All Blog Posts Tagged 'Steps' (125)

Here I go! I just spent the most ever on a huge promotion blitz for SILENT INVASION and DROP OUT (my two best sellers). I did it through blogads.com. I’ve read other posts about the effectiveness of such ads and most said that author’s sales increased because of them. I booked on nine different sites with a combined reach of 312,000 avid readers. These are people who actively read the blogs. My ads will feature the cover, a blurb, and the link to buy the book. The blitz will run on all sites…

My latest novel is off to my formatter and should be ready for sale in a few days. I’m ready to go with publicizing it once it is live and plan on doing all that right after Christmas. It’s been nearly a full week that I haven’t written any new fiction material. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing (I wrote the back jacket copy for IMAGINATION and I am posting this blog) just not doing the kind of writing I love most. Though I have been marketing and will continue to reserve…

Once again, I’ve reach the elusive milestone of finishing a book. My latest novel (my eleventh to date) is now complete and awaiting the formatting process. The novel took exactly 374 days from first sentence until the final read. A lot has happened in the past year and a lot of changes have taken place both in my life and the world. So, as I sit here on this first day of non-novel writing I find myself feeling quite odd and at a loss of how I should spend my morning. I could market and…

Fellow/author and fan from the U.K. is promoting me on her blog. Please check it out and also check out her books.

http://amymahvampire.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/neil-ostroff-drop-out-degenerates.html

Please check out my paranormal, sci-fi experience AFTER. http://www.kindleboards.com/ It’s Kindle Boards book of the day! Thanks!

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

I’m posting the results for my Kindle Boards book of the day sponsorship. One sale of SILENT INVASION. Yep, that’s right. One sale. But, all is not lost. Strangely enough, sales of my other books went up. I even sold a few copies of PULP, my ultra-noir thriller. I also got invited to promote SILENT INVASION for free on a few blogs and two websites. So, that’s good. I have another Kindle Boards sponsorship tomorrow for AFTER so we’ll see how that goes. All in all, the Kindle Boards…

Please check out SILENT INVASION as Kindle Boards book of the day. Enjoy a great sci-fi adventure!

http://www.kindleboards.com/

If you read my blog you know I’ve been dealing with some family health issues related to the dreaded C. Doing my final read for IMAGINATION has helped ease the boredom of fifteen-hour hospital room waits. Of course, waiting is nothing compared to what the patient must endure. It was during one of these interminable waits that I had my sudden, ‘ah ha’ moment. I realized, as my wrist and fingers grew sore from typing on my laptop sitting literally on my lap, that I’ve spent my life…

Now that my Kindle Fire Department.com sponsorship has officially ended I can now look back on it as a success. I sold enough copies of DROP OUT to break even but what most important is that so many new people have now been exposed to my stuff. It also got my ranking down below 10,000 which according to the Amazon algorithms, means that the site will give me a little more promotion than a book that hasn’t sold so well. As of this post I’m still below the 20,000 rank. As I’ve…

Please check out my latest novel on Kindle Fire Department.

Thanks.

http://fireapps.blogspot.com/2012/11/drop-out-kindle-book-of-day-1130.html…

Please check out my latest novel, it's book of the day on Kindle Fire Department.

Thanks.

http://fireapps.blogspot.com/2012/11/drop-out-kindle-book-of-day-1130.html…

I’m at the absolute most fun time in the novel writing process for me. The plot of IMAGINATION is complete and tight and coherent. The characters have all been fleshed out and the settings are all detailed. Now, I spend the next few days reading fast and tweaking the tiniest details. Once that is complete I give one final, very quick read and send it off to my editor/formatter. I just contacted my cover artist and we are about to begin the process of designing a cover. I have a tagline for…

I’ve been reading a lot of threads lately about Amazon and Kindle and how Amazon is changing the algorithms to promote books that are more expensive. It makes good business sense if you think about it. You need to sell five ninety-nine cent books or just one five dollar book. If you put equal amount of promotion into each book, naturally the five dollar book will make more money if both books benefit equally from the same amount of promotion. Make sense? There is also the ‘perceived value’…

It’s here, the day when the crazy people of the world jam into stores and fight for the best bargains. Personally, I avoid that mess at all costs. That doesn’t mean black Friday doesn’t have an impact on me, it does. But from a writer’s point of view. As I mentioned in my last post, the ads for Kindles and Nooks are out of control. The ebook marketplace is definitely gaining steam and soon ereaders will be as common as cell phones. Because I believe black Friday does influence people to shop…

I’m just amazed at the number of Kindle and Nook ads that I’m seeing on television. It seems just the other day that people were scorning ebooks as a fad that would never take off. Well, guess what? People were wrong. Kindles and Nooks are selling by the millions now. I foresee a near future where paperback books, like music CD’s and large boomboxes, will be an oddity, a relic from the past. Now, I’m not talking about coffee table books and photography books, and the book as a work of art.…

I’ve been working feverishly lately trying to finish IMAGINATION by November 30^th, but alas, it doesn’t appear that is going to happen (I’m about a month from completion). Between the damage from Superstorm Sandy and my wife’s cancer, my priorities have changed a bit. Had I finished the book on time it would have been a year to the day that I wrote the first sentence. When I first conceive of the plot of IMAGINATION (What if everything we perceive, all that we experience, is just…

When you buy a book especially on the internet, what do you look for? Is it the cover that attracts you? The reviews? The description? The key to selling books is to have all three of these as plus’s. A good cover, good unbiased reviews, and a blurb that makes people want to look at the book. With ebooks, a consumer can’t take it off the shelf and feel its texture, skim through the pages, get a sense of the thickness and how long it will take to read. They must rely on the free sample pages…

I finally received the insurance check to fix the damage left by superstorm Sandy. Though, I count myself among those lucky enough to still have their home, the storm did a bit of damage to the roof, gutters, and some interior stuff. A power surge blew my computer, erasing countless scraps of ideas and phrases. I know I should have backed them up, but I had so many I thought I take a full day to do it. That day won’t happen now. I also lost more than two weeks of marketing online, which as…

It’s been two weeks since my last post and I’m still at a loss over the destruction caused by hurricane Sandy. Though I was away on vacation at the time of impact, I had relatives that were evacuated from New Jersey staying at my house so they surveyed the damage for us. We sustained some minor roof and siding damage and lost power for five days, which resulted in us having to throw away all of our refrigerated food. We were lucky. Sometimes it takes something as powerful and tragic as a…