Indie Book Collective discussion

Hello friends,

I am a new (and clueless) indie author. I have decided to publish under a pseudonym, which by the way means all my social networking accounts are starting from scratch (0 friends! Pathetic!) so I would love to be buddies. But my real question is this: I desperately need reviews. I have enrolled in Kindle Select which means I can't participate in things like Story Cartel, where you give books away for free in hopes that people will review them. This means my only recourse is to run a 5 day free book giveaway through the Select program itself.

I only get one shot at doing this right (at least for the next 90 days) - and I know I need to promote my giveaway before it happens. But the number of promotion sites and twitter accounts is making my head spin. What is the number 1 most important place to advertise when you are planning a big free book giveaway and are stuck with doing all the legwork yourself?

And does a new indie author with no reviews have a chance of getting included on BookBub's list?

Many thanks for your help.

Callista, you've asked about 3 different things:

a) getting reviews: there are plenty of GR groups that do independent ethical non-resiprocal unbiased unpaid reviews. I'm member of a few of these, have a look at my group list.

b) promotion: I just wrote a post on my own experience doing a two-day free-ebook promotion and $0.99 kindle countdown deal, with stats: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

There's a whole list of sites that advertise free books or giveaways. There are important book blogs who can do it for you. APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book mentions the basic process of launching an ebook.

c) There is no point in starting a giveaway or promotion without first having a list and plan on who to contact.

Best of luck with your writing and all future success with the book!