…I promised yeez a round up summary of my recent dabble with book-selling websites… and the final report makes for sorry reading… let me back up and explain for emb’dy coming in fresh to this… as a self-published author, I’m always keen to find and develop non-spamming channels to help sell my wee literary masterpieces… Aunty Internet is full of enterprising offers, at a cost, of course, with various claims of daily email shots to anywhere up to 120,000+ readers, clustered in genres, in order ‘to target and maximise your sales to these avid followers’... well, in good ol’ Scottish vernacular… BORROX!!… here’s the score:
Website ONE:
Paid US$ 15—Result 2 sales
Website TWO
Paid US$ 16—Result 2 sales
Website THREE
Paid US$ 50—Result 1 sale
…impressive, NOT… in truth, I hadn’t expected massive downloads from this, but the sheer sparseness of the returns is mind-boggling… and it raises questions in my mind… are these email lists for real? tested?…
…remember this, each of these sites demanded that my novels be offered at a significant discount, and to have had a minimum number of positive reviews already… I think that 85,000+ downloads under my own promotional activity, with in excess of 350 reviews in aggregate, the bulk of which are 4-stars and 5-stars, more than qualified… now here’s the rub… each of the sites also ‘suggested’ that I use my own SOSYAL NETWURKS to push the promo at the same time they put out their emails… again, my questioning mind would ask, ‘If their email lists were so productive and effective, and that’s what I’m supposedly paying for, why do they need my extra push?’...so, naughty quill-scraper that I am, I did not push the specific titles on the days they did… instead I ran my own parallel promos for separate titles in my back list… and guess what?… yup, every one of my own efforts produced sales in multiples of their returns (which wasn’t difficult, considering how paltry theirs turned out to be)… I’d be more than interested to hear from anyone who can share their experience with such outlets…
…I retrospectively emailed each of the sites and asked if they could tell me from their records how many sales were attributable to the promo on their page… the answers were astonishing… not one has the capacity to do that… in other WURDS... they have no idea whether their service produced none or a million sales… hmmm… again I question, so, how can they be so assured in their offer in the first place?…
…let me be clear, I’ve no beef with anyone who offers a credible service to any of we authors, self-published or otherwise…we all wanna make a living… but I do have an issue with any outlet which may be seen merely to be preying on the desire of most writers to get their WURK up and running… it’s tough enuff trying to scrape a living from an occupation that takes months and years of effort to create the end product… meantime, not missing the opportunity, my books and their links are listed below… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
THE VIOLIN MANS LEGACY
myBook.to/theviolinmanslegacy
VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK
myBook.to/vengeancewearsblack
SAVAGE PAYBACK
myBook.to/savagepayback
KILLER CITY
myBook.to/calderkillercity
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