Book Marketing: You Get What You Pay For

ByPhyllis Zimbler Miller

In my continuing book marketing experiments I decided to personally submit the upcoming KDP Select free days for my women’s friendship novel MRS. LIEUTENANT to sites that have listings for Kindle free days.

Although I have submitted myself in the past, more recently I have hired someone to submit my books. And I have thought the investment in saved time and effort well worth it.

Now I have realized that, probably due to Amazon’s associate program changes, many of the listing sites have undergone revisions. And, as I checked out the sites, many of these require a small payment to have a guaranteed listing.

I can understand this requirement because these sites may receive so many listings for any one day that requiring a small payment helps manage the submissions.

Therefore I am taking the money I would have spent on someone else submitting for me and am using this marketing expenditure for some guaranteed listings.

And, yes, it is very time consuming to do this.

One thing I’m grateful for is using the free submission list to be found at Author Marketing Club — these links go directly to the free submission page on a site rather than the home page.

This saves time because I have often found, when coming to a site’s home page, it is not always easy to find the tab for the free submission listing.

While you can join Author Marketing Club for free to get access to the direct submission pages of numerous sites, you might want to benefit from the yearly membership fee that includes the Amazon Reviewer Grabber System and the Amazon Enhanced Description Maker.

(If you are interested in benefiting from these and other Author Marketing Club tools, click here to check out this premium program — note that this is an affiliate link.)

Bottom line in submitting for your free book listings? You get what you pay for.

If you hire someone to submit your books for you, unless that person also has the authority to pay for the guaranteed listings, you are missing many of these opportunities (unless you personally return to these sites and pay for the guaranteed listing).

While this is a tradeoff of your time and money, it is an important consideration when planning your book promotional strategies.

P.S. If you read dystopian fiction, I hope you will check out my work-in-progress — THE MOTHER SIEGE — on Wattpad. Click on the dropdown table of contents to read the short chapters published so far.

© 2013 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON and the romantic suspense spy thriller CIA FALL GUY.

4 Comments

    1. Una — I appreciate your leaving this comment.

      What I am learning as I go through this time-consuming process for the first time in months is that I need to be “in the trenches” occasionally to monitor what’s going on. This way I have a better handle on my book marketing efforts.

  2. Phyllis,

    As always, your comments on your experience with book marketing techniques are very helpful. I agree with you about submitting to sites directly versus paying someone else. Thanks for the tip about Author Marketing Club!

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