How My Job as a Book Marketer Turned into Another Way to Help and Support Authors

Photo credit HtcHnm via Pixabay

 

One of the things I love about being a book reviewer is that it is a great way to support other authors. The same goes for my monthly newsletter; I get to not only learn about other authors and their books through interviews, but I also have a chance to share all about their work and books. 

 

I am not one of those authors who view other authors as competition. Heck, no! We are all in this thing together and I believe it is important to support other authors.

 

We need to lift each other up, not tear each other down!

 

That said, I will always jump at the opportunity to do something that will support another author.

 

So imagine my delight when I was offered the position of Marketing Manager by PsychoToxin Press last year, in December. This position enables me to not only help support other authors but also to get the word out about some amazing books! (It helps that I’m a booklover and love to read a lot!)

 

While I have worked in book marketing, I have been using any and all available resource to promote authors and share about forthcoming books. Recently, I started to think about how I could also use this blog for that purpose.

 

In the past, I did post about other authors on this blog when they had books coming out. I featured guest posts, did a series for both Read An E-Book Week and Youth Art Month, and included my blog in blog tours.

 

Then for the longest time, this blog went quiet. There weren’t that many posts and authors didn’t use it for promotional purposes anymore.

 

That is about to change.

 

It was not too long ago that I started regularly posting on this blog again. I mostly used it to promote my own books and talk about the writing life.

 

Now, however, I will be including other authors on here and promoting their books. I will also be posting about forthcoming books as well as any guest posts the authors wish to share. I plan to interview authors on this blog as well.

 

I will continue to post about my own stuff as well – in fact, I’m posting a cover reveal for my forthcoming novella, All the Beautiful Things, tomorrow – and there will also be posts related to writing.

 

But for the most part, I will be posting about other authors on here and providing them with just one more place on the Internet where they can share about their books, or anything else they want to share. Who knows? My blog just may be a part of an author's blog tour again!

 

It’s just one more way to help and support other authors, and I’m happy to be able to offer this to them through my blog.

Tell All About It! New Ebook Offers Ideas for Book Promotion

 

When I made the decision to self-publish ebooks for my monthly newsletter, The SPARREW Newsletter, I knew there is one rule to book publishing which I should follow: Give readers what they want. I couldn’t self-publish just ANYTHING. Sure, I have self-published some poetry books, but these were the personal poetry collections I knew would not sell if sent to a regular publisher. And, besides, there are probably other readers out there who love poetry just as much as I do. So, I figured, why not self-publish some poetry books too? After all, I have poetry books that are not available for free, so it wouldn’t hurt to include some free poetry collections among the free ebooks offered on my website.

 

Even so, I know just how important it is to provide readers with reading material they want and could use. So I shifted gears and decided to self-publish more ebooks specifically for writers and authors, since the newsletter is for writers and authors!

 

That’s what led me to the decision to self-publish the newest ebook, Promote Your Book on a Shoestring...or Less.

 

I got the idea for this book years ago, but I couldn’t really figure out just how to put it together. Then the idea on just how to put this book together and what kind of slant it should have came to me earlier this year, and it was so simple!

 

Simple enough, in fact, to create a short, 20-page ebook I could offer to subscribers of my newsletter for free!

 

The result is the new ebook mentioned above. It contains 50 ideas of methods to promote your book both online and offline. I decided to just include 50 suggestions for each option because if I included a looong list of suggestions, then it might be too overwhelming for readers. So, 25 suggestions for each option seemed about right. I also made sure all of the suggestions in this book were either low- or no-cost book promotion methods.

 

Thankfully, I was able to come up with 50 suggestions thanks to my many years of keeping my finger on the pulse of the book industry, following authors on social media, checking out various author sites, subscribing to many author newsletters and paying attention to what other authors are doing to promote their books. I have also used some of these methods myself with my own books.

 

While the book promotion suggestions included in this ebook will not guarantee sales, they will absolutely help spread the word about your book, which is what book promotion is supposed to do. Every little bit you do to promote your book and help get it in front of more readers will help. So give some of these suggestions a try and see what works for you and your book!

 

Here is the blurb:

With so many free opportunities available to authors for promoting their books, it can be hard to decide which promotional method works best. Where can authors find good free or affordable book promotion methods? Which ones are right for them? If you are an author with a book to promote, but you have a tight budget, then Promote Your Book on a Shoestring...or Less will give you the resources you need to spread the word about your book!

