sales. That isn't the case now but still many new Authors are finding decent sales after a free promo run on a new book.
Using all social media outlets will help you market your name, brand and those books that you write. Use them all, from twitter to Tumblr, from LinkedIn to pin-it, from your website to other websites. There are so many opportunities out there now to use media to get the word out about you and your books and by not taking advantage of it all is just like throwing it away.

A remarkable opportunity is a book series. It is the hot item going today to make an unknown into a well known. The secret? Making the first book in the series perma-free. I don't know how long this marketing strategy will continue to succeed as many more are finding it the key that unlocks the door to success.
Alright, We cover a lot here. So, what is Social media? Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, yahoo, LinkedIn, tumblr, etc. Next we have Content media, which is? They are Press releases, articles, guest posts, book bloggers, etc.
Those two, Social and Content go directly to and with your website. This is your Author Platform base. You are gaining an email list of followers to your site as an addition. Your website is the foundation or house that supports everything else that you do. Now then, we are getting somewhere.I'll continue this series later so look forward to it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer Information Systems degree, Retired Networking Analyst, Management Professional, Micro-Stock Photographer, Author,eBook Marketing. The rest of what time I have left is for rest, sleep, fishing, hunting or other outdoor activities. Sometimes I may have to swap one for the other.