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best promo sites 2024 book promotion promote a book promoting

The Best Book Promotion Sites in 2024

Updated by David Gaughran 3 May 2024. Marketing • 208 Comments.

These are the best book promo sites in 2022 for boosting your sales, broken down into various categories – with something for all budgets and experience levels, even some completely free options. This list is curated by me personally, and all these sites have been tested and are recommended because of the results generated.

You can skip to the section you are looking for below but make sure to check the final section for a free course on how to build a proper marketing campaign. Read More…

amazon book category hacks with all your tips for amazon category, amazon categories, amazon book category, amazon book categories, kindle categories, metadata, optimizing metadata, choosing categories, ebook categories, kdp

These Amazon Category Hacks Can Boost Your Book Sales

Updated by David Gaughran 9 May 2021. Amazon, Publishing • 38 Comments.

Choosing the right Amazon categories for your book can greatly increase your visibility in the Kindle Store, making your work more likely to be discovered, purchased, and recommended.

But if you make bad decisions here – or opt to do nothing at all – you can limit your book’s success in surprising ways. Sometimes you can even nudge Amazon towards recommend your book to all the wrong people! Which invariably fails, of course, and causes Amazon to think you have written a dud. Meaning Amazon is less likely to recommend your book at all. This is something you really want to avoid.

Many authors don’t realize they should revisit their categories on a regular basis – not just to ensure they are maximizing visibility, but to check Amazon hasn’t placed them in a bad category. You need to know exactly which categories and sub-categories your book is in – Amazon doesn’t make that part easy – and then keep on top of changes to the category system as well. Read More…

how to self-publish a book free self-publishing guide publish your book for free self-publishers costs self publishing

How To Self-Publish A Book In 10 Steps [2023]

Updated by David Gaughran 10 February 2023. Publishing, Resources • 526 Comments.

This fourth edition of Digital has been completely revamped to reflect the needs of self-publishers in 2020. The structure has been completely streamlined to reflect the ten steps involved in publishing your work like a pro.

Reflecting the specific challenges that writers face today, the advice on each step goes much deeper than before. Instead of just showing you how and where to find a cover designer, for example, Let’s Get Digital will show you how to brief your designer effectively, and learn what effective commercial packaging is for your niche, so that you end up with a cover which isn’t just pretty, but also very effective at appealing to your specific target audience.

And the same goes for writing, editing, formatting, pricing, metadata — all the areas where an author must make crucial decisions which affect the viability of their book.

Of course, the largest section of the book, by far, covers the entire topic of marketing from the ground up, showing authors not just how to find their first readers in the most cost effective way possible, but also how to construct a real author platform, one that will capture interest from readers and use those seeds to grow a community of fans around your work, who will send each new release higher in the charts. Read More…

Amazon Recommendations and also Boughts - customers also bought amazon recommendation engine recommender system

Amazon Recommendations & Also Boughts

Updated by David Gaughran 22 January 2022. Amazon • 19 Comments.

Amazon recommendations drive millions of dollars of book purchases every single day, and Also Boughts are central to this system, which can lead to panic when they periodically disappear.

Also Boughts play an important role in Amazon recommendations — that process of pairing books to readers like some literary version of Tinder — but the exact role in Amazon’s recommender system can be misunderstood.

So let’s break it all down today, and show you the exact role Also Boughts play in Amazon recommendations, and why you need to protect yours. Read More…

this guide to publishing short stories will cover not just how to publish short stories with publishers and magazines, but also how to self-publish a short story, and also how to use short stories in unusual ways to build a readership

Publishing Short Stories • Your Guide to Making Money

Updated by David Gaughran 22 January 2022. Writing • 45 Comments.

Short stories are fun to write, but can you make money from publishing them? The quick answer is: maybe. But it’s almost certainly harder than you think, and the path to success with short stories can be circuitous.

Let’s begin by looking at the enduring popularity of short stories, including how a surprising number of much-loved movies were adapted from shorter work – but also contrast that with how difficult it is to get them published… unless you decide to do it yourself.

Another needed dose of realism for authors of short stories: the opportunities brought by ebooks and self-publishing haven’t led to the short story renaissance many hoped – except in certain niches. Nevertheless, some intrepid writers are using shorter work in new and clever ways to get attention, grow their readership, and make some money while they are at it. Read More…

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How To Market A Book | 2020 Edition

Updated by David Gaughran 29 January 2021. Marketing, Resources • 11 Comments.

Figuring out how to sell books in 2020 means facing a pair of imposing challenges : the multiplying complexity of book marketing and — speaking of things rising exponentially — the global pandemic, which has led to lockdowns, recessions, as well as no small amount of tragedy.

And I want to focus on that second challenge for a moment — before we dive into all the ways that you can get your books into readers’ hands — because there is something rather different about this year.

Writers are generally quite fortunate in that they can work from home and sell books online and, for the moment at least, the digital side of the publishing business looks less exposed than the physical end.

