Vegas and the Mob - Internal Marketing

Sometimes you've got to throw caution to the wind and plug your own work. No matter how much marketing you have done for your latest book, your own words may be the difference between a successful campaign and a dud.

Throwing caution and modesty to the wind, I give you my latest work: Vegas and the Mob.

The truth about Las Vegas, unlike the watered-down versions you might have heard elsewhere. Sin City was the Mob’s greatest venture and most spectacular success, and through forty years of frenzy, the FBI watched, listened on phone tapes, and did virtually nothing. Thank goodness for that, because Vegas wouldn’t be what it is today without the Mob!

Two of the nation’s most powerful crime family heads went to prison in the 1930’s, Al Capone, and Lucky Luciano. Frank Nitti took over the Chicago Outfit while, Frank Costello ran things for the Luciano Family. Both men were influenced by their bosses from prison, and both sent enough gangsters onto the streets to influence loan sharking, extortion, union control, and drug sales. 

Bugsy Siegel worked for both groups, handling a string of murders and opening up gaming on the west coast, and that included Las Vegas, an oasis of sin in the middle of the desert – and it was legal. Most of it. The FBI watched as the Mob took control of casino after casino, killed off the competition, and stole enough money to bribe their way to respectability back home.

New York’s “Lucky Luciano” was getting a taste of the profits in the 1930’s, Detroit, Kansas City, and Chicago weren’t far behind. By the 1940’s, nearly every crime family in the United States had a stake in a Las Vegas casino. Some did better than others. Vegas casino owners watched-over their profits while competing crime families eyed the others success like jealous lovers. Murder often followed.

You can get a copy of Vegas and the Mob on Kindle for just $4.95 If you prefer a book you can hold in your hand, this new 188 page book is just $12.95 at Amazon! Enjoy

New Books at Book Sales World

There are two new books that just hit Book Sales World as part of their Book Sales Ladder Program. They are both selling steadily on Amazon's Kindle, and they are both just 99 - cents. You can't beat that.

The 5 Moons of Tiiana is a Sci-Fi from Author Paul T Harry. Sphere Publishing calls it a swashbuckling, science fiction epic filled with adventure, mystery, romance, and fantasy. We call it a really good time!

5 Moons has 38 reviews already on it's Amazon page and all but one are 4 or 5 stars. That tells you the readers are really enjoying the rush. Sales rank is 292,668 - lets see where it is in a few weeks and how the program works!

Book Sales World is a small marketing program that connects authors to other authors and readers across the globe. Their Book Blast program is a tiny $9.95 to get an Author's book marketing started. Take a look!

Stealing From Bandits is an action adventure set behind the scenes at a Nevada casino. Author Al W Moe sets the tempo: Casinos and money, that's what it's all about in Nevada. To protect the state's greatest asset, cash, the eye-in-the-sky runs 24/7, but something at the Royal casino was never supposed to be seen.

Now Kevin Webb needs to figure out which one of his friends can help him stay alive after being just a little too good at his job. This fast-action thriller takes you behind the scenes of a major casino and lets you take-in what the cameras see and only the bosses are supposed to know about.

Stealing's current Amazon purchase page shows a sales rank of 415,222 - lets see where it is in a few weeks and how the program works!

Virtual Book Tour - Get Bang for Your Buck!

A virtual book tour can help get the good word out about your latest novel and it can be cheap, quick, and effective. But it’s rare to have all those qualities. Most virtual book tours are centered on book blogs that have little to no readership, little interaction with the blogger, and will require plenty of extra work from you. Don’t expect to pay the fee and be done working!

Sure, you wrote the book, but the tour bloggers probably won’t. Ideally, every blogger would read your book, do a quality review of it for their readers, and some of those readers would click the links, check out your site, and buy a copy. That doesn’t always happen. Make sure you ask the who, what, where, when, and why questions.

Who’s Doing My Tour?

So, who’s going to do your tour, and where are the tour stops? You really need to know which sites are going to be hosting your book. Do they have any readership? Are they going to actually review your book? Are they going to post a question and answer session? Do their blogs ever get picked-up by other blogs or newspapers?

What’s Getting Discussed on Each Tour Stop?

Find out whether you are getting a simple blog notice that your book is available, or something meatier that a reader might find really interesting. If you are providing guest blogs, ask how you need to tailor them to fit the blogs. No sense doing a piece on romance novels when the blog features nonfiction.

When’s the Tour Starting and Ending?

Obviously you need to do your own advertising to coincide with the tour dates. To take advantage of a virtual tour you should schedule some additional advertising by using Twitter exposure, doing a book giveaway, and making sure your book is available when the tour is in full swing. A small tour of six to ten sites isn’t nearly as strong as a month-long tour with 25 blogs which will only cost a little more. Weigh your options carefully.

Where Are the Readers Coming From?

