Support for Indie Authors discussion

I write fantasy books, but my struggle to get readers is similar to yours. Short answer...your guess is as good as mine.

Since your book is about diet and healthy living, I mean, obviously, we wont be selling to the same groups. But you are going to have to find an audience that is looking for that type of content. That audience may not be the largest, and may have increased or decreased difficulty.

From far away, I will try to answer whichever of these questions I feel I can.

ADVERTISING PLATFORMS:

I've spent a bit on Amazon, and I have a small number of sales to show for it. I stopped running the ad cause it was like a ratio of $1 earned for ever $10 spent. Talking to others in my writers forum, some have worse ratios than that.

I've not advertised on Facebook or Goodreads, other than to post up my own messages.


BUDGET:
Whatever you can afford without breaking the bank.


BOOKS:
For book price, I would look for a number of books similar to yours (hopefully doing well), and try to make an apples to apples comparison. If other books in your market are priced at $19.00 for 200 pages, and yours is 200 pages....I'd be at about $19.00. (course I would stay in the 70% royalty range for amazon)

(Note: for KDP, I have been told that there is no point in pricing at $3.99 as its in the mid range... better to be low .99-1.99 or just go for $4.99. People willing to buy at 3 will also buy at 4 is the psychology....course, I priced mine at 3.... )

Optimal clicks, I dont know. I have many impressions (thousands and thousands) a number of clicks (a few hundred) and a few sales (like 50).

I discontinued efforts because I was selling more copies on my own through social groups than I was through ads. I dont think I have the money to really hit the ads hard enough to get lift off. I am on the marathon and not a sprint portion of the game.

Almost all of my sales have been on kindle, but I am fantasy fiction, so I expected that. A book like yours might have more appeal to buy a non-electronic copy.


GOODREADS:

I dont think anyone here will buy or read my book just for me posting up that I wrote one. I would suggest joining groups and being active, making friends and maybe some will...the currency here is kind of read books. So...if you are reading theirs, they may read yours. (Course, amazon does not like trading reviews, so....)

For me, I would offer my book as often as it takes to get the review count up high enough, that it should have achieved a level of reader validations. Then as needed, or seemed a good marketing effort, in the future.

I would suspect, if the people reading the books are those who would not have read it on their own otherwise, they will be more likely to leave lower reviews, but...everyone is different. Some just don't give out 5 stars...what can you do?

If you are getting a lot of low reviews from the target audience, that might be telling you something.

If you are getting a lot of low reviews from people who are not the target audience, then you need to get over the target.

I, personally, would not do a Premium package unless I already had a lot of friends and followers, or a good number of places to post about the promotion.

INDEPENDENT AUTHORS

I wish I knew the magic. If I find it, I will share ;)

P. Pherson wrote: "I would suggest joining groups and being active, making friends and maybe some will...the currency here is kind of read books. So...if you are reading theirs, they may read yours. (Course, amazon does not like trading reviews, so....)"

In principle, one of the best solutions to that is to join one of the read/review groups here on Goodreads which are designed specifically to avoid reciprocal reviews.

In practice, I'm sorry to say there is very little take up on that, at least in the speculative fiction genre that I read and write. Other sites have monthly book pools from which you can choose one to read and review, giving you the right to put one of yours in the pool next month.

It's not much, in the scheme of things, but at least it's something and doesn't cost anything. In my case, I always buy the book in question - I think that's least I do - but then I'd be buying books to read anyway, so it's not costing me any more. Shame more don't participate in this kind of thing.