Indeed, retailers and distributors are reporting a boost in ebook sales, and freebies in particular seem especially popular. Anecdotal reports concur, and also seem to confirm that there has been a surge in new entrants to the ebook market — which makes sense when people are stuck at home or less inclined to go browsing in meatspace, for painfully obvious reasons. Read More…

Amazon Decoded • Resources

Hi there! Here are all the resources mentioned in Amazon Decoded, and a few extra ones! Oh and if you somehow stumbled on this private page for purchasers of Amazon Decoded, I recommend picking up a copy. Really, you will be missing all the good stuff if you just try and crib from this page, and will probably end up doing everything ass-backwards. It’s less than five dollars, and it’s just nugget after nugget for anyone wanting to increase their Amazon sales. Get your purchase links here. Knowing who you are writing for and what appeals to them is critical to success. Ensuring that you have a solid conception of your Ideal Reader and that your presentation and packaging is Read More…

Starting From Zero Course Resources

Starting From Zero • Resources Page

Hello! These are all the course resources I mentioned in Starting From Zero. And if you stumbled onto this page without enrolling in my free course, Starting from Zero, you can do that right here. Free Course Books You have download links in the course materials, and you should also get an email a couple of days after enrolling, with those download links as well. But just in case you miss those, here they are again. Download Let’s Get Digital here. Download Following here. Let’s Get Digital is freely available from all retailers and you’ll get the links you need above, but Following is a mailing list/course exclusive, and you can only get it from BookFunnel. Click the NEED HELP? Read More…

Let's Get Digital Bonus Publishing and Marketing Resources

Let’s Get Digital • Self-Publishing Resources

Well hello there! These are all the self-publishing resources I mentioned in Let’s Get Digital, and a bunch of extra ones too (affiliate links throughout): If you have stumbled across this page without downloading your own copy of Let’s Get Digital, I recommend you do that. It is free after all! Writing Putting all those words in the right order is harder than it looks! Here are all the writing books I spoke about in Let’s Get Digital: And then a couple of novels I mentioned: Finally, my favorite productivity tool is a nifty little site called 4TheWords which rewires your brain and makes writing the most compulsive thing ever. It costs a $3-$4 a month, depending, and maybe it’s Read More…

Following - Bonus Resources

Following – Resources

Here are all the wonderful platform building resources I recommended in Following (affiliate links throughout). Before we get into the nitty gritty, this podcast I did with Diana Wink at Story Artist on the topic of author platforms is probably the best one I’ve done on the topic, and gets into some things I only touched on in Following too like blogging and SEO and topic recycling, as well as newsletters, Facebook Pages, and websites. Diana did a great job in editing down our conversation into something logical and digestible: And if you need a quick refresher on author platform basics, here’s a quick guide I did on my YouTube channel: Note: As I said in Following, many of the Read More…

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Reader Targeting Influences Everything

Updated by David Gaughran 13 April 2021. Marketing, Publishing • 10 Comments.

Reader Targeting is yet another concept we have to juggle. It’s no wonder many writers take to the drink, or otherwise lose the run of themselves. Or can be a little… kooky. We have to wrestle with a number of contradictory notions all the time — it’s enough to make anyone batty.

The most obvious is with the writing itself: we need at least some level of ego to push something out into the world and ask money for it. But we also must have the requisite critical faculties to see what’s wrong with it and to motivate ourselves to fix it, and to otherwise work on our craft until the things we make are as good as we need them to be.

(As a famous editor once put it — Nan Talese maybe? — those first few years, when our taste is much more developed than our skills, are tough.)

The experienced author isn’t done with these trying dichotomies though; one in particular that we all continue to struggle with is between our artistic natures, and our commercial sensibilities. It’s not so much about what to write or how to write it — most pros can navigate that part. The battlegrounds are elsewhere, things like cover design, series titles, descriptions, branding.

And one more surprising, perhaps: reader targeting. Read More…

Createspace is closed and has been replaced with KDP Print - but you might want to add Ingram Spark too if you sell a lot of paperbacks

CreateSpace Has Closed • KDP Print Is Here

Updated by David Gaughran 25 January 2022. Publishing • 184 Comments.

It’s official! Amazon is closing CreateSpace “in a few weeks” and seems to be nudging people to move now. More on that below, including how the process has been simplified further – significantly in fact, especially for those with large catalogs who can now move the whole lot at once.

As I said in my post two weeks ago, it’s probably wise to get ahead of the big migration in a few weeks. Amazon has 2m titles to move; stuff is bound to go wrong. And my own experience with KDP Print customer service indicates that you might not want to get stuck in that queue with everyone else.

To encourage you to move now, Amazon has further streamlined the process and you can now port your entire catalog in one go right here. There’s also a pop-up which will initiate the process for you when you log into CreateSpace, but reports this morning suggest both are getting slammed right now. Don’t panic if you can’t get in today – you have “a few weeks.” Read More…

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Granular Targeting Explained

Updated by David Gaughran 17 May 2021. Marketing, Resources • 17 Comments.

I’m pretty experienced with digital advertising at this point but when I got my interview for Google AdWords back in 2003 I had to… Google it to figure out what they did. And I still got it wrong!

I was quite lucky that I first interviewed with Overture (the former name of the digital advertising division of Google’s one-time rival, Yahoo) because I had absolutely no idea how these kind of ad platforms worked, let alone best practices. But I learned fast—Google’s training was excellent.

One thing that was drilled into us constantly was the importance of granular targeting. It might be a little more obvious in 2018, but back then the only really familiar advertising model was the broadcast one. Put your message in giant letters on the billboard. Flood the airwaves with ad spots. Take out full page ads in newspapers and magazines (for the kids: these are paper versions of websites that used to be popular). The basic strategy was a simple, brute force one; if the signal is strong enough, the right people will hear it. Read More…

Let's Get Digital - How To Self-Publish And Why You Should - Fourth Edition

Let’s Get Digital

Publish your work like a pro with the most comprehensive self-publishing guide on the market today. Packed with practical, actionable advice, this new fourth edition of Let’s Get Digital delivers the very latest best practices on publishing your work and finding readers. Find professional editors and cover designers which won’t break the bank. Learn how to package and brand your book in a way that attracts the right readers. Discover which approaches are best for selling fiction vs. non-fiction. Implement powerful ways to make your ebooks more discoverable. Increase your visibility by optimizing keywords and categories. The ebook edition is free on all retailers. Find your links below.