Welcome to the wonderful world of author shoutouts!

 

Calling Indie Christian writers, Children's book authors, clean fiction writers (Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Romance, Young Adult, Children's fiction, Regency...) who would like to try something new!

I am always thinking about ways to tackle the marketing issue. It is my biggest enemy, but an enemy I want to defeat. Last year I started an online book store, and made quite a few sales in the beginning, but it fizzled out, and I didn't have the energy to do something about it. Now, I am ready to try this again, but I thought I might be more successful if I had other authors join my store. 

I am a self-published author through Kindle Direct Publishing/ Amazon. I am grateful for that option to get my work, out, without losing money I don't have, but let's face it, the paperback option is a big time rip-off. Sure, I make royalties, but because of the printing cost and everything and Amazon getting a good chunk, the royalty pay is super low, unless you make your book super expensive, but who likes to buy expensive books?

So, I looked for other ways to sell my work. The marketing situation is the same whether I sell through Amazon or do my thing, but by having my book store, I can play by my own rules. KDP lets you order author copies and so you have a much bigger playing field regarding pricing the books. I still have my books on Amazon as well, but I feel I am more in control. I also love that there is no interference with reviews, and anyone can post a review and don't have to have an account on Amazon or Goodreads. Not only that, but I am super frustrated with Amazon and how they target reviews and sometimes simply delete them. It ticks me off.

I transferred some of my reviews to my book store. On Amazon, my debut novel has 21 reviews on my bookstore, 37 reviews. I hate having to beg for reviews, but I hate it even more because not everyone has an account on those important platforms. Writing a review there is super easy, and you can even write reviews yourself (meaning transferring them from other platforms) so you have them all in one place.

So, if you are interested in joining me, here is my thinking/ plan:

Since this online store is geared towards Christians (religious-leaning audiences), teenagers and children, I only accept the following genres (as long as it is clean):

• Fantasy
• Romance
• Historical Fiction
• Young Adult
• Religious or inspirational
• Sci-fi
• Mystery
• Paranormal 
• non-fiction

Not accepted:

• Erotic
• Horror
• Cross-genre/ fiction
• short stories
• non-fiction bashing religious denominations, same-sex relationships, genders, cultures, etc.

How this will work:

I will be managing the store. I can add your email address, so you get a message each time the store makes a sale.  Since I just upgraded the store from free to more features, the cost is $20 a month. I also use stripe, so customers can pay with a credit card. If we are several authors doing this, I would only charge you $1 a month, which will help me cover the monthly cost. I am not sure yet, about stripe and the costs there, but I don't think it is much. You would need a PayPal account, so I can pay you  or a stripe account, so I can transfer it to you. I am still pretty new to stripe, so be patient when I figure things out.

You are in charge of your taxes regarding your income. The store is set for sales using Amazon shipping. I finally figured out the dang shipping set-up, but again that's all based on Amazon shipping since I will order my books directly through them, so I get the author discount. That also means I can only ship to the following countries: US, Australia, Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, France. (I can ship to other places as well, but I don't get author copies discounted and would have to add the difference to the shipping cost.) If you don't sell through Amazon or have a publisher, I need all the information on selling, including your shipping costs. The bookstore is great and adaptable, but shipping has to be a fixed price, otherwise customers will take advantage of you.

Depending on how many sales you make, I would pay you once a month through PayPal. My phone number changed recently, and I can't get into my dang account right now, but I am getting that fixed. I will only take out the cost for the website and stripe. You keep the rest.

Taxes are a bit of a pain in the butt, so right now it is a fixed percentage on shipping. Kindle books can be sold through Amazon. I added a link to my book description that will take customers directly to the page on Amazon. I tried to set it up through the bookstore, but it is so difficult to figure out and set up, and the e-book selling is actually pretty fair. Plus, we can keep our books on kindle unlimited.

Each author is in charge of ordering and shipping their books. I need the information for shipping and such for the website, but it will be up to you to take care of your orders, since I don't have access to your KDP (or others) accounts. The website sends out notification emails to let us know when a sale has been made. (Which is why I need your email address.) It can also send out dispatch/ shipped emails, but I have to do that manually since that has to happen after the order has been ordered and shipped.

You decide the price for your books. You can sell it as high or low as you want. 

The idea of this is, that we work together to advertise and market our books. Maybe if we have an online bookstore that offers a good variety of Indie books and all do our part of advertising for it, things will get better regarding sales and reviews. I love that my reviews are all in one place now.

