Tag Archives: Amazon

Free sci-fi novella on Amazon

New release
Before the Light – new release

A gift to my readers!

Time running out to grab your FREE copy of Before the Light, on Amazon!

The world’s most powerful quantum computer cracks the secret of the Big Bang but refuses to share this knowledge with the world. Why? Read the book and find out!

ENJOY!

The Novel versus the Internet?

The future of the novel
Can the novel survive the constant distraction mounted by digital media?

I was not always as upbeat about the future of the novel as a form of entertainment as I am now.

The desktop computer was the hot topic of past decades, driving the burgeoning games industry and a torrent of spectacular special effects movies to greater and greater heights, while book sales steadily decreased. How could the written word stand up to such a challenge?

Yes, screen and game writers were assured of a bright future, but what was to become of the poor novelist? Could she expect smaller and smaller slices of the loaf until she starved to death?

As things turned out I need not have worried. The tablet revolution, sparked by kindle, and taken up by the likes of kobo, iPad, and android devices, would be the game changer.

Suddenly, people who had drifted away from books, especially the youth, found it cool to be reading on brand new technology. It satisfied their fascination with gadgets. Tablets started popping up from a range of manufacturers. Reading was the winner, which, of course, was good news for writers, although not without hiccups.

“Long-form stories such as those of the novel continue to have merit in themselves as well as feeding film and television’s insatiable desire for source material.”

Any major upheaval in the established order creates instability. As companies continue to experiment on how best to bring writers, readers and their products together they make mistakes. Writers are often on the receiving end.

Publishing houses, too, are having to adapt to ensure survival. The landscape is continually changing making it difficult to predict what’s next. Opinions fly around with detractors and supporters of traditional versus electronic publishing fighting it out in countless blogs and forums. My attitude is that as long as people keep reading, whatever the format, I’ll keep writing.

In the meantime, I am optimistic about the novel. After all, stories will remain an important part of life no matter what.

Summary

Stories told through novels are enriching and entertaining—and they are here to stay.

Catch my latest writers training video here!

Why Put Up Your Book For Free?

Book cover

The Nostalgia of Time Travel

It’s been a while since I used Amazon’s KDP option of putting up a book for free for a few days as a marketing strategy for my novels. In the old days, if your book did well in the get-for-free list, its ranking was transferred to the pay-to-read list.

But since then Amazon has tightened its algorithms. The do-well affect is not as transferable. So why offer your book, whose creation is a torturous and labour intensive task, often spanning months, for free?

Well, for one, it gets your work read. Amazon still calls the shots in the indie world in terms of spread and reach. Obscurity is akin to oblivion for a writer. Rather have people read and (hopefully) enjoy your book than have it wallow in the darkness among the millions of other books that are never discovered.

Secondly, there is always a chance that some kind souls who have harvested your book for free will find it in their hearts to review it and post the reviews up on Amazon. As we all know, reviews are like gold dust to indie writers.

Thirdly, a widely popular book on the read-for-free list, does enjoy some spill off effect. Maybe not a torrent, maybe not a gush, but definitely a leak.

It is for these and other reasons that I decided to put up my latest book, The Nostalgia of Time Travel, a novelette, for free on Amazon for a period of three days. Within two days, Nostalgia had shot up the lists — #3 in the Metaphysical bestseller category, and #4 in Fiction and Literature!

So far so good.

But, again, the nagging question persists: Will the book’s popularity endure? Time will tell.

Needless to say I’ll be reporting on The Nostalgia of Time Travel’s bid for prominence, in the near future. Watch this space, because if it works for me, it can work for you!

Summary
Offering your book for free for a few days on Amazon may help get it noticed.

Invitation

If you enjoyed this post, kindly share it with others. If you have a suggestion for a future one, please leave a comment and let’s get chatting. You may subscribe to this blog by clicking on the “subscribe” or “profile” link on the bottom right-hand side of this article. I post new material every Monday.

Many Lives, Many Levels, Which One is Yours?

Chair

The Level:

This short post, is, unashamedly, about the release of my new novella, The Level. I started writing it in Brisbane, Australia a couple of years ago, before pausing to complete Scarab II: Reawakening – the follow-up to my successful first novel, Scarab.

Scarab’s amazing popularity on Amazon (it reached the #1 spot both in the US and the UK in the science fiction/high tech category), persuaded me on this course of action. Mission accomplished, I returned to The Level with gusto. Whether this new novella will reach the heights achieved by Scarab, we will just have to wait and see.

Below, is a short press release of The Level, as it appears on my amazon page.

The Level

A man, suffering from amnesia, wakes up in a pitch-black room, tied to what feels like a wooden chair. He discovers he is being held captive in a derelict insane asylum haunted by inmates who are determined to kill him. Help comes in the form of a beautiful, mysterious woman dressed in a black burka who offers to show him the way out, if only he can remember who he truly is.

If you enjoy your science fiction spiked with mystery, suspense and thrilling twists…

If you’re fascinated with the pervasive nature of love, consciousness and the limits of personal freedom…

Then scroll to the top of the page and grab this brand new novella, now!

There you have it. Effective? You be the judge of that. Perhaps you can write in and give me your opinion. I’d greatly appreciate it!

Better still, you could grab your own copy of the book and write a short review on amazon!

