David Gaughram's latest newsletter discusses the most effective ways to increase book sales. He talks a lot about algorithms, which is sort of fascinating, but very confusing. I've wondered a bit about the way I'm classifying and keywording (if that's an actual verb) my books, and if changing those things would affect sales. I honestly had no idea about algorithms, nor that there are ways to make them work for me. (I still don't know, honestly ~ it's quite complicated.)
An easier task, I concluded, would be to do more research on keywords. I've done it before, but could find no program that fit my budget, which is $0.00. So I applied my keywords the old-fashioned way, by using the Amazon search bar. I'm well aware that this is less than ideal. First, I needed to devise my keywords, then plunk them in, but what if I wasn't thinking of obvious ones? I need a program that tells me what I'm doing wrong and shows me how to do it right.
Lot of people, it seems, want to do that for me, for a price. I actually ran across one that charges ~ get this ~ $999.00 per month! Awesome! An author better be damn sure he's got an out-of-this-world book before he plunks down a cool grand on a keyword generator.
When our band was active, I found that every online site fed off another. Just getting our music online, we had to use some type of service, and thus the "offers" commenced. Music licensing sites, music review sites, "get played on radio" (internet radio), submit your track to TV and movie listings, and on and on and on. I fell for a few of them, and it goes without saying, none of them were free.
For every creative pursuit, there are thousands of online hucksters salivating to make money off someone else's artistry and toil. They sell dreams, and dreams are always alluring. What did the band derive from all those services? We did get accepted by a music library, which by the looks of its site, practically every artist does. But it at least resulted in a twenty-dollar check a couple of times a year. I continued to fork over the obligatory $20.00 for a music listing that seemed to fit one of our tracks just right. The hook is that we just keep trying ~ maybe the next thing will be the golden ticket. After a time, my interest faded away. We weren't making new music anymore, and I chalked the whole thing up as a passing fad, of which I've had many. Our producer (my spouse) retired from producing, plus I couldn't write a good song anymore to save my life.
Experience and good sense keeps me from making the same mistakes with my fiction. I did experiment with ads ~ promos, to be precise ~ but found them to be useless.
Unlike with our music, which I profoundly believed in, I don't feel the same about my books. Truthfully, I think they're "kind of good"; at least, not awful, but they really don't amount to much. They're little stories that I should probably be giving away, but I can't seem to manage that, either. (I've tried.) So, no, I'm not going to spend money on promises. And I'll keep using Amazon's search bar. That costs me the same amount as I'm earning from my work.
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