Marketing Your Book: Part 4, Tagging

A great explanation of tagging and why it is important to tag books is included at
http://trianglepubs.com/1762/book-marketing/sell-more-books-amazon-tagging/

Tags are a free way to help your book come up in a search on Amazon.com. To select a tag, think of terms
one might use to search for books like your book.

Those that view a book's web page on Amazon, have the option to "agree to" tags. I never noticed this until one of my LinkedIn groups noticed that I had not placed any tags for my book on my book's Amazon page.

One is allowed 15 tags, use them all! When my book has a free day in the Amazon Kindle Select program, I will remove two of the 15 tags and replace them with two tags to tag the book as a freebie.

Marketing Your Book: Part 3, Twitter

Since my book is free this Thursday, October 11, 2012, I have been tweeting about my book and making sure I direct it to like-minded persons.

I am using the following hash tags (#) at the end of my tweet about Walk Forward, per my upcoming first day promoting my book as "free" in the Amazon Kindle Select program.

The hash tags which I have been collecting include:

#FreeKindleEbooks, #freebook,  #free,  #ReadThis, #Kindle, #authorshelpingauthors, #amazon prime,
#book, #ebook, #read, #writing, #writechat, #storycraft, #amwriting, #litchat, #journalchat

The tags which I added to the Amazon page of my book include:

"free ebook," and  "kindle freebie." I had to delete two of my 15 tags to make room for these two tags which I hope the search engines pick up before this Thursday!

The hash tag #SampleSunday directs tweets to your book's website.

Walk Forward was published on September 25, 2012, and appeared on Amazon on September 26, 2012.
To date (October 9, 2012), a total of 25 copies have been sold. I gifted 40 copies, but unfortunately, those to whom  I gifted books, did not understand that one need not own a Kindle or any reading device to read an ebook.

One can read an ebook on the Amazon platform in the free Amazon Cloud or download the book to one's personal computer and read the book via the free "Kindle for PC."

I will report on the progress of the book in real time on Thursday and continue tweeting with hash tags!

Walk Forward - Housekeeping

I felt courageous and clicked on the "look inside" my 3-day-old book, Walk Forward, and noticed two conversion errors in the first 10% of the book. One word was repeated, and a hyphenated word did not convert correctly. I had read about the second error type, but not the first. I wish I did not have any errors in my first few chapters and am perplexed as to how the errors happened. Fixing them is simple, if one likes to format and convert files, but I have no plans to format in the near future,  am seeing code in my sleep, and continue to search for any secrets to the process of ebook publishing!

When some of my paragraphs failed to indent, I could verify that code was missing, I saw the missing symbols, but no matter what I tried, I could not add the needed code. I finally had to alter my content to fit the formatting -- luckily, I am the author of the book and can add or delete content!


Many of you are formatting, please share any and all secret fixes, so that we might all save time!
Seems like a  list of common errors observed after formatting or sending a file to be ground up, would be well received, certainly by this author!

Starting with plain HTML is my secret and  made the process easier than those I read about. I had little manual labor to do, did not have to go through pages correcting code. I had no extraneous code in my manuscript. Using Open Office has some advantages and Word has others, but since I am not comfortable with the new Word program on my computer, I used Open Office and recommend it.

Breathing on a manuscript seems to propagate extraneous code, and holding one's breath, as I did, apparently makes some needed code mysteriously disappear!

There is much housekeeping to do the first days after publication for a single platform. I have not found
a "to do" list anywhere, but am  finding out by the helpful hints of those reading Walk Forward.

One reader emailed that she loved the book, would like to "like" my tags, but I have none!
Another told me she could not find me in "author central" -- maybe an issue per my maiden name?

Amazon prompted me for an RSS feed to my blogs, and I have no clue how to do, but will be reading about it in the wee hours of the morning!

I want to respond to the email and telephone calls I am receiving about the book. I am being asked "Rosa, where did you get all of those details?" -- the answer is that I was lucky that my mother kept a journal which I found after she died last year. Adding details to the stories I remembered was easy, as she wrote them down. This was long before I was serious about writing a book. It remains a very emotional process, because I miss her very much.

Summary, one can not do a half decent job if attacking all platforms at once. The housekeeping tasks are keeping me busy 24/7. I am glad that I am only on Amazon!

My book keeps moving from #6 to #4  and  back again, in several of its categories, and I can not help scrolling back and forth between Amazon's incredible report module and my book's web page.

I highly recommend checking Amazon's incredible report module which includes statistics on my book in real time!