There is a book list on Amazon updated daily called “Amazon Best Sellers: Best Kindle Store” and you can decide on free or paid top 100 books. Knowing what is out there will help with book marketing and selling.

I picked free and wooza-there were some great titles in that.

There were indie authors, indie publishers, and others. It was a pretty neat place to check out.  Here is my opinion of things that we know as indies and what we should pay attention to.

Book Marketing and Selling Tips

What we should aim for as indies

Write fiction. Plain and simple, fiction is the all-time bestselling way to go indie. Literary fiction not so much. Memoir not at all. Non-fiction is remarkable also, but if your aim is to entertain the masses, write fiction.

Write series of novels

In today’s landscape of ebooks and ebook readers, getting to the next book in a series is a matter of clicking. It is SO easy to do, why wouldn’t an author take advantage of that? If someone reads your first book, they can easily click through to the next one and the next one. Writing series of books just makes good sense.

Price it reasonably

This is aimed at indies’ book marketing efforts, more than anyone else, because indies can control their pricing. If you want to develop a readership, price it reasonably. That will vary widely, I am pretty sure. But I range my books and short stories from 99 cents through 3.99. The longer the work the more expensive, and that is because I have to list it for a price where I will make more than 35 cents profit. Yeah. It can be that low!

Get book reviews

I know how hard this is to do – I  struggle with it every day. The people who have reviewed my books are my darlings. I love you. But for those who just DO NOT review a book they read, please reconsider. Reviews (esp good ones) help an author out. People buy when they see reviews. Sometimes they buy out of curiosity when they see bad reviews.

Buy ads

The latest news is: Facebook has been overstating metrics. When the biggest ad market says they have found errors, well, what do we do? Personally, I am not using FB ads until they get their business together. I don’t want to think that I have had X viewers when I really had Y. Having said that, I have used other places to advertise and had moderate success. Consider advertising your books FOR PAY. It works.

In the end, I have to say the three things that have worked best for me are: book reviews, paid ads, and of course, writing another book. Series works!