Useful websites & tools for WRITERS e-publishing & Self-publishing authors

DIGITAL RESOURCES FOR WRITERS

I have spent the morning researching websites for self publishing authors. Really, I guess I am procrastinating. Now that I have finished Infidelity I am moving on to the next book in the trilogy, Alimony. This will be a much more difficult and involved book than Infidelity, I think. So I am kinda looking for all sorts of ways to delay. Hence, I have been just scrolling around the Internet, reading stuff. There is so much to learn! I really don't see how any self-publishing author navigates this maze and still has time to write! OMG. Case in point, below are some terms and vocabularies and websites and tools I picked up that I wanted to reinforce in my own brain. I find that when I write about something, it helps me to retain it. So if you already know these things, skip to the next post. But if you are learning with me, dig in.

HERE ARE SOME USEFUL TERMS, TOOLS, & SITES FOR WRITERS:


1. Bookbub:
bookbub.com
This is a little bit snooty because not just anybody can get their books talked about. But if you can pass muster, you should: "BookBub is a free daily email that notifies you about deep discounts on acclaimed ebooks. You choose the types you'd like to get notified about — with categories ranging from mysteries to cookbooks — and we send great deals in those genres to your inbox."

2. Perma Free:
It is a system of making your digital book permanently free on Amazon. check out smashwords.com for more details.

3. Goodreads:
goodreads.com
A maze of a website but all self-respecting authors are on it and know how to navigate it. If you understand what they are talking about, please tell me because I just get a headache trying to figure my way around goodreads.com. And it makes me very, very perturbed.

 4. Nook
It's a tablet and e-reader. Like Kindle. A competitor for Kindle. "Kindle Oasis v Nook Glowlight Plus"

5. i-book
A kindle competitor offered by Apple.

6. Kobo
"kobobooks.com Founded in December 2009, Toronto-based Rakuten Kobo Inc. is one of the world's fastest-growing eReading services, offering more than 5 million eBooks and magazines to millions of users across the world."

7. kboards.com
This site is a "user board for Kindle, the family of wireless reading devices from Amazon."

8. Smashwords.com
"Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks.  We make it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute ebooks to the major retailers.

FOR AUTHORS, PUBLISHERS AND LITERARY AGENTS, Smashwords offers quick and easy e-book distribution to most of the world's largest e-book retailers.  We provide free tools for marketing, distribution, metadata management and sales reporting.  At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works.  Smashwords is ideal for publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays, or other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet."

9. Slickdeals.net

A venue to post alerts for deals on your books and other things

10. Pickfu.com

Get feedback on stuff like book covers etc. before you publish.

11. e-junkie.com
"E-junkie is designed for people who want a feature-rich shopping cart for their own website or blog, without having to be expert coders or deal with the headaches of a bloated off-the-shelf software suite. We’ve gone for that perfect balance between simplicity and customizability.
How does it work? We have a Seller Admin panel where you add products and then receive short code snippets for Add to Cart or Buy Now buttons to embed anywhere you want—just copy and paste our code into your page. Great for sites on Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, or anywhere that supports Javascript (we also offer codes that work anywhere you can't use Javascript).
After your buyers build their order through a cart that displays inside your own page, we guide them to secure checkout with their choice of any payment method you accept, among the wide variety of payment services we support. After checkout, we automate and secure the digital delivery of download files and codes. We also support the sale of physical products with tax and shipping calculation, inventory management and many other features."

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Click here to get it on amazon

Can Facebook Ads Help Self-Published Authors to Sell Books?

SHOULD I BUY FACEBOOK ADS?

A few people have advised me to buy Facebook ads to help jumpstart my new book writing endeavour - especially now that I have finished the hot and sexy Infidelity. So, my advisers tell me that Facebook ads will help drive people to my e-books and paperbacks on Amazon.com and Kindle, help me become an Amazon bestselling author in no time flat. None of these people actually bought Facebook ads, btw. But they assure me it is a good idea if I bought Facebook ads. Can they be right?

I am a little bit skeptical.  I have been doing research on this and it is mixed at best.

I DID A GOOGLE SEARCH ON "FACEBOOK ADS TO SELL BOOKS" 


If you Google "How to Use Facebook Ads to Sell Books," as I did, you will get a healthy return of great websites and posts such as:

• How Authors Can Use Facebook to Sell Books - digitalworld.com
• Successful Book Marketing Using Facebook Ads - the creativepenn.com
• How to Use Facebook ads to Sell More Books - authorscrib.com
• Facebook Advertising for Authors - Selfpublishingadvice.org

There is this one article Why Facebook Cannot Help You Sell Books by Michael Alvear for Digitalbookworld.com. One quote that I particularly remember is this one:

Let’s review: Facebook shows your posts to less than 16 percent of your fans, and you have to pay to reach the other 84 percent. And even if you do, only two-tenths of 1 percent of the people who see a post about your book will even click on it.
Facebook gets you closer to book sales in the same way that jumping up and down gets you closer to the sun

I really got very nervous when I read that. This guy sounds experienced with this stuff and he really thinks that it is a TOTAL WASTE OF TIME to buy Facebook ads to sell books.

As I continued my research, I read the following by a guy named Mark Dawson, "Facebook is the single most powerful marketing and promotional tool that is available to authors, be they traditionally or self-published."

Hme...what does he know that Alvear doesn't. The article goes on to talk about some staggering sums he spends on advertising, like nearly 4 grand per month! This guy is not talking about folks like me who are just breaking into the business and are "virgins" with this marketing stuff.