And where are they going? You need blogs that attract readers, but they need to fit your genre’. In addition, you need to make sure that every reader has a chance to follow a link to your own website or sales center. For most authors that center will be Amazon, but if that’s the case, make sure your book description is awesome, because that’s what the reader sees next and you need to make the sale!

Why Am I Paying For This?

Could you manage to get a dozen book blogs to cover your book without using a tour service? If so, why are you paying for the service? Find out what else is included in the tour package. Extras that will help make it successful include a personalized tour page, a reviewer’s page, a banner for links to your pages, press release (even if they are group releases), book trailer (even if a group trailer), and social network advertising.

If you are getting most of the above items, you are getting a high quality service. Expect to pay at least a couple hundred dollars – and expect at least 15 to 25 blogs to be carrying a story about your book.

How To Get the Most Impact

Make sure you do daily tweets about each new day’s blog listing with a link, and so some advertising on  Author’s Den, Good Reads, Google Ads, or somewhere, and have notices on your own website about your tour with links to each book-blog site. Also, a press release should be included by you to some type of web-related service so you get more publicity.

If possible, have a trailer made for your book. You can make your own with power point and place it on You Tube, or you can pay $50 to $150 to have a 30-second spot made. It helps!

Where are you Selling?

Just wondering where you might be selling your books!  Are your books at Barnes & Noble? How about Apple, Sony, Kobo? If you use Smashwords to publish an ebook you'll get those and more. There's no fee, but you'll have to fight a bit with their automated processor to fit your book to so many platforms. The results are good if you advertise a bit - take a look at one of my books at Smashwords.

A Gift from John Grisham

Recently I really got stuck on a writing project. I thought, I paced, I waved my arms at the blank canvas of my computer screen, I bit my nails. Nothing. Just me and the darkness. I was stuck, stranded in limbo. After a day in the dark I was afraid to go forward. There might be a cliff, a wombat, or even worse an editor out there for all I knew. I mean come on, it was really dark and I was scared and hungry sitting there cradling my meager story ideas in my lap.

Eventually I gathered enough courage to slink away to the kitchen for a tuna sandwich, leaving the story to fend for itself, because I'm a heartless bastard. And that's the way the story would have ended, except for John Grisham.

Strange as it seems, the man of 100 million book sales clicked on friends on my Goodreads account. I know because the website sent me an email, I looked to confirm this happenstance, and there was a great quote from him:

"Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have." — John Grisham

Now not even in my fevered mind did I think he was sitting at home in front of a roaring fire reading  Nevada's Golden Age of Gambling, but still, I was happy, and suddenly inspired. And, I wanted to pass that along to another author. So, I chose a not-yet-proven but fun-to-read writer and bought a dozen of their eBooks on Kindle and passed them on as gifts, to friends via email. Really, you could do a lot worse for a present these days than a book that can be read anywhere.

If you buy those gifts on Amazon, your friends can read from any Kindle reader, the device itself, or a web app on a computer or even a Smart phone. And, it's win-win. Your friends get a good book, and the author gets the thrill of seeing some extra book sales and makes some royalty bucks before Christmas. You can pass on a little inspiration and kindness. And, if you happen to see Mr. Grisham, tell him thanks for me.

Those thanks are heartfelt, because his little mouse click, that tiny act of kindness, inspired me to get that last story, a chapter of my novel, actually, back into play, and now it's nestled between chapters 11 and 13, safe and sound and no longer alone. A random act of kindness can go a long way!

Living on Book Reviews

Living on book reviews will not feed you as an author. There is a popular misconception that a book with a lot of reviews is selling more books based on those reviews alone. Sure, book reviews can be very important, but they don't come first!

I really enjoy reading reviews at places like EK Ellis Literary Works or Goodreads, or even Amazon, because they help me find what I'm looking for. However, too many new writers see wildly successful books on Amazon with 1000 reviews and put 1 and 1 together to get 11. Sorry, doesn't work that way!

You have to have a quality product and great marketing first, to sell that many books and then to get that many reviews. If your book isn't selling you may be able assuage your feelings by blaming it on a lack of reviews, but the secret is, you don't need more than a few reviews to sell your book. Books sell based on author name recognition, genre, price, reviews, marketing, and well, those last two things, what were they, oh yeah, creativity and quality.

If you forget those in your manuscript you won't have many reviews and the ones you do have won't be that good. A bad book can get some reviews and sell some copies, but those sales won't last, while a quality read without many reviews can still sell plenty of copies.

Your Book's Best Friend

If you are a self-published author, you know how important it is to try most everything to sell your books, from blog tours and book signings to free copy giveaways, but your absolute best friend for life is good old word-of-mouth.

