Did you notice that all of the online book sites, be it Apple’s book sales pages, BarnesandNoble.com (they show even several slots with books in the same genre), Amazon.com, or Kobo, wherever your book is sold, have a listing at the bottom of the screen that says “Customers also bought” or “People who bought this book also bought …” and then it shows all the books of your competition. They are listed on print sites or e-book sites (or both). So, what can you do to beat your book’s competition?
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Write More Books
If you write more books, say between five and nine books, and readers like what you do, guess whose books appear in this paragraph? Yours! If you only publish one book, then those slots get filled with books, written by other authors. These book suggestions show that readers who liked not only but also bought these books. A great example of a very prolific writer with more than 20 romance books is Jan Scarbrough. Just click on one of her books, scroll down and you will see lots of her other books shown under “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…”
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Write More Short Stories
However, it might take years until you have written so many books that only yours show up as suggestions.
An even better way to promote your writing is to write and sell short stories as e-books (either self-published or traditionally). Unlike book publishers, short story publishers only hold onto exclusive rights to the story for a limited period of time. After that period of time, either the rights revert to you or they become non-exclusive. Read more about book contracts and rights in former blog posts. You license your copyright for a certain period of time. After this period of time – specified by your publishing contract – you can then put your short story up as an e-book or put it in an e-book collection of your own (or both), without having to remove that story from the place of first publication. If you self-publish your short stories you can do whatever you want and don’t need to wait until your publishing contract expires. Short story markets will allow new readers to sample your work. Readers you would never ever reach without.
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Sampling is the Best Way to Hook a Reader
Retail businesses know the importance of sampling. Sampling in grocery stores work. I almost always buy these food novelties after I can try them. Then there are the many samples arriving in the weekly flyers, and personal products, such as shampoo or body lotions get promoted through hotels to their guests. In the past, some publishers would offer the first chapter of each book in their new book listings, but they only handed these reading samples out at book fairs or to bookstore owners. But barely anyone read them. Readers can download samples of any book published electronically. If they like the sample, they will most likely buy the book.
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Write a FREE e-Book
It doesn’t need to be a full-length novel, just more than a short story. You certainly can implement all your other book’s sales page links, your Social Media links and even ready-to-click tweets about your book. Readers want to know more and interact with the author whos’ book they are buying – not only see ads with the message: Buy my book, buy my book, buy my book … Readers rather want to see samples of your writing before they purchase more of your books.
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Start With Maximizing Your Foreign Presence – For FREE
To maximize your presence in overseas Amazon Kindle stores, just set up an Author Central account in each of those country-specific sites where your book is available. As Amazon divided the world in single countries, announce your Countdown Deals, new book launches or Free Kindle KDP Days in several languages: Use Google Translation or Deepl Translation into Spanish, French, German etc. for free. The countries with the most usage of eReaders, according to a survey of Bookboon are USA, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark etc.
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