I posted recently about the leap in traffic that my website has enjoyed. It appears that the book marketing advice that Brian Feinblum gave me some years ago, about posting every day to boost SEO (search engine optimisation), has indeed finally translated into book sales. I have therefore decided to pause my Amazon advertising campaign in the UK. I paused the US campaign last year. For me, it was costing far more than it was generating in sales.
The bonus of the website is that it has also generated clicks to my non-fiction book, Project Sponsorship, and the short story anthology, Something Hidden. However, unlike the real time sales data you get from Amazon, I’ll only discover how those clicks have converted to sales when the royalty payment arrives.
In other writing news I presented my synopsis of The Favourite Murder to my fellow writers at Milktown Writers on Wednesday. Thankfully they were impressed. Compressing 110,000 words onto a page of A4 felt like an impossible task, but they thought I’d done really well. The guidance for a synopsis as part of a manuscript submission is to describe the narrative arc. The publisher’s reviewer will probably only read the first 10,000 words of your manuscript, perhaps less, and the synopsis tells them what happens after that. We were joined by Jac Forsyth from Frome Writers and she advised that in a synopsis each character’s name should be in capitals the first time it is used. She also told us about Silver Crow Books who offer an evaluation of manuscripts with a written report at a reasonable price. I might give that a try, once Claire has finished reading my draft. She also emphasised how important it is to really get the back cover blurb right. I shall give that some thought.
We talked about Amazon quite a bit. I think Jac Forsyth said she publishes via Troubador Publishing, and that’s the route that Rosemary Griggs has taken too. Jac seemed to think that my choice of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing was a better route, certainly in terms of royalties, hence her merchandising.