You only get good word-of-mouth if you have a great product and you manage to get some copies into the hands of people that will mention your book to their friends. So, you'll have to do some good marketing, but before you publish, have a few friends take a look at your work. Then, track down all those dangling participles, passive sentences, and of course all those adverbs you do not need (that's 98% of them). And then, go through your manuscript again and look at the story, your timing, your protagonist's motivation. Does your book still need work?

Yes, without reading your manuscript I can tell you that it does! Self-published authors aren't often hurt by a lack of enthusiasm and drive, but their stories can be killed by a lack of editing. Find a librarian, English Teacher, your best friend's mother's cousin's sister if you have to, but find someone who can help. You might even have to pay someone.

I've read hundreds of manuscripts from authors who thought they were ready to go-to-press, and I can tell you that only two of those were really ready. That's bad odds for you being ready. Fight the fight, edit till you can't stand it any more so you don't put your readers in the same boat - and then you have a great chance of selling your books, even if you don't have many reviews!

Other Marketing

You also might consider using a banner exchange to get additional readers to your site. A banner exchange is (usually) a free-membership type of website that allows you to install a banner on your website (for most, like this blogger site, you simply go to "layout" and click "add a gadget," then scroll down to "add html" where you insert the html you got from the banner exchange and your web page will now show a banner!

You, in turn, upload a banner with a link to your own site page to the banner exchange and they automatically give you x-number of free page views for the readers on your own pages. The exchange is usually 6 or 7 to 10 (your site gets 10 page views and your ad on their network of web sites will show your banner 7 times).

If you want to stay free, try ad designer. You can signup for free and make as many free banners as you want.

The Secrets of Search Engine Optimization

Marketing your website or blog without having first provided good content is like capturing water with a net. Even if you do succeed in getting to the source, you won't be able to hold onto it! Readers want quality content - whether you are writing a blog, a web article, or a book. Offer junk and you won't hold your readers, even if you provide excellent SEO practices.

Today's search engines don't just analyze your traffic patterns, they actually have amazingly strong algorithms that measure your actual content. Search engines like high quality, continually updated content that is unique on the web. Provide it and the web will beat a path to your site - using front and back links!

Know Your Audience

Just as a book author has to know their genre, a blogger needs to know their main subject and their readers. If your blog is about manhole covers, you need to know a lot about them, you need a new slant on them, and you need to figure out what your readers want to hear about them!

Make sure you use the name manhole covers in your blog title. And, when you do each article, use something associated with them in the title - and whatever the article is about, make sure you use several keywords in the text.That's the first step towards getting some good marks from search engines.

The second step is proving new and unique content every day. Obviously your readers will return more often if there is something new to read. If they return once or twice and there is nothing new - well,  you just lost them. And, the search engines really do love to see new content. Do yourself a favor and make the search engines happy!

Sacrificing Your First Born (Book) to the Masses

Want to be a successful self-published author? Consider sacrificing your first born new book to the reading (and buying) masses. Driving future sales with current book giveaways is one of the best aspects of Amazon's Kindle program. The marketing aspects are sound - introduce readers to an author's work and hope there's a land-swell of interest and word of mouth that propels new sales.

Read New Books for Free

Readers can hardly pass up a free book. For instance,  Oct. 29 and 30, readers can download Jessie B Tyson's book, White Heaven Women (a supernatural ghost story), and read from start to finish at their leisure at no cost. That's great.

Unfortunately, even if the idea of a free book is sound (and Jessie is only giving it away free for a short time), it only translates to future sales if the author's book is exceptional. That doesn't mean the writing has to be great (honest, it doesn't), it means the story has to be great. Readers don't care nearly as much as paid critics do about an occasional grammar slip. Readers want a story!

With physical books, a great cover can translate to many new sales. Seeing a book on your friends coffee table with a catchy cover is enough to start a discussion and boom: book sales. Books online via Nook or Kindle (and other readers) don't have that hook, but free books can help.


The Real Key

However, the real key to successful book sales (beyond the obvious STORY, STORY, STORY) when using a free book as a driver, is to have other books for the satisfied masses to buy. New writers can learn a lot from those who have already been successful like M. R. Mathias - he of the Dragon stories.

Mathias figured out his audience, he's prolific (over a dozen books and stories for sale), and he's got a few freebies that are always available. You can read his 77-page novella The First Dragoneer for free and see if you like the style, which many, many people have done. Then, you may be inclined to do what about a zillion other people have done:

Pay for Other Books

Yes, Mr. Mathias gives away a lot of books, but because he has a back-list of titles, he knows many readers will turn to his "for sale" books, and he'll make money from those. I know, because several of his best books, like The Sword and the Dragon, are fun to read and selling great on Amazon and on other eBook devices.

When readers find an author they really like, they'll buy all of their books. Giving away free copies or even 99-cent copies makes a lot of sense when you have other books to sell. If you have but one book, well, free and 99-cent books may not be the way to go! $2.99 is probably where you should be - and I'll explain that next week!