I think the best advice I read was this by authorscrib.com:

Facebook Ads aren’t meant for selling low prized books like the common $0.99 and $2.99 books on Amazon. If you are still thinking about using Facebook ads to help you sell more books, you can do so NOT by directly selling using Facebook Ads, but using it to build your mailing list by offering something in exchange for your target book audience’s email and name and draw them into your sales funnel where you can finally sell them your books through relationship based email marketing.

CONCLUSION

OK. I think I get it. I will not be buying any Facebook ads not even for Infidelity.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=infidelity%2C+by+marion+lewis

INFIDELITY HITS THE KINDLE STORE and AMAZON PAPERBACKS

MY NEWEST AND LATEST BOOK HAS DROPPED!

Infidelity: Cheating, Love Affairs & Divorce

WHERE CAN YOU PURCHASE THIS BOOK?

• It is available on createspace.com for $7.99
• It is also available in the Amazon Paperbacks for $7.99
• And of course the e-book version is available for $2.99 on Kindle.

Do Free Giveaways of e-books (Free Downloads) Help Authors to Sell More of their Books?

Hello Everyone!

So I just finished Infidelity. It will be published on Thursday on Createspace, Amazon paperbacks and Kindle. Yeah! I am not going to start the next book till the weekend. The next book is Alimony but I am going to take a few days to rest my head and think with a different side of the brain for a little bit.

Right now I am making lunch and while that works itself out, I am researching how to market and sell e-books online. As you can see I have been doing a lot of writing but not exactly the same amount of selling. Giggle, giggle.  I am definitely not a good saleswoman, OK? I have no idea about sales. But I have been trying to learn about it.

A lot of people who have been successful in marketing and selling e-books on Kindle, advise free downloads and free giveaways - as a sales and marketing strategy -  for a limited period. What do you think about this? Have you done this yourself? Was it effective as a sales and marketing tool?

I am thinking of making Infidelity a free download for 24 hours on Thursday on Kindle. What do you think? I sort of think that when things are free people may not value it so much and it could possibly not work. But I think it would be fun to give it a try.

So I have decided. I have just decided right now. In real time.  Infidelity will be a free download for 24 hours on Thursday in the Kindle Store. Yeah! Get it while it's hot!

I hope you will read it and give it some good reviews. Help me make it an Amazon Bestseller.

See you later! Talk soon!

Katy Perry's "Fight Song" and I am pumping to finish the divorce book: INFIDELITY

Good morning!

I just woke up and hit my laptop almost immediately. I am listening to Katy Perry's "Fight Song" and I just blogged about it for Divorce Saloon.

Right after I eat my breakfast, I have to continue with my current project Infidelity.

I need to finish this by midweek, at the latest.

Infidelity

So, I was supposed to be working on my Paris memoir but I found myself working on the Infidelity divorce book, which was next in the pipeline. It is an interesting topic and I think I will enjoy working on it but guess what? My fingers are cramping on me. So  I have to stop. If not I could incapacitate myself for months. And I still have 80 books to write. How the heck will I ever find 80 topics to write about? Why in the name of all that is sane did I give myself this 100 book challenge?? My friggin' hand is seizing up already!

Read an excerpt:

Infidelity is one of the key reasons for divorce in the United States and possibly in every other country in the world. However, at this juncture, all states in the United States are now no-fault which means that, while infidelity remains a "grounds" for divorce in some states, parties in a divorce no longer have to prove fault in order to obtain a divorce in any state in the Union – and this applies even if the “fault” is as grave as infidelity or adultery.

For some uncanny reason, when couples cheat this often leads to the implosion of their marriages! What is up with that? This is a worldwide trend.  Historically, infidelity has meant execution. This dates back to biblical times where, under all three of the world’s major religious doctrines - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - adultery  was perceived as so grave a wrong, that the punishment was swift and severe and bloody such as by death by stoning or other inhumane means.

In more modern times, infidelity has still carried quite a bit of stigma and could subject the transgressors – especially women – to extreme consequences. In 1256 for example, infidelity is rumoured to have been the reason that German noblesse Maria Duchess of Bavaria lost her head after her husband had her executed.

Here is the tentative cover. This is my favorite part - creating the book covers. What do you think?

"How to Divorce Part 3" is available on Createspace.com. Now for the memoir and "infidelity."

So book 3 in the trilogy How to Divorce  is now available. It is on createspace.com. But it is also available on amazon.com and in the kindle store (this could take up to 24 hours because it just went live on create space. I will share the links when they are live.)

I am psyched. Now I can give my attention to the next book in the pipeline which is the Paris memoir: PARIS: My First 3 Months I am kinda finding that I am not huge into the memoir. It is bringing back memories I kinda don't want to think about.

I mean, everybody knows I dropped out of Phd school. I am a phd dropout. And the reason ultimately is that I decided that I needed the experience like I needed a hole in my head. But writing the memoir also reminds me of how I came to this decision. And the missteps and the naiveté and the outright sabotage that resulted in this decision to drop out.

Don't get me wrong. I have not had a day of regret. I don't think phds are for everybody and ultimately, if you can't find work when you are done, what the hell is the point of all that torture and torment? But still. I find this memoir a little bit difficult to process emotionally. So we shall see if I finish it or push it to the side as I tend to do with things I find unpalatable. You should know that I am the ultimate escape artist. I like to just escape - that is, tune out. Into my own world.

But, so, yea, book 3 is ready. And now I am working on the memoir. Right behind the memoir is another book called, Infidelity.

So my favorite chapter in How to Divorce Part 3 is "How to Have a Zen Divorce."

The chapter that scares me is "How to Hide Money From Your Spouse." I think I could get in trouble with that chapter. But let's see what happens. I tried to stress the disclaimer that I was not advising anybody to actually do it.