Writing and marketing young adult fiction

 

I started publishing my first young adult fiction last year, with no platform.

Since then, I’ve gotten about 500 reviews, built my email list to almost 25,000.

I’ve been mostly using permafree strategies to reach readers, so I haven’t earned much money yet – but I have been building up my platform so that I can earn money on the other books in my series. This month I put Shearwater, my YA mermaid romance up for preorder on Amazon. Without promotion, it’s already #1 in several categories. I also changed Scarlet Thread, my dark fantasy romance based on Greek mythology, from permafree to 99cents. With some category fixes, it’s already showing the orange bestseller sticker.

I’m going to be talking more about how I market young adult fiction on my main blog, www.creativindie.com, so you can follow along if you want to see how things work “in action”.

Specifically, after you’ve made the ebook and put it up for sale, how do you get more book reviews? How do you connect with readers? And how in god’s name do you seize the holy grail of publishing – making your book “sticky” so it keeps showing up in Amazon search results and sells on autopilot. These are the things I’ve investigated this year. I’m publishing a lot of books, at least 10 fiction and 10 non-fiction, so I can test out everything under the sun.

The main strategies I’m using, (which you can see in this post – notice how I’ve used anchor text to link to my books on amazon) is to build content and relationships so that people link back to my site and it shows  up high in natural search results. Few authors are focusing on Google results or SEO like they should be (most “SEO for author” type articles are rubbish, only focused on the bare basics of using SEO in WordPress.)

Your personal author website is never going to rank for competitive keywords, especially if you don’t post much content. That’s why I also made a community site for YA book reviews. YA authors can use it to build traffic and visibility on their own blogs (just like I’m doing with mine). If you’re a YA author, you should also join the Alliance for YA authors.

 

An Introduction to Self-Publishing

You’re writing a book! Congrats! Or maybe you’ve already finished your book and now you’re thinking, “What’s next?”

In the old days you would seek an agent, who would pitch you to publishers, and you might get a publishing contract. You’d earn some money – maybe even a lot – and then your book would be published in a year and you wouldn’t really have to do much else. You could take it easy. Go on vacation. Write another book.

These days, that whole process is a myth.

Sure there are still agents and publishers, but they are increasingly risk adverse. It’s not about the book anymore. Because even a GREAT book doesn’t guarantee sales, and nobody wants to spend $10,000 publishing a book that nobody buys.

To lessen their risks, agents and publishers mostly sign established authors with their own platforms.

That means, you need a blog; you need some previous bestselling books; you need contacts with other authors in you genre; you need a Facebook page with 50,000 likes. If you’re coming to the table with nothing but your book, you’re fighting a huge uphill battle.

It’s still possible… but is it worth it?

You can probably get a contract from a small  press and a little advance (around $5000, if you’re lucky).

But as a small company, they won’t have the resources to make a brilliantly designed book or market it well.

Book marketing is changing quickly and you mostly need to use guerrilla marketing strategies that publishers simply aren’t capable of handling.

You need an author platform, but it has to be authentic and genuine.

You need to blog about articles that attract your ideal readers.

And then there’s all the other stuff; formatting your book for mobi and epub; getting print layout done in Word or InDesign – not to mention the book cover design itself which is crucial for managing reader expectation.

And there are so many options these days! Should you sign with Amazon KDP Select, or use Smashwords or Draft2Digital or Ebookbaby?

Should you use Createspace for print on demand or Ingram Spark?

There are arguments for and against every possible choice. Getting started can be tough. There’s a steep learning curve.

This site – www.publishxpress.com – is just one of my I’ve set up to help indie authors publish better quality books, faster than ever, and market them well. I’ll use it to keep sharing resources I find, tools I recommend, or marketing hacks that I’ve used to rule the bestseller lists.

So browse around; use the free ebook making tools I’ve put up or read the articles I’ve posted. If you have questions, get in touch – I’m not hard to find.

 

Need an eBook Landing Page?

I’ve done a lot of research on author websites, and this is what I’ve discovered:

1. Unless you’re a designer AND a coder, it’s difficult to pull off a very complex, graphic heavy author website.

2. Those sites load slow anyway. So it’s always better to use something minimal and white.

However there are still some choices to make.

I say you need to focus on getting readers to take the action you want by removing choices, and making your optin offer easy to find, and writing content that attracts the right readers: and I’m not wrong – I build sites assuming you want to attract natural traffic; content rich sites.

However if you’re driving traffic directly to your site yourself, through social media or advertising, and are already getting enough traffic, then you may be thinking about boosting your conversions, and for that you need a landing page.

A landing page is basically a very simple pitch with one option: sign up HERE to get a free book (or whatever). If readers really don’t want the offer, they can probably go look at something else on your site, but you don’t want to make it easy for them, because having a bunch of traffic on your website is kind of useless if you can’t get them to go do anything.

A landing page is different from a whole blog and you can test things out and see what works for you. Getting people to sign up to your list gives you control and the power to contact them when you have a book launch – and also lets you build a relationship with them through ‘drip content.’

For a big list of author websites you can check out this post of 99 themes I added to Creativindie.