amazon

Free Holiday Bonanza on Amazon!

amazon_xmasHappy Holidays!

To celebrate the season and get 2013 off to a rousing start, I’m setting a slew of my titles on Amazon to “free” at different points over the next week and a half.

If you like crime fiction, fantasy, psychological suspense, and dark humor, you might just find a favorite in the list below. Please pass it on to friends and family!

Finding Emma | 12/25 – 12/27

one bad twelve | 12/25 – 12/27

Seven Into the Bleak | 12/25 – 12/27

Assassin | 12/26 – 12/28

The Sword of Kings | 12/28 – 12/30

Three the Hard Way | 12/29 – 12/31

Three of a Kind | 12/30 – 01/01

Three on a Match | 01/02 – 01/04

Happy reading and have a safe and joyful holiday!

Advertising Your Book on Goodreads: Thoughts, Numbers, Questions

I’ve embarked on a number of low-cost, (hopefully) high-impact advertising ventures to boost my book sales. Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll examine what I’ve done and try to draw lessons and conclusions from the experience. First up…Goodreads!

Basics
Goodreads advertising currently comes in two flavors: tiny, highly-affordable self-service ads and large-scale page campaigns coming in at massive cost (when asked about “premium advertising offerings,” Goodreads replied that, unless my budget was over $5,000 per month, I was likely to be more interested in their self-service option. Well, no shit.).

For obvious reasons, I’ll only talk about my experiments with their self-service advertising.

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Caveat Writer

Image

Warning: Image link goes to fake Amazon page.

Successful paranormal author Ilona Andrews recently had her short story “Questing Beast”–offered free on her website for fans–swiped and re-posted to Amazon, where some unscrupulous magsman was selling it for $5.99. Since it reached a rank of 60,000, quite a few poor folks were rooked.

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Not so funny

After less than scintillating results on, well, every e-book retail outlet except Amazon, I was inspired to create what is quite possibly the worst drawn cartoon in the world.

I would be more charitable to Amazon’s competition if:

  • Smashwords could assure me that they’d actually ship the e-books I ask them to.
  • Barnes & Noble wouldn’t blame Smashword’s staff for not having my books on their site.
  • Apple actually acted like books were sold online.
  • Kobo improved a search engine that displays a search of “iden, matthew” on Page 2 and Page 3 of the results. And created some sort of system whereby indies could compete with Trad Pub titles.

Until then, it’s probably back to Select for me, like every other indie author except Bob Mayer.

Click for bigger version.

Tip Tuesday: Three Groovy Tips

Friends –

Pardon the light post today. I’m in a race to finish my third Marty Singer mystery, Signs, before next week when one of my redoubtable beta-readers has asked for it. But I’ve recently stumbled across three interesting links and services that deserve a gander.

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