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.