World, Writing, Wealth discussion

Watch this author, Jennifer Foehner Wells, market her books. It is very instructional.

First, she had the first book Fluency in the series, come out in June 2014. Now her second book Remanence in that same series just came out last month. Just this week--and only for this week--she put her first book on sale--dropped it from $3.99 (I think) to $0.99. The first book was doing quite well before but now it's #12 for all of the entire kindle paid books. the second one is doing pretty well too: #271.

the things that i find that she did well are the following:
* dropped the price of her first book to drive sales of the second one
* she didn't make it free, which #1 wouldn't make any money for her, but 2ndly wouldn't devalue it too much in the customer's eyes.
* book covers are in the exact same style and well done.
* she's active on twitter--that's actually how i found her--she always likes my quoted retweets and doesn't tweet her own books often (maybe 1/wk)
* she has an email subscription service, which i subscribe too, but she doesn't blast very often. in fact, over the past 4 months, i've only gotten about 3 and two of them were to give away her novella ($0.99 regularly) for free.

the one thing she could've done is to do the sale on the first book before her second book came out (maybe she did do it, but i wasn't paying attention). however, at that time, i seem to recall that she made another push for email subscriptions in exchange the novella.

all in all, she makes a good social media impact, doesn't badger her customers, manages her packaging well, and does long-term incentive-base pricing. she does quite a number of things that Hyatt's book, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, recommends (btw, i still haven't finished it--maybe this weekend).

Looks like she's doing very good, her 1-st book being # 36 on Kindle and #1 on all three sub-categories... The write-up somehow reminds me of Solaris by Lem for some reason...
Her pricing and marketing techniques seem sound.
Very impressive result for someone, if to believe GR, published her first work in 2012.

What I find interesting about this book is that it has got where it has despite some really fierce reviews. It seems to be very polarising - reviewers seem to give it five stars or one star, yet it seems to sell very well. Nevertheless, I am envious of her sales.

I hadn't noticed that it had very polarizing reviews. It did get an overall high rating. So perhaps--as has been noted in other threads--those negative ones lend the positive credence.

One thing I wish I could do would be to include a coupon at the end of a book to give a discount on another. Theoretically I could make a smashwords coupon, but if someone buys a book on amazon or the istore, I'm basically trying to take customers away from those retailers. I know some authors ask the customer to go to their website and give away short stories and other bonus content.

J.J. wrote: "One thing I wish I could do would be to include a coupon at the end of a book to give a discount on another. Theoretically I could make a smashwords coupon, but if someone buys a book on amazon or ..."

Sounds like an interesting gimmick and a nice bonus to a reader. Probably those readers who enjoyed the book tremendously, would look for other books/author's site anyway, while those a little less excited may go after the discount

Talking about polarization - 50 shades has 35% ratings of 3 stars and below, yet it's a hugeseller...

J.J. wrote: "One thing I wish I could do would be to include a coupon at the end of a book to give a discount on another..."

this is just as big or maybe even bigger:

"Also, pre-orders will contribute toward sales rank and other Kindle Store merchandising even before your book is released, which can help more readers discover your book."

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A...

(from Lisa on the other SIA group thread:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...)