Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors Review discussion

For those who have found my facebook page, this is the same issue I mentioned there. (Just a little more polite for mixed company.)

I'm having some issues with twitter. I can link freely to my blog, to facebook, or to individual Amazon stores. That's all well and good until you have HOW many amazon stores to get word out about??? I've got a universal link, but twitter, being a little behind the times refuses to let me send the universal link through. Anyone have a suggestion in FIXING this issue (besides having to post 8 simultaneous links with notations)?

When I checked my past scheduled tweets, now I know why I've had such a lousy turn out on Remember the Shadows on Amazon. Every one of the tweets with the universal link got flagged as automated. (They are scheduled, but none of my OTHER scheduled tweets with links got rejected.)

Help please? Ideas?

It might be an issue with who you used for the universal link. I got around this by just making a page on my blog that links to each market. It's an extra few steps, so it's not the most convenient, but twitter doesn't mind.

What Christina said. I haven't done it, but something like that's the way to go.

Like, couldn't you link to a Facebook post that has the universal link or all the links?

Probably many ways around that.

Blast. I've got it linked through the landing page on my blog. But, the only ones who hit that are either ones coming in from a web search (maybe 1 or 2 a week) or from groups where blog pages are shared. Most of the time folks come in directly to the linked page.

I've been using SmartURL, because it helps me track where the clicks are coming from, so I have an idea about what type of click through I'm getting into Amazon. Guess I'm going to have to set up a new page, like Christina said. Oh, well, the blog is under construction anyway. Trying to clean up the mess I let it get into.

Thanks everyone. Not grousing, just ... never mind. It's late, and I'm going to sleep. See if it doesn't look so daunting tomorrow. ::Grins::

I'm using a mix. I have a domain lockhand.org with a webpage for me, and one for each of my books. When I'm tweeting adverts, I sometimes link to that page, sometimes to the Amazon page, so it's a one-click experience.

On a related note. Do people have a thought about the frequency of tweeting people will tolerate? At first I was only tweeting when I genuinely had news. Now, I'm tweeting an ad pretty much every day, and my follower totals don't seem to suffer. It's a very un-British thing, blowing your own trumpet, but most of my readers are American, so perhaps don't mind.

Richard, I finally started going that route. I've got a page dedicate to the books, I just have to figure out how to get the "buy now" options installed. Especially since I'm on both Smasowords for the multiple format options, and Amazon for the hundred pound gorilla option.

I've seen a pretty steady growth of 3 or 4 new followers every day with the weekly batches of tweets I run out. I tend to have 8 in a batch, cycling every hour with a break for the local overnight (10 PM - 2 AM US CST).

All of my tweets point back at my blog, and I'm seeing a pretty steady trickle of visits coming from that (3 or 4 per day).

In watching a couple of other authors, I've seen upto 1 book promo tweet an hour when they've got multiple books to advertise. They just cycle through the books, so it's not the same book time after time.

I haven't gotten to the point yet where I've got enough books to try that, so I tend to run my books out about once every other week for a day or two in a complementary cycle, then let them fade back down. I get a spike in views for both books, but not a bunch of new sales - I think that's because of the cover/blurb/sample, which is still a work in progress for Darkness. I think I'm losing some of the potentials because the covers don't match when I point them at Smashwords and I use the Kindle cover for the pictures.

Actually, K, it was your tweet-rate that encouraged me to up mine. Seeing you get away with several tweets a day made me feel OK with aiming at one "commercial" a day. See how we egg each other on? Of course I tweet a lot more often on space-dev issues and sniping at right-wing politics, so maybe the commercials get lost in the noise.

PS I was interested to see you mention covers. I had no idea when I started out writing how important the cover is. There's probably a hundred eyeballs hitting the cover for every ten reading the blurb and then one going in to the sample? Hard to know, but that's my impression.

Richard,

This is what I just skimmed out of my analytics from twitter, hootsuite (take this one with a grain of salt, all my links are hootsuite, so includes up to 20 possible links), Amazon and Smashwords for the time period of 3-2 until 3-8.

Twitter views/clicks on cover promo tweets for the duration: Out of the Darkness - 383/14 (only 2 adds - the 2nd and the 7th), Remember the Shadows - 665/17 (only 2 adds - the 2nd and the 7th)

Amazon clickthroughs from the blog, as reported by my SmartURL - Out of the Darkness - 35, Remember the Shadows - 1

Smashwords page views (For the duration of the sale, I had 2 sales and 1 sample download for both books) - Out of the Darkness - 150, Remember the Shadows - 125

Hoosuite clicks - 14

I got quite a few views with the cover promos - I've got 4 different ones I use for individual books, and 4 more that I run with both books shown. For the sale, I only used the individual books like a fool. Next time I do a sale like that, I'll try to remember to use the combined image.

Take what I can come up with with a grain of salt, but that's the numbers I can report. I'm hoping this month to get a couple of marketing books, and see if maybe I can up my engagement rate. But, want to get Darkness out of its revision nightmare.