If your first question is: What is a pre-order campaign? then you’re in the right place. If you’ve done a pre-order campaign in the past but it wasn’t successful, then you’re also in the right place.

Below are the 13 strategies that will ensure success when it comes to selling your books.

Including pre-order campaigns in your author marketing plan is a great way to build buzz. Additionally, it’s an excellent excuse to engage fans and draw in new ones. And perhaps most importantly, pre-orders can prove very lucrative for sales, when done right.

It’s important to note that a lot of these strategies include a request that people email you a copy of their Amazon receipt in exchange for an offer or prize. Not only is this a simple way to verify who’s really buying, you get the added bonus of building your mailing list with their email addresses…

I’ve got a treat for you today – John Howell and Gwen Plano are here with their new release!  The Contract offers an intriguