SoonerCon: A Media Guest’s Retrospective

Yesterday ended my weekend at SoonerCon 26, a local science-fiction/fantasy/writer’s convention in Midwest City, Oklahoma within a short driving distance of my house.  This was my second year being invited as a media guest, which means I’ve written a few books and have done some podcasting, so they allow me to come be part of

How to Set Up an Amazon Giveaway to Drive People to Your Amazon Author Page

I can’t take credit for finding out about this cheap little marketing gimmick.  That credit goes to my awesome podcast partner Richard Kutz.  We host a weekly podcast together called “Three Cylinder Stardrive”, a geek-out fun-fest where we break down current pop culture often from a writer’s perspective and also note a “Dollar Rental of

Use Everything to Promote Everything

There is a solid reason I haven’t released my short story compilation recently.  In fact, I’m brushing on some finishing touches before it is released very soon. The fact is, I was ready over a week ago to release it, but after talking to a friend who had one of his brilliant ideas I realized

7 Out-of-the-box Tips to Increase Book Sales

You probably landed on this page because you are an independent novelist and are tired of seeing the low monthly sales from Amazon.  You wrote a book (or four) and have hit a promotional slump.  You may also be hard up for cash as your writing life is mostly a hobby that you would like

Results of the Kindle Free Giveaway

For the past few days I’ve been blasting my free book on the internet via several outlets and free services that get my book in front of millions of Twitter followers.  Today I went on KDP and checked out the results. I gave away 99 books. Now, let’s say that half of those people who

My Abysmal Facebook Promotion Ad

Last week I posted that I was going to try out a Facebook ad to drive traffic to my Amazon page where my book was listed at a Kindle countdown price of .99 cents. I’ll have to admit…I had high hopes. Well, I quit the ad yesterday. I’d spent a little over $100 after about

How I’m Using Facebook Advertising

Well, The Terminarch Plot has been available for 6 weeks and my sales are pretty dismal.  I’m undaunted, however.  Recently I was paid for an editing job and that gave me some capital to throw at the problem. Rather than throw money around willy-nilly (which would be irresponsible) I decided to spend some time doing research

New Podcast Up: Con-goers and Promotions

In this podcast we talk about our experience at Sooner Con 24 and break down the struggles that come with promotion of indie work. Mainly we discuss the many types of folks you might expect to visit your table and how to best move product by curbing those types of visitors who might unintentionally prevent

4 Reasons Why Facebook Is Not Useful for Authors

Let’s face it. Authors, especially independent authors, need to promote themselves. However, there are ways to promote and ways not to promote.  Social media is a way to promote yourself as a writer, but it can also be a double-edged sword.  Of course, Delilah S. Dawson wrote a fantastic article about the misuse of social

3 Web Tools for Free Promotion and Beta-Reading

As an indie author, I am always on the lookout for ways to promote my books and make them better.  This week I found a few tools on the web that could potentially help me with this process.  As always, I thought I’d share: Wattpad – I had heard about this site a long time