Neil Ostroff's Blog – January 2012 Archive (12)

I just signed up for what I believe is currently the best deal in advertising your books on the internet today. I bought two 1-day ad promotions for AFTER and SILENT INVASION on Kindle Boards. This site currently gets more than 100,000 unique hits a day. The ad will run at the top of every page hosted by the site for that whole day, potentially stimulating thousands of sales. And I get all this for a mere $35 dollars per ad. There’s only one catch. The first available spaces are Dec. 4th and…

Funny thing happened yesterday while I was working at my conventional job. A young, attractive girl happened to stumble upon my books on the internet and came up to talk to me about them. She said how much she respected someone who could do what writers are born to do and she wished she could author a book. (What I didn’t tell her about was the years of isolation and sacrifices made). Anyway, she then said something to me that struck as both humorous and poignant. She said, and I quote “Wow,…

In my endless quest to market and promote myself so I can sell millions of books and spend my days fishing in the Florida Keys, I’ve discovered yet a few more sites and tips that are free and can do wonders for promotion. The latest cool marketing bit is on the Kindle Forums, ie. Kindle chat. This forum has thousand of members and there are hundreds of topics to comment on. But do not self-promote! So, why is this so cool? Because, Kindle forums allows you to place cover widgets of your…

They are here! They are hidden among us! They will stop at nothing to destroy us!

That’s right! After much anticipation, SILENT INVASION is live and available for sale! If you’ve read DREAM TRAVELER or INSECTLAND, this is the book that started the series. I had release the sequels first, but now the full storyline will all come together. SILENT INVASION took fifteen years to finish. Not write, but finish. Here’s the history. The first draft was completed in September 1997 as…

Since my last giveaway was so successful I’ve decided to do it again with a different book. From now until Monday DREAM TRAVELER is absolutely free on Kindle!!

DREAM TRAVELER

Every time Jamie Richards falls asleep, she’s bounced through time and injected into possible futures. And all of these diverse futures lead to one horrifying conclusion; the end of everything. Can Jamie save trillions of lives, prevent a war that has already occurred, and stop herself from…

Continuing to showcase queries that got agents and publishers interested in my work over the years, when there was a publishing industry willing to take on new writers (ha ha), here is the query that got the head of Random House Children’s Division (Jim Thomas) interested in AFTER. It was submitted by my agent at the time and was given a read in less than forty-eight hours. This is his exact reply.

“Thanks for the look at AFTER. There’s a lot I like about it. It’s quite inventive,…

Just another example of how the internet has changed authors and the exposure that their books are capable of receiving with a little marketing and promotion. Here is a review and blurb about me that appeared in Italy. I couldn’t even read it and had to have my step-daughter translate it for me. This was a totally unsolicited article and I thank the writer for it. Also, now that it’s over, the free book promo on Kindle is resulting in paid sales. Quite a few I might add. The way I understand…

With just hours remaining on my promotion here are the latest stats. Sales in the U.S are DROP OUT – 751 and INSECTLAND – 281. In the UK my sales are DROP OUT – 251 and INSECTLAND – 67. In Germany my sales are DROP OUT – 7 and INSECTLAND – 1. DROP OUT is close to breaking into the top 100 in sales and might in the next few hours. I’ve done a last minute promo blitz of the free books so maybe there may be a final surge. Not bad. If I can get ten or fifteen reviews out of this it will have…

I used to think I was a really strange person. While everyone else was out socializing and going to concerts, movies, and having meals out, I would stay home and sit in my room and write stories. I thought I was even odder when I got older and went to college. While I did my fair share of partying, I never got into that whole social clique thing. While my friends would be outside playing football or Frisbee tag, I’d be in my dorm room cranking out poetry (that’s what I was into at the time)…

As my five dollar blog ads end I can reliably say that they resulted in maybe a dozen sales. Since I only get like thirty-five cents a book the result wasn’t worth the expense in monetary terms. But it’s all about exposure. This brings me to the next level of my experiments in marketing. After reading forums on the pros and cons of making your ebook free to the public, I decided to do just that. Kindle Direct offers a program where you can offer your book free for up to five days. I’m doing…

That is the goal of most novelists. Not so much because of the greed factor, but that money affords the life of being a writer. Indie publishing can make it happen! That said, here are the final results of my relatively expensive blog ad campaign. I got maybe twenty extra sales because of it. So my advice would be only to place ads that are cheap and give great exposure. My mistake was that I jumped right in with the $40 ads instead of doing more research and finding numerous little ads for…

Since my website and blog pages are getting so much attention I’ve decided to submit SILENT INVASION to try and get an agent, again. Though, as I said before, it’s more of an ego thing than anything else. I figure with my sites getting so much traffic I can use that info in my query as a great platform. Since most agents won’t even look at an author unless he’s got the basic WWW promotion down, at least I might spark someone’s attention. Although I’ve made money from my books, it would be…