It’s a great time to be a writer. It’s also kind of a pain. Authors, no matter which route you take, have to be authorpreneurs. Fortunately, book promotion is like 90% digital. Only big name authors get print ads. New companies are creating ways to promote books. Because they want indie/hybrid authors to use them, they’re services are either free or relatively inexpensive. So far, I haven’t run into any shady services. I’m pretty sure they’re out there.
Don’t pay for anything until you thoroughly research the business. Follow publishing professionals- people who know something about the industry.
I learned about Bublish from Book Baby. I trust Book Baby- for now. They did get rid of their free ebook publishing option.
Bublish is a publishing technology company that offers cloud-based tools, metrics and resources to equip today’s business-savvy authors for success. An innovative, award-winning platform, Bublish empowers “authorpreneurs” by providing a complete social marketing and digital publishing solution. Launched at Book Expo America in June of 2012, Bublish is changing the way writers share their stories and reach their readers. Thousands of authors around the world use Bublish to promote their work and build their brand. (Bublish)
Through Bublish, you share excerpts (bubbles) of your story along with some behind-the-scenes info.
The free version only allows you to upload one book. You have to shell out a few dollars to upload more books.
The profile page and bubble design are amazing. I just want to share them everywhere.
We get some analytics. They tell how many views my bubbles and profile got on Bublish, Twitter and Facebook. They also tell conversions from the bubbles- which online retailers people visited after reading my bubbles.
With most sites like this, you get basic promotion for free. As in, you sign up and they put you under New Authors. After that, you’re on your own. Not so for Bublish. I tweet my bubbles. Bublish retweets them to their 4,000+ followers. In the Twitterverse, 4,000 followers isn’t a lot. But, I have about 1,400. Through Bublish, I have the potential to reach more people.
All I do is create the bubbles and Tweet them. I don’t do anything else to promote my page yet my profile and bubble views keep going up.
I’m not doing this to generate books sales. That would be nice, but my goal is to create conversations about The Sciell– preparing for the release of Book 2, Chains of the Sciell, in May. So far, I haven’t gotten sales or conversations. I don’t think that’s Bublish’s doing. The bubbles got people to visit online stores. They didn’t buy probably because of the reviews. The bubbles also got people to visit my blog.
I’ll keep trying different excerpts, different Tweets to get people to share content. So far, I’m happy with Bublish.
On an unrelated note, I finished redesigning my publisher/employer’s, Aubey LLC, website. Check it out!
