Authors Electric

Katherine Roberts           Katherine Roberts and I started this blog in 2011, because although it’s a fine thing to be an indie-author, it’s quite another to be an indie-author who’s known to exist by anyone outside their own family.           Amazon stocks over 2 million books, and has a world-wide market.  You have to wave hard and jump up and down a lot to get noticed in a field that size.           So Kath suggested getting a group together, so we could all wave and jump at the same time.           What I didn’t foresee – though I should have  – is how quickly our bloggers would become a tight little community.           I should have foreseen it because both Kath and I are members of  the Scattered Authors’Society (SAS), where exa...

Image via http://9gag.com/ Post by Kathleen Jones Getting your book reviewed is one of the most difficult aspects of publishing a book - whether you’re doing it yourself or through a publishing house.  We’re all eager to have our books noticed and recommended to the lovely readers we hope to entertain, inform or intrigue.  Magazine and newspaper review sections have contracted over the past few years, so sources of hard-copy review are hard to find and usually closed to independently published books.  But, at the same time, Cyber-reviewing has expanded into outer space and beyond. Amazon and LoveReading encourage us all to rate and review the books we’ve bought, and there are other dedicated readers’ review sites - the vast Book Blogs and GoodReads   are the biggest, with Kindle Users Forum   not far behind.   And then there are all the thousands of private book blogs all chattering away like mad about books - and not just the ones that appea...

spar First off, I have to say I'm by no means a marketing expert. I'm still not comfortable with Twitter, despite having bought Nicola Morgan's wonderful guide, 'Tweet Right' and read at least the first five pages. And I'm never entirely sure whether my promotional activities are worth the time I've spent on them (apart from one example I'll come to later), because unless there's an instant leap in sales, it's hard to know what's worked and why. But, caveats aside, here's an account of my first hesitant steps into the marketing maelstrom.  Experienced marketers may dismiss my efforts with a lite larff (as Nigel Molesworth sa) but fellow novices may find something of use, or perhaps one idea that will spark off another. Apologies in advance if they seem hopelessly basic. As I mentioned in a previous post, my main and most profitable ploy has been to leapfrog on the back of an existing media phenomenon, Downton Abbey. Be...