Author Dana Lockhart

In Part I , I discussed the marketing methods that I recommend and ones that I almost recommend.  In this Part II, I have a list of marketing techniques I do not recommend, as well as a final note of what I wish I would have done better and how Kindle Scout appears to work.  Not Recommended: Books and the Bear – This is another company that baited me by following me on Twitter.  I was getting desperate to become hot and get views again before I had found the Fiverr marketing.  So I panicked and purchased their $10 one-time promo to their giant Twitter account before I realized this one-or-two times promotion stuff just doesn’t yield results.  Look at where you’re getting promoted!  Look, I beg you!  The Bear has a lot of followers, yes, but they also post umpteen times a day with their own advertisements for marketing and editing so that in no time your paid advertisement gets lost on their page.  Heck, since following them back they’ve been clog...

This is Part I, featuring recommended and maybe recommended marketing techniques for Kindle Scout.  Read Part II about what’s not recommended and a final overview of Kindle Scout. Before I even launched my Kindle Scout campaign, I was getting baited by marketing companies to try and buy their promotions.  Being pretty new at this marketing thing, I was looking for cheap, effective ways to promote, and I quickly learned that sometimes you get what you paid for and you better be a smart shopper. If you undergo a venture like Kindle Scout as a new author with little experience in marketing, I encourage you to really double check what you’re actually getting.  An ad of “reach 100k+ people on Twitter” sounds too good to be true because it is.  Sure, there might be 100k people following said Twitter account, but when you only pay for one post when they post over 30 times a day, you’re post is likely to never be seen. I have outlined some very specific methods that I imple...

Perhaps the worst part of being rejected by the Kindle Scout team was that they did it so politely, so encouragingly, so supportively. I almost wonder if it would have been easier to accept if they had told me they hated my novel. But for them to tell me they liked it, but didn’t want to publish it, threw me for a huge loop. How hard is this publishing thing really going to be if good works still get the axe? How good does “good” have to be? -It Hurts So Good- The editorial feedback is a special Kindle Scout is doing at this time, starting in November 2017 and ending at the end of February 2018. When you get the email, it starts with “general comments” about the novel and their opinion of it as a whole. Mine was as follows: “There is a lot that we like about this novel, and we’re impressed by the positive and pragmatic attitude you express on your blog about the business aspects of pursuing a long-term literary career. You’re definitely the kind of talented and business-conscious...

Well, I don’t really know how Kindle Scout is going, honestly. Kindle Scout does give you some tools to work with in order to figure out which of your marketing strategies are working and which are failing. But they won’t flat up tell you how many nominations you or anyone else has. For example, they tell me how many people have used external links to view my book, and where it was they were directed from when they clicked on it. It’s neat to see the breakdown: how many came from facebook, how many came from my website (and which page of it), how many came from promotional websites, etc. This is a screenshot of my traffic stats as of Jan 8 at 4 AM But external links don’t really seem all that important, because Kindle Scout also shows you what percentage of page views are coming from browsing Kindle Scout and how many are coming from outside sources. Right now, my ratio is about 90% of my views are coming from Kindle Scout, and 10% are from elsewhere. The highest external sources...