Neil Ostroff on Kindle Direct Publishing and Twitter

Silent Invasion novelNiel Ostroff, author of the novels Silent Invasion and Drop Out, has just written a blog post on The Book Marketing Network where he describes the effects of just one tweet from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

As he notes in the blog post:

When you’re as active on writer’s sites as I am, you occasionally receive what I like to call a little gift from the creative spirit. Case in point, yesterday when I received notice that one of my posts on Kindle Direct Publishing forum was tweeted by them.

I was a little dismayed, I must admit, because I didn’t even know that KDP read the author forum let alone would actually take the post and promote it. I didn’t ask them to do it and wholly appreciate that they did. So, what happened?

With just that one tweet I suddenly saw my books sales begin to increase. Literally every fifteen minutes another book would sell. I watched my blog counter (which links to the post) nearly quadruple its regular hits, and at one point I was getting ten hits a minute. The exposure continued as people re-tweeted and Google+ the post, and as of right now, I’m still getting emails from interested readers and my blog counter continues to rise.

So what has this taught me? Well, I must say since there is no way to pay KDP to tweet a post, you must write something pretty darn interesting to get their attention. Also, I’ve paid for many sponsorships over the years, some costing hundreds of dollars. I got the same results or better from this free tweet, leading me to believe that I must concentrate on writing strong, interesting posts that will garner attention from the mainstream rather than just posting about my personal book publishing odyssey.

And the last thing I learned from this is that just when you think you’ve been lost in a sea of manuscripts and that no one is reading your stuff or paying attention to what you’re writing, something like this little surprise happens and makes it all worthwhile.

To learn more about my books and myself, please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING http://neilostroff.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-kdp-story.html.

The power of one tweet


John’s Book Marketing Comments

These comments are especially aimed as novelists and self-publishers who often seem to complain that there’s no way to market their novels or self-published books. Note two things that Neil’s post emphasized:

1. Even one tweet on Twitter can be influential — and can sell books. Note that Kindle Direct Publishing only has 15,000 followers on Twitter and yet one tweet spurred more book sales for Neil and significantly more traffic to his blog.

2. Blog more. And write interesting blog posts. As Neil noted, “You must write something pretty darn interesting to get their attention.”

And also: Concentrate on writing strong, interesting posts that will garner attention from the mainstream rather than just posting about your personal book publishing odyssey.

So, here is my recommendation: Write lots of blog posts, at least 3 or 4 a week. And write a strong, interesting blog post at least once every two weeks.

The other blog posts can be short and sweet. For example, see some of the recent short but graphic posts from Jean Hausmann at http://jeanhausmann.com/weight-loss-and-wellness-blog-posts.


About John Kremer

John Kremer is author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, the Relationships Matter Marketing program, and many other books and reports on book marketing, Internet marketing, social media, and book publicity. -- .

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