Science Fiction Ebooks

How To Promote Your Finished Ebook

Now that you’ve finished your book and put it up for sale on Amazon.com, Smashwords.com, and perhaps other sites, it’s time to promote it.  The very first thing I did after uploading my science fiction novel for sale was create an event through my facebook account.  With a single click, a few typed words, and a link to my eBook’s sale page, I had instantly advertised my novel to hundreds of my friends and family members on facebook.  It resulted in my first few sales.

If you have a twitter account, send out a tweet.  You should also send out a mass email to your email “contacts.”  Remember, not all of your email contacts will have facebook and/or twitter accounts, and for those who do, you’ve simply reminded them to go check out your finished book that is now available online.  Every outlet should be considered, including blogs, Google and Amazon profile pages, etc.

The next thing I decided to do to promote my eBook was to start writing articles.  I found three websites almost immediately that were willing to publish my articles: Amazines.com, ArticlesBase.com, and ezineArticles.com.  It’s a great way to get your name and the name of your eBook out there.  It’s also helpful to get friends and family to read and comment on your articles, giving the articles relevance in search results.  I recently discovered that a few of my articles had been picked up by websites that I didn’t even know existed.  Bonus!

And then a wonderful surprise came in the mail: $75 in free advertising through Google adwords.  If you have a billing address in the U.S. or Canada, you too can have this wonderful gift by searching google for “free google adwords $75″ and signing up at google services.  It is apparently a limited time offer.  There is a $5 activation fee.  Your ad will consist of a short title, two short lines of text, and a link to your product or service.  They will ask you to provide bank account information to verify your account.  They send a small deposit to your bank account (between 15 cents and $1.15) which you verify through your adwords account.  I was very reluctant to provide bank account information but they began running my ad before I had verified my account so I decided not to verify my account just in case I went over my $75.  I shuddered at the thought of Google sending my paltry bank account into overdraft.

But it’s easy to control the cost of your adwords campaign.  I set my daily budget to $1.00 and set my ad campaign to run for 30 days.  Daily costs will vary from slightly less than your daily budget to slightly more, but it all balances out.  My daily cost varies from 93 cents to $1.09.  Next you will choose keywords relevant to your eBook.  Don’t be overly specific or too general.  For example, if your eBook is a science fiction novel taking place in space, don’t use “space” as a keyword or everyone looking for office space, etc. will prompt your ad to be embedded (appear on a search results page) on the sidebar beside their primary search results.

Then there is the bidding option for your adwords campaign.  I set my Cost per Click (CPC) bid limit to 30 cents.  That doesn’t mean I will be charged 30 cents every time someone clicks on my ad, it just means that my ad will place higher on the search results page than anyone who bid 29 cents or less for the same keyword.  To be honest, I don’t fully understand the CPC bid limit specifications, but the higher you set it, the higher your ad will appear on the page.  As of the writing of this article, my ad has been embedded 42,607 times over a period of 6 days and has been clicked on 25 times.  These numbers may seem disproportional but keep in mind that Google adwords embeds your ad as many times as necessary to provide you with your daily click-through limits.  The past three days of my current adwords campaign generated 6 clicks per day.  I realize it’s confusing, even to me, but the bottom line is that your ad will appear over and over until someone eventually clicks on it.

Finally, don’t forget about print media.  Whether your eBook is about gardening or nuclear physics, there are newspapers, magazines, and other publications that cover your topic.  Some publications are collected as sets and series’ by their subscribers so your small display or classified ad could actually get years, even decades of visibility.  Finishing a book is a monumental achievement but unfortunately, that’s only half the battle.  The greatest book in the world will go unnoticed unless it is promoted properly.  When I finally completed my science fiction novel “Rise of The Kek” after 20 years of writing and revising, I thought I had achieved my goal.  But nothing was further from the truth.  Now I had to actually sell it.

About the Author

The original John Joseph Burhop (human birth number (hbn) 3,362,714,069) was born 23 May, 1966 in Des Plaines, Illinois, USA.  His fate is unknown.  The current John Joseph Burhop first appeared in Illinois in 1980.  His physiology was consistent with a boy of fourteen, the same age that the original John Joseph Burhop would have been.  Although friends and family will insist that the current adult John Joseph Burhop is the same person they grew up with, hard evidence proves otherwise.  Tests confirm that the child John Joseph Burhop is not the current adult John Joseph Burhop.

Blood analyses have revealed numerous disparities between samples of John Joseph Burhop’s blood taken both before and after 1980.  A number of polyhedral protein clusters, not present in samples taken before 1980, have been identified within the plasma of the current John Joseph Burhop’s blood.  The source/cause of these clusters and their biological purpose is yet unknown.  Also, mitochondrial and genealogical DNA analyses indicate a less than 1% chance that the current John Joseph Burhop is related to any of his base family members.  There exist other genetic anomalies that biomolecular researchers have so far failed to explain.

New Science Fiction eBook By Greg Lundberg