The Knotty and Nice of Indie Publishing #4 - Reviews, Interviews, Podcasts and YouTube

Let’s talk about reaching out to your readers and potential readers.

Remember once the reader reaches your author page on Amazon or Smashwords, they look at the book’s cover, the description and then the reviews.

Reviews are what authors crave. We indie authors do not have a publisher to tell us how great our current book is and most of us do not want to hit you over the head with the “please read me” tweets. It is so wonderful when someone reviews you and you can quote them as saying you are well written, clever, prolific, a multi-genre genius, whatever.

We live for reviews and are thankful to those who give them. A tip I picked up by reading other indie authors’ books is to insert an “author’s note” in the back of each book, calling for a few words and a sprinkle of stars on any social, media or platform site. It works.

The Knotty and the Nice of Indie Publishing #3 - The Domino Effect

Writing guest posts on blogs is a worthwhile way to attract an audience to your writing. Once the post is published, you and the person who owns the blog can Facebook the post, Google+ it, or Tweet it. If you are lucky, your connections become like dominoes.

Carla, a well-known author in Italy, gave me my first opportunity to write a guest post. Through the article I posted on Carla’s blog I met Max, who lives in Italy. Max liked what I wrote and clicked on the Web link provided. He has become one of my most devout and supportive fans.

Max belongs to a group called Effortless English (EE) which is composed of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students who follow a program developed by A. J. Hoge. Hoge’s method of teaching English is to have students read authentic English material – books written for young English speaking students.