I’m running a 3-day special on TWELVE DAYS OF FAERY. From Dec 3-5, TDOF is free on Kindle! Get it while it’s hot–er, free!
And when you’ve finished it, FIRE IN THE BLOOD is only 99c on preorder!
The WR(ite) Blog
Explorations in the world of Indie Publishing
New Covers! New Covers For Everyone! (Plus A Rafflecopter Giveaway)
You get a New Cover! YOU get a New Cover! New Covers for Everyone!
As you can probably tell, I’m a bit excited. Not Oprah-giving-away-trips-to-Australia excited, but pretty excited anyway. I’m trying a new experiment which involves new covers for two of my books.
Ain’t it purty?
A Time-Traveller’s Best Friend has a lovely, easy-to-see cover, thanks to my good friend Josh Atkinson (be patient as he’s still setting up his website). Thusly –> And now Ruth and the Ghost has an absolutely FAB cover from Covers For Romantics.
So much gorgeousness, I Can’t Even.
In honor of Ruth and the Ghost‘s gorgeous new cover, I’m hosting a Rafflecopter Giveaway of 3 Kindle copies! So break out the typing fingers and enter for a chance to win a copy of Ruth and the Ghost! Just click on the Rafflecopter Link to enter. (And don’t forget to check out the blurb below).
Enter Rafflecopter Giveaway Here! (Sorry, too late!)
He’s dead. She’s not- but someone is poisoning her.
When Ruth, sick and ailing, moves into her inherited estate in England, she brings with her a stepmother and a stepsister- and a murderer. But that’s nothing compared with what she finds there… George is dead, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have a bit of fun. Unfortunately for Ruth, his idea of fun is making sure that his new friend stays with him. Forever. Can Ruth survive a poisoning murderer and a murderous ghost, or will her inheritance be the death of her?
Experiments (Of The Kind That Don’t Go Boom)
I’ve been doing a few experiments this week (and last). Unfortunately none of them involved high explosives, but ya can’t have everything, right?
Mostly my experiments have been with ads: Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Goodreads ads, etc. I wanted to see which (if any) provided bang for buck, and which (if any) would provide hard sales. I began with Goodreads ads, which I’ve had some success with in the past. I ran an ad and a giveaway for my new book Wolfskin. Those are still running, but my conclusions from this and past campaigns is that Goodreads, although providing a few scattered sales, is mostly good for name awareness. It gets my books out there for the notice of readers. And that’s not accounting for the slow burn of sales: each of my books on Goodreads is on a couple hundred To-Be-Read shelves. I’m hoping that will mean sales in the future.
Facebook ads. Well, I tried. I got no further than using my book cover as an image. Initially, the ad was approved. Five seconds and two click-throughs later, it was disapproved. Why? Apparently it had ‘more than 25% text’. It’s a book cover. It has a title and an author name. What you gonna do? Until FB ads allow book covers, they’re going to be pretty useless to me. I canceled the ad and won’t be bothering again.
Twitter ads. Huh. What can I say? Oh, I know: don’t bother. Not unless you love being retweeted and faved by fake accounts. I don’t know whether it’s a dodge by Twitter themselves, to earn easy money, or whether it’s just a whole bunch of fake accounts that love retweeting and faving random stuff, but it was next to useless. I got a heck of a lot of click-throughs, but since all the retweets and faves were from fake accounts, I’m not holding out much hope that the hundreds of clicks are from real people either. I guess the next couple days of sales will tell. At this stage, I don’t think I’ll be bothering with another Twitter ad, though. It’s too much to pay for fake interest.
I have been doing other things these last couple weeks, though, so All Is Not Lost. I’m very close to being able to start final edits on Spindle, I’ve written a guest blog post over at Tiger Hebert’s Blog (entitled The Problem With Self-Publishing– check it out!), and I’m having lots of fun on Twitter apart from bogus ads and fake followers. Oh, and I just sent off the review copies for my Xpresso Book Blog Tour of Wolfskin! It’s a week long from July 6-10, and will have 2 Guest Posts, 2 Author Interviews, and roughly 10 book reviews, so YAY! Also keep an eye out, because There Will Be Excerpts!
Maybe next week I can start with the kind of experiments that do go BOOM.