 

Promote Your Book on a Shoestring...or Less is available as a free download on Kindle Unlimited here.

Rediscovering My Voice as a Book Reviewer

 There’s a page on my website that lists all of the books I have reviewed in the times I have spent as a professional book reviewer. Some of these gigs were paid while some of them are unpaid. (The standard in the book review industry is that the free book offered to the reviewer serves as payment. However, when I have been paid for my reviews, I make attempts to not only turn them in faster, but also to make them as thorough and in-depth as possible. There’s something to be said about getting paid for your time and effort!) What people won’t find on there, though, are reviews I wrote for a publishing company seeking in-house reviews of their books.

 

Maybe that is a good thing, because there was one review I wrote of an author’s book which wasn’t very favorable of her book. And, sadly, she later committed suicide.

 

This news of her death was devastating. I did not know her personally, but I did occasionally communicate with her through social media. Her life was so short and she is still very missed.

 

Meanwhile, I was dealing with a personal issue in relation to her death. I didn’t talk about it openly, because I didn’t want MY problems to interfere with the mourning period her family, friends, associates and fellow authors were going through. But, later on, I did talk about it.

 

And I need to talk about it again here, because things have since changed.

 

For a long time after this author’s suicide, I couldn’t review another book. I felt so terrible about the review I wrote of her book, that I started to wonder if it played a factor in what drove her to end her life. I know it probably didn’t, but that was how I felt at the time. It was awful. I was ravaged by guilt. I even vowed to never review another book again.

 

Well, obviously, that has changed. I did start leaving small reviews of books I read on Amazon. They were all very short reviews and I tried my hardest to make them positive. I gave 5-star reviews to books which I really felt did not deserve five stars, but I was worried that anything less would be hurtful to the author. I just didn’t want to make anything negative of those mini reviews that I wrote.

 

Anyway, after several months of this, I found the strength to publicly share book reviews under my name again. I started a book review blog – first on LiveJournal then on Blogger – and then I decided it was time to review books professionally again. First I tried one online book review service, but the owner was pressuring members to review his book (one which I was not interested in reading!) and the editors of the reviews were rude. Plus, it would be several weeks until the reviews I wrote for them finally appeared on the site – although there is one that I wrote several months ago that was never published. I didn’t stick around there for very long!

 

Then I remembered a site my friend, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, had mentioned in her many communications with me through the years: Reader Views. I checked out the site and liked what I saw. I noticed they even had a presence on social media AND they reviewed self-published books. I decided to give them a try and applied to be a book reviewer. Fortunately, I was accepted. The two ladies operating Reader Views are lovely. They have promptly answered my emails, were always kind and considerate, and the reviews I wrote were promptly included on their site and in their socials. I have been happily reviewing books for them ever since.

 

I don’t know if it was the act of writing those mini reviews that helped me to regain the confidence to write book reviews again, but I know it certainly helped.

 

Also, I have been more mindful of the reviews I write. If I don’t like the book, I won’t review it, even if there is one thing about the book that I DO like. (Thankfully, as an ARC reviewer for a publishing company and some authors I know, I have only received books to review that I actually liked.) But if I don’t like the book, I decline the review. I am grateful that this is an option. I know there are ways to still write a positive review of a book you don’t like, but I’m still not comfortable doing that.

 

And I know I am not doing the authors any favors by giving a 5-star review to books that are not exactly 5-star books. I have since changed that bad habit as well. I’m not so negative with my reviews of books I don’t give five stars to, but at least I am now more comfortable to be more honest about how many stars that I personally feel a book should receive.

 

And “personal” is the keyword here. All reviews of books are just that: a personal opinion about a book. They are not meant to be a way of lashing out at an author or a universal statement about what kind of book this author has written. They are only personal opinions about a book. (Sidenote: This is true in MOST cases. I am aware that there are so-called “book reviewers” out there leaving negative reviews of books simply because of what they know about the book’s content, even if they haven’t read it, or as a means of leaving hateful comments against an author currently in the news for a crime or something similar. There was one author who was accused of killing her child and people left angry and hateful comments about her on Amazon where the reviews go, and another author who was murdered ended up having people who knew her leaving sentimental and thoughtful comments on her book pages on Amazon where reviews are supposed to go.)

