The Savvy Book Marketer has put up a blog post by Kathleen Gage about book promotion strategies. This is an area where many writers fail, as … well, they’re writers, not marketers.
I’ve heard writers refer to the excellent promotion tools provided by Amazon – like the Select program that allows authors to give their books away for up to 5 days over a 90 day period where the book is exclusively offered by Amazon – as a “gimmick.” These same authors claim that they gave away “hundreds” of books to people and because of that they lost “hundreds” of sales.
These writers don’t know the first thing about marketing, and they need to learn it – and fast.
According to Digital Book World, eBooks pushed the total net book sales over $27.1 billion for 2012. eBooks were 20% of trade publishing net sales for 2012, beating the 2011 eBooks sales figure (15%) handsomely.