Summary

The Level is a novella in the science Fiction/Psychological/Thriller category, which explores the nature of love, consciousness, and personal freedom in the setting of an abandoned insane asylum.

Review or Bust

Review or Bust

This post, requested by one of this blog’s subscribers, fellow author Joy Sikorski, deals with the task of finding reviewers for one’s books on Amazon—an often daunting task. Readers often don’t realise the crucial importance of reviews to the life of a book. Without a sufficient number of these, books languish and die.

One approach aimed at alleviating the problem is to ask readers for reviews, either at the beginning, or end of your book, and provide a link to the specific spot on Amazon. This can work, but it requires that a sufficient number of people read your work first. When your book first appears, however, especially if you are a new author, it tends to get lost amongst the millions of others on Amazon. It’s easy to miss. Few readers, few reviews. It’s catch-22 all over again.

Joining some of the various book clubs and establishing a dedicated Facebook of your novel may, and, does, help. Yet, there are many who promise reviews on such pages, but never get around to writing them—though we live in hope! One does occasionally strike it lucky through such channels, though.

Yet another method is to run a blog such as this. If you are offering a free service that people find helpful, some conscientious souls may be inclined to reward you by buying your books and offering honest but fair reviews of them. This method, for example, has yielded some success for me.

One surer way is to join a professional site such as the Author’s Marketing Club.

http://www.authormarketingclub.com/

I have subscribed to this site and have found it extremely helpful in a variety of ways. The site provides loads information and insight on how best to market your book. It develops and offers many tools that make marketing your novel(s) easier. The site offers a specific tool (reviewer-grabber tool) that identifies reviewers on Amazon in your genre and lists their email addresses for you. It even offers a template letter showing the ideal way to word your request. It is then up to you to email these reviewers, offer to send them your book as a gift, and request they review it. Because these reviewers have an established track record (which you can check with the tool), the chances are that you will receive a number of positive responses through this method. You do have to be a paid-up member of the club to benefit from this, though.

I’ve have discovered that the benefits offered through this club, more than make up for the joining fee.

These then are some of the methods that independent authors, such as myself, use to encourage reviews of their books. Taken together, they form a core strategy, which yields results.

Summary

Reviews are the lifeblood of your book on Amazon. Few reviews = few sales. This post offers methods to address the situation.

Invitation

If you enjoyed this post, or have a suggestion for a future one, kindly leave a comment and let’s get chatting. You may subscribe to this blog by clicking on the “subscribe” or “profile” link on the right-hand side of this article. I post new material every Monday.

Amazon, Mon Amour!

Glances and hearts

Amazon Love:

In today’s post I want to pay a personal tribute to Amazon. Now, I do realise that it is sometimes unpopular to align one’s self with a large institution such as Amazon, an institution whose operational style might be seen, by some, as predatory. But, with all due respect to contrasting views, I make no apology for this.

No. I don’t own shares in the company, nor do I work for it—although, I do, in a real sense, work with Amazon to achieve my personal goals.

Let me explain.

Some fourteen years ago, whilst working as the resident screenwriter for Elmo De Witt Films in South Africa, I wrote a short novel called Scarab. A fellow South African writer read it, liked it, and recommended it to his publisher at Perscor. The book generated interest with the local branch of the company, but before it could go further, the branch closed down and some of its staff relocated to Cape Town to form a new company. The South African economy was shaky at the time, and businesses were folding one after another. This was during the early days of Nelson Mandela’s Apartheid-free South Africa and the country was excited, nervous and focused on more important things. I was advised to try to find another publisher, failing which, I should contact the Cape Town group and take it from there.

I never did.

I was eyeing Australia at the time, busy with my graphics and animation company, and somehow, I let things slide. I suppose the fear of rejection also played a role.

As time slipped by, I found myself teaching and studying in Australia, while a little device called the Kindle gathered in strength and popularity. The thought occurred to me that there was no harm in updating my novel (the pentium processors mentioned in my old revisions of Scarab were now passé), with the view to publishing it on Amazon.com as a Kindle ebook. And so I did.

I’d love to say that the rest is history, and offer some rags-to-riches story, but, sadly, that wouldn’t quite be the truth. What is true, however, is that since that day, I haven’t looked back. Scarab performed better than I had ever expected, hitting the #1 spot in the bestseller list in High-Tech Scifi, both at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. And some two years later, the novel is still holding a place on the same bestseller list, while its off-spring, Scarab II: Reawakening, has staked its own bestseller claim on amazon.co.uk.

The effect of this small gift of success was to grant me confidence that with enough hard work, output and dedication, I could eventually earn a living solely through my writing. What a rush for any writer!

The truth is that without Amazon’s global reach and innovative vision for the future of books, its research and development, its success in making reading “cool” again for the younger generation through the introduction of its Kindle tablets and software, Scarab would have remained a pile of pages on my shelf, placed in a box, gotten lost, and Scarab II would never have seen the light of day. My dream of being a writer might never have materialised—not for me, and perhaps, not for many other authors who have trodden a similar path to mine. This has been an opportunity for which, I, for one, am deeply grateful.

Invitation

If you enjoyed this post, or have a suggestion for a future one, kindly leave a comment and let’s get chatting. You may subscribe to this blog by clicking on the “subscribe” or “profile” link on the right-hand side of this article. I post new material every Monday.