Who am I? I’m just another indie author who took StoneHouse University's, Learn how to ‘Work’ the system, webinar and had huge success.
Of course this isn’t always the norm, however, for whatever reason I was able to use this as a platform to propel my YA book to #98 overall on Amazon.
Now, I hadn’t just been sitting around before I took this course. I was marketing myself to death trying to get anyone to take a peek at Cheyenne, my novel. It’s not that it wasn’t good enough; its just that it wasn’t getting the exposure to take it to the heights it deserved.
There are four platforms that StoneHouse suggests in the webinar and I was doing three out of the four fairly well, but it just wasn’t enough. What I was missing was the fourth, the Amazon connection. There’s a lot more than just listing your book on Amazon and watching it fall where it may. A whole lot more than I knew.
I’d had Cheyenne on Amazon since July 2011 and had sold about 500+ books. Not too bad since I’m unknown, but not enough to quit my day job either. My best ranking ever since listing Cheyenne was about 9,300.
Through following Aaron's extremely useful tips and advice, I began working on the Amazon connection. Now I’m not going to go into details here, as you need to take the course to get all your ‘duck in a row’ so to speak. But with following a few of his suggestions in the month of February I began seeing some small results.
Now there’s a bigger picture to all of this and it’s all in the seminar, but one of them was making sure that your book cover truly meets the audience. What I mean by that is make sure if you’re a YA book to have a YA cover. Now, I’d thought I’d done a good job with my cover, I was going for the retro look, but I missed it by a long shot. Yeah, here’s the before and here’s the after….
So with a new cover in hand and being enrolled in the KDP program with Amazon, I decided to follow another one of StoneHouse’s webinar suggestions, offer my book for free.
I picked a Tuesday/Wednesday for the free promo after consulting with Aaron and began, Tweeting, Facebook and messaging just about everyone I knew to get the word out. My friends in turn began promoting it on their side as well. With that said, by the Wednesday afternoon of my free promo, I’d reached the ranking of #4 on Amazon’s ‘Free’ listing.
Shocked? I was! I’d never expected to see this sort of success and yet I did by offering my novel, Cheyenne, for free for two days. I had over twenty two thousand free downloads!
Next came the scary part, well scary for me in that I’d never done this before. I once again ran to Aaron and went over the after free promo pricing. Should I go with the .99 cent price point, or stick with the $2.99 that I’d been at previously… I kept the $2.99 price point and was in for a surprise.
So, let me run this down for you…. The month of February didn’t show me much love, I had a paid ranking of about 66,000. Not horrible considering there are over a million plus eBooks on Amazon. But by the time the free promo was over and I looked at my paid ranking on Thursday morning, I was at #3,900. Not bad you say? I was ecstatic, but it gets even better.
As the day progressed I gained even more ground, 2,000, then 952, then 458 and yeah my paid ranking kept going up! By Saturday I’d made it to #98!
As we speak I’m holding good steady ranking. Am I done yet? Not even close… What’s on the list next is the 10 Steps to a successful Blog tour #2. Took the first one and loved it, the second one is this week—you should join in!
The most impressive part of StoneHouse Ink’s webinars is that the data is all rolled up into a nice compact package that’s easy to understand and practice. Will it bring you success like I had? Who knows, but it’s worth a shot. I’m glad I took the course and I'd recommend it to every indie author I know.
You can follow Lisa on Twitter @lisawiedmeier
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And on her Website HERE
Author Aaron Patterson: Blog: The Worst Book Ever.
