Day 35: Marketing

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I spent most of today doing non-time-sensitive chores I had put off for Sunday so I’d have more time to focus on writing fiction during the week. Some of it was writing-related business—filing and recording receipts, writing blog posts and newsletters I plan to release this coming month, updating my website.

I also switched my Story Sensei worksheets over to Kindle Unlimited, but they’re DRM-free so anyone should be able to download a copy from Amazon onto their computer and then load it onto their iPad/iPhone, Kobo, or Nook. Right now, when people buy my worksheets, they can also download them in PDF, .epub, .mobi, and .docx on a special section of my website, but that requires them to join my website, and I have to manually add them to the download page. So I’m considering a website like BookFunnel, which will enable me to email people directly with other file formats of the worksheets they’ve bought. Also, if I have time this coming Sunday, I’m going to go through the worksheets and update them a little bit.

One of the reasons I switched my worksheets to Kindle Unlimited and am also considering BookFunnel and updating the worksheets is because I have been reading marketing books today. The self-publishing market has changed so much in the few years since I first started self-publishing, and I haven’t released anything in several years because of those bad bouts of writer’s block,so I wanted a refresher course on ebook marketing. I also recently did my taxes and saw clearly that I’m not making any money on iBooks, Nook, or Kobo.

I don’t want to stop releasing on those platforms, because it’s not wise to put all my eggs in the Kindle basket, and I want some of my books—like the Matthew devotional and my novels translated into Japanese—to have a wider audience. I also personally don’t like reading books on my Kindle or the Kindle app on my computer, because I prefer the cleaner user interface of the Apple Books app on my computer and iPad/iPhone, so I don’t intend to exclude anyone who doesn’t read books on Kindle. This is why I release all my self-published books DRM-free, so readers can download copies and put them on their ebook reader of choice.

Anyway, I’ve been considering things like sales funnels and marketing strategies today. I’m not very good at marketing AT ALL, and quite frankly I don’t like it very much, but I know I have to do at least some marketing for my books.

I think I should go back through the marketing books I read and make more notes, and then organize my marketing with a checklist of things to do. That way I won’t be overwhelmed and I’ll keep my ideas all in one place, and I can edit the checklist if I decide to discard or revise an idea. I already came up with some marketing ideas that I just threw down messily in a document file since I didn’t have any place to put them and I wanted to write the ideas down before I forgot, but they’re not organized by project and they’re only unrefined brainstorming ideas.

Luckily I won’t need to do anything, marketing-wise, for a few months at least, so all this is just researching and laying groundwork.

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