The post-Olympic and Labor Day weekend free download promotions did not generate much in the way of new sales, although I was pleased to get a few more positive reviews on Amazon; however, some new connections would provide me with more avenues of promoting my novel. On Twitter, my paltry account got a new follower, Faydra Deon. One day, I checked out the links on her profile and discovered that she was the owner and developer of the Independent Author Index. Her site and the Independent Author Network are two sites where indie authors can join to promote their creative works and readers can go to search for uniquely new literary gems. Both networks maintained that every author needed an individual website and blog, which led me to invest the time and effort to learn how to create my site. As soon as I had a viable site ready, I joined the Independent Author Index.
At the same time, while going through my author’s page on Amazon, I noted a section recommending that I update the extras section of my book on Shelfari, Amazon’s social media site for book lovers. As an author on Amazon, I discovered a logon and account had already been created for me. I was guided to join the Book Promotion & Marketing group and discovered some postings about e-zine blog sites that freely promote daily free e-book promotions to their readers. Of course, the number of books these sites could promote daily was limited. I had just been given a new allotment of five promo days from Kindle Publishing to schedule, so I went over my options. The obvious choice would have been the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, but I heeded the lesson from my first five promo days and scheduled one free day for this past Saturday, one week before Thanksgiving, and labeled it the “try before you gift” promotion. Besides the Facebook postings and tweets, I now alerted the Index and registered the promo day with four e-reader sites. With less competition, two of the sites – The Digital Ink Spot and the Ereader News Today – added Legacy Discovered as one of the featured free e-books for Saturday. The results were amazing. This one day promotion netted nearly fifteen times more downloads than the two day post-Olympics promotion. Now as I await the judgment of these new readers, I consider the newest lesson of self-promotion – with limited resources, seek out and do not miss the opportunities to join the networks and groups of fellow independent authors for there is strength in numbers and cross-promotion is key.
There will be more lessons to be learned as I continue to introduce my debut novel to readers around the world and contemplate the next story to be told. I will also start to look at my fellow authors current works and give my honest opinion on their endeavors, which is all I would ever ask of anyone willing to read my work.