The bookstore's currency is set on US dollar, but customers can change the currency to the currency of their country. It will also change the prices to their currency, but all is based on us dollar. 

If you write books within the genre not for my online store, but have one or two books in a genre for the store, you are welcome to sell it through the store, and I can add a link to Amazon or your website, so customers can check out those books as well. I just don't want those genres directly on the website. Plus, I have to manage it, too, and don't want to completely overwhelm myself. I also like the idea of having a place for like-minded readers like me without the worry of coming across inappropriate covers and things.

If you have any questions, just message me. The store is live already, so I can add anything as soon as you want to join. Here is the link: https://booksandmore-boutique.onlineweb.shop 

Right now, all my books are featured, but I can change that quickly.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Love,

Rebecca

Upcoming book release and lip-sync fun...

I am so excited about my newest book release which will be Friday, June 4th, 2021!!! "Healing the Orphaned Heart" is the title and the first feedbacks I received from my ARC readers, were incredible. Each book release is a major step out of your comfort zone because you just don't know what the reactions will be and whether you got it right. Book babies require leaps of faith, and it doesn't matter how many books you've written. It is scary to put yourself out there. You want readers to love your work, but of course there is never a guarantee for that.

 

Book promotion and marketing - a pain in the...?

Self-publishing is tough. As much freedom as it brings, it also comes with many difficulties. It is a nonstop battle of creating ads and posts to get attention, the never-ending fight for reviews and the constant struggle to come up with new and clever ideas to get yourself and your books noticed. As much as I love writing, marketing and book promotion drains the heck out of me.

I have researched my heart out regarding ways to advertise and promote and have found some fantastic websites that help me get the job done, but the competition out there is fierce because let's face it, I am not the only Indie author out there who wants to get noticed. Instagram has been a huge help and I managed to create myself a solid platform and image. I have now over 8,8k followers, and it feels good. What did I do to get there? I transferred my meme posting from Facebook to Instagram and people seem to love it. I also try to be as active as possible and interact with other Instagrammers and especially bookstagrammers. Sure, every so often you come across some not so pleasant human beings, but for the most part, the community is remarkable. If you look past the scammers, fake accounts, unfollowers and sugar daddies who try to get to you, the majority of those on Instagram are freaking awesome.

So, yes, people love my posts and I get mentioned and noticed for it, but how do you make it about your books at the same time? I do my best in creating fun and cool memes and ads for my books, and I can see the slow process, but there is still plenty of room to grow. I am always looking for ways to encourage others to follow me and hopefully wanting to read and buy my books. Amazon lets you do promotions every so often, but only for a short amount of time. Recently, I did a free e-book promo for my new release "Grandfather's Will" and the response was pretty cool. Now I am waiting for reviews to roll in (hopefully). Although I give away free books to promote and find my audience as well as in exchange for reviews, I can't just give away books. Sometimes it feels as if people, especially those who know you, expect a free book. Please remember that a lot of work went into my novels, not to mention that I have to pay for paperback copies. I get them cheaper, of course, but I still have to pay.

I think because I want this so bad, I am not giving up and continue my diligent and stubborn pursuit of the dream. Even if in the end it doesn't quite reach my hopes and expectations, I can say I tried my best and could see success and that means I continue to explore my creativity and let author authors inspire me.

If you aren't on Instagram, you are missing out. The way authors, reviewers and bloggers take pictures of their books or the books they've read, is pretty incredible. Some of those photographs blow me away. Although I am no match to their talent and creativity, I do attempt photo shoots too. Want to see what I have come up with so far? Here we go:

It is no secret that I am a massive Harry Potter fan. I mean everyone who has been to my house figured that out pretty quickly. When I thought about taking pictures not only of my books, but books I own and have read, obviously Harry Potter came to mind. I decided to play around with it a bit and just have fun as well as using some decorations I have. Here you see the results. (And yes, I made an attempt to create the look of butter beer. We still had a plastic mug from our visit to Harry Potter land at Universal Studios in Florida for our 10ths wedding anniversary, so I thought why not.)

 

Then I wanted to try something else. I had the idea of creating a mini story with pictures while promoting one of my books. I choose "German Deliciousness" (my little cook booklet) for that and here are the results:

And then there was this time, when I did another photo story shoot with my favorite obsession. HARRY POTTER!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Interview by Adam Gaffen...

It is always fun when you get interviewed by another author or someone interested in your work. Here is the newest author interview from me. Feel free to check it out. Author Interview by Adam Gaffen

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