Recurring dreams

First, my apologies to anyone who might have been looking at the blog on Thursday. I was switching to a new template, so the place probably looked a mess. Everything’s all spruced back up again, with some new features (social networking links) and easier navigation. And in happy news, I’ve gotten a few more reviews for Destined. One is by SexxyBlogger...

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Top Ten Tuesday… on Wednesday

I know, it’s not Tuesday anymore. But I didn’t see this until today, and I want to make an effort to do more fun bloggy things here. When I saw this week’s top ten list, it looked like something I’d get a kick out of. As much as I read (over 100 books a year), you’d think I’ve read everything, but there are still a lot of popular books out that I’ve never gotten to.  So here we go. :) To Ten Tuesday, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish Top Ten Books I Feel As Though  Everyone Has Read But Me   1. The Night Huntress series by...

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A little rebranding

After reading some good advice today about drawing in new readers, I decided it was time to tweak my blog a little. Before, I was blogging to other writers, sharing what I learned as I self-published my first book. But now that the book is out, I need to switch gears and aim my blog at readers. And I suspect readers really don’t care about how I got...

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More promotion frustration

The good news first: I got my first book blogger review yesterday, and it was 5 stars! http://www.bittenbyparanormalromance.com/2011/09/review-destined-by-allison-kraft.html I was very excited to read it, and the blog has a fairly large following, so I was anxious to see how the review impacted my sales. Unfortunately… not so much. I know it’s only the next day, but I only sold one Kindle book yesterday, and the Nook, Smashwords and paperback stats didn’t change. So that’s frustrating. Maybe I’m just too impatient, or maybe that blog wasn’t the...

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I'm a library addict

I spent most of the day yesterday tweaking my blog a bit to add handy little buttons in the sidebar for ordering Destined and visiting the various websites I use. It looks better than a long list of text links, and takes less space, but man, was it time-consuming! How am I going to get my second book revised and edited when I spend all my free time dealing with promotion for the first one, or messing with my blog and website? *sigh* There aren't enough hours in the day. It's a good thing my job isn't really full-time, because I'd never get anything...

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All right Smashwords, you win

I resisted for as long as I could. I really, really didn’t want to have to deal with Smashwords to get my book out there, but the more I researched alternate sales avenues, the more I came to realize: there aren’t any alternate sales avenues. At least, none that work very well. I gave up on Google Books today. They’re impossible to deal with, they give away too much of the book for free, and I haven’t been able to get them to do the one thing I wanted: sell my ebook! So I sent them a request today to remove my book and account. It isn’t worth...

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Print isn’t dead

Perhaps I’m not the norm here, but judging by my sales so far, print is definitely not dead yet. I have 15 sales – not a ton, I realize, but it’s a start – and of those 15, 7 are print copies. (7 print, 7 Kindle and 1 Nook) I’m finding that as I promote the book to people I know, more often than not, they don’t have an ereader, and therefore wouldn’t have been able to get my book if I wasn’t offering a paperback edition. I guess the lesson to other self-publishers is: offer a print edition. It really isn’t hard. There are print-on-demand companies...

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Self-promotion is hard

As I was getting ready to start this post, I spotted something pretty darn exciting: someone gave Destined 5 stars over on GoodReads!  What’s even more exciting is, it’s not a friend or family member!  Unfortunately, most people that see I have one 5 star rating will assume it’s a friend and disregard it, which sucks, but what can you do? Hopefully more ratings and reviews will start coming in as people have time to finish reading. I wish there was a way to mark the rating with a “I don’t know this person, I swear!” notation. ;) Anyway,...

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