 

The bottom line is, not everybody is going to like a book. There WILL be readers out there who don’t like the same book that everybody else likes, and readers that do.

 

As to that one author, I DID like her book. The only thing I pointed out were certain mistakes she made about things in her story (they weren’t writing mistakes; they were mistakes about certain items the characters used). But overall, the story itself was good. And I think that as long as the author manages to tell a good story that readers enjoy, then a mistake or two in their story doesn’t really matter.  

The Self-Publishing Problem

 Towards the end of last year, when I decided to take on the challenge of writing and self-publishing an ebook for every month of the year, I automatically decided to use Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. A writer friend had done the same when she did this challenge some time ago, and since I was already using KDP to self-publish poetry and children’s books, it was an easy choice. I went about this business as the months of 2022 went by.

 

Then, in June, I discovered that Amazon was refusing to remove books which promoted transphobic, homophobic and hateful material targeting the LGBTQ+ community. As the parent of two kids who are a part of this community, I was concerned. I felt that I had to do something.

 

That “something” ended up being the decision to look elsewhere to self-publish my ebooks. I just didn’t feel right doing business with a company that was okay with selling homophobic and transphobic material.

 

I chose another service for this challenge. The first ebook I self-pubbed with them went through without a hitch. The bonus was that, unlike Amazon’s KDP ebooks, the ebooks I published through them were also distributed through other online retailers, such as Apple Books, Kobo and ScribD. An even better thing that I liked was that the ebooks were available in various formats: PDF, Mobi and EPUB. (Not everyone likes reading ebooks as a PDF!)

 

But now, with the ebook I self-published last month, I ran into a problem.

 

As a self-publisher, I always take advantage of any opportunity to promote my other books, and not just those which are self-published. That said, if I have relevant titles which are only available on Amazon, then I will include them at the back of the ebooks.

 

Unfortunately, the service I was using doesn’t like that.

 

Shortly after I released the free ebook for July, I got an email from them saying they could not list my book in their Premium Catalog. When I asked why, the response was that this ebook contained links to books on Amazon. As they put it in their email to me, I was not allowed to include any links to competing retailers “of any sort.” Not only did this mean Amazon but also other retailers such as Barnes & Noble, etc.

 

Well, that sucks!

 

The reality is that there are a lot of self-publishers out there who aren’t exactly making a huge profit off of this venture. I am one of them. I have yet to earn what’s known as a “full-time living” as a self-publisher. This is WHY I use free self-publishing services for ebooks such as Amazon’s KDP or this other one. (I create my own covers but I do pay for editing.) 

 

Also, as a person who RELIES on sales of books in order to actually earn anything as a self-publisher, promotion of other books listed at the back of the book is important.

 

Especially the books that are ONLY listed on Amazon!

 

Now, I know that a lot of people don’t like Amazon. I know some people who refuse to shop through Amazon as a matter of principle. But, you know, Amazon is a business. And, they are just one of the many online retailers out there which sell books. (When I made the decision to stop using Amazon to self-publish ebooks, I debated asking my publishers to remove my books from Amazon as well. However, I decided not to, because even though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the company, there are A LOT of people who still use it to buy books AND ebooks for their Kindle. So, that would mean a huge loss of sales for them, which was not a good thing for me to suggest to a business that relies on sales of the books they publish in order to stay in business.)

 

When I self-published ebooks through KDP, I didn’t come across this problem. I included books with links to Barnes & Noble, Kobo and even Walmart, and Amazon didn’t give me any problems over that. However, it seems that this other self-publishing service I have used does have a problem with that.

 

And I have a problem with their having a problem with that!

 

So, I am trying to figure out where to go from here. I DO need to use a self-publishing service that will not charge me, but I need to be able to have the freedom to include whatever links I’d like to include anywhere in the book. Period. I also need a service that will allow me to make the ebooks available as a free download. (Some of them will be used for promotion of other books.)

 

I just might end up going back to using KDP for the free ebooks. I talked it over with my oldest and he told me to just do what I had to do. I may not feel comfortable with this arrangement, but given that being able to have the freedom to put whatever content and links I want to in my book is super important to me (and part of the appeal of self-publishing itself), I will choose a service that enables me to do so.