Write Good or Die

case, word of Google. If you Google me, you get a lot of hits. Lots of folks link to me, review me, read and recommend me. I did a lot of self-promotion for my print career, and that foundation still stands in over 100,000 mentions on the world wide web. This extends to Twitter and Facebook, and the kind folks who retweet and link to me.
    6. Promotion. Strangely, I don't do much self-promotion for my Kindle books. Especially compared to my print books, where I've signed at over 1,200 bookstores. I've posted my titles on a few Kindle forums, done a few Amazon blogs and Listmanias, and been lucky to get a lot of reviews and a few mentions by the mainstream media. But for the most part, my Kindle promo strategy has been hands-off. In fact, I know that Kindlers hate too much blatant self-promotion, and will label you a spammer if you toot your own horn a lot.
    7. Cross Pollination. It's no secret that I write scary books under the pen name Jack Kilborn. I want all JA Konrath readers to know this, and all Jack Kilborn readers to know he's really JA Konrath. So I've tied the two names together by writing the novella Truck Stop, featuring my series character Jack Daniels, and my villains from Afraid and SERIAL. I wrote SERIAL with Blake Crouch, ensuring his fans discover me. I wrote novellas with Tom Schreck, Jeff Strand, and Henry Perez, to make sure their fans know who I am. And I recently put ebook excerpts from my other titles in the back of my ebooks. Plus, I'm now trading excerpts with Robert W. Walker to hook even more readers. Remember my Virtual Paper blog?
    8. Decent stories. Name recognition and cheap prices only go so far. If the ebooks aren't any good, sales will drop off. Not only should the writing be stellar, but the Kindle formatting should be perfect. A great story with terrible word formatting won't sell. Period.
    9. Good covers and product descriptions. I just improved some of my covers, and saw an immediate uptick in sales. I'm also constantly adding to/tweaking my book descriptions. I've found that more information leads to stronger sales (as opposed to teasers with less info.) I also make sure my first line of description is "Only $1.99 for a limited time." By announcing the low pricing is limited, I encourage impulse buyers.
    10. New content. Every few months I try to add another ebook to my Kindle store. The more books you have on Kindle, the greater your chances of being discovered. And if someone discovers you, and likes you, they'll buy more of your ebooks.

    J.A. Konrath— http://www.jakonrath.com
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33. ADS IN EBOOKS
    By Scott Nicholson
    http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

    I’ve gotten out of the “writer babble” business for two reasons: (1) I don’t know as much as I thought I did, and (2) it’s all changing so fast that even the boldest predictions of digital evolution quickly become laughable.
    I don’t even use traditional publishing as a reference point anymore, because that is so far removed from most writers’ realities that it may as well be Shangri-la or Hollywood. The indie vs. trad debate is now only meaningful for a small group of people, and they are all making way more money than you or me.
    So you are in it, and if you are lucky, you made a nice little nest egg back when everyone was standing on the sidelines deciding whether indie was the way to go. Hopefully, you shook off the intellectual shackles that chained us to the agent speed-dating sessions at writing conferences and were hammered and locked into place by “publishing experts” with 20-year writing careers in the old system. You know the mantras: “Get an agent,” “Only hacks self-publish,” and “You can’t produce and distribute a book without the advice of publishing experts.” Basically, ego affirmation. Of course the experts didn’t want to lose their position of authority (and in the agents’ case, the intermediary status of being the first in line to get checks.)
    But the gate was left open and the horses all got out of the barn, or something like that (come up with your own gatekeeper metaphor; I am writing this for free!) So now we have a market where the 99-cent ebook had a year’s run, and the pool was finally beginning to find stratification (crappy books sinking, good books nailing stable plateaus) when Amazon unleashed the latest version of indie roulette—the free ebook.
    I'm on record as predicting the flat-text e-book era has an outside range of five years, at least for