The Rocky Road to Sales...

Things are currently rather interesting. I'm in the middle of setting up my Amazon Author Central page which will be live in seven days, working on my Goodreads and Authorsden pages and generally trying to tell the world about my book. On Twiends I got a brief VIP feature which increased traffic to my Fire season lens significantly.

The publisher spoke to Nielsen and the release date issue has been corrected. I will confirm here it is the 1st December 2010, not 1st November.

Perhaps most worrying of all, in two days I should receive an ARC copy of my book for promotional purposes. It has a placeholder cover, but the internal text should be properly laid out.

Things were looking good.

This of course is when Amazon crashed this afternoon and lost my book page. The page still exists but currently without the direct URL you can't find it as it isn't on the search, making promotion rather difficult. Things don't ever seem to be easy with this book, but then nothing worthwhile ever is. If I keep repeating that I might believe it, but I can't believe most authors go through all this to get their books out.

Meanwhile I'm back to bothering bloggers for reviews. If anyone would like an ARC copy for a review, please leave a comment below and I'll pass it on to the publisher.

Still working on promotion

This blog should hopefully be appearing on Technorati shortly. Meanwhile I'm creating a list of local press, review sites and author profile sites, so that once the book is up, I'll have it ready.

Even if it's the same profile on each, it's all extra backlinks and publicity.

If anyone is interested I could put this site list up on Google docs and make it shareable.

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Marketing and publicity

It seems early, since the book is still being edited, but promotion work is already underway. Once the book is released, promotion and publicity has a hard deadline as a new release becomes yesterday's news very quickly. Although the publisher does the marketing and promotion, any additional work the author can provide can only help; after all if no one knows about your book, how can they know if they want to buy it?

My efforts are already taking effect. This blog is one of the more obvious, as is the online presence I am building. Book trailers and videos are under discussion, and the first mention of a cover was made recently which caused my ears to prick up.

I know how the book reads, but I can't wait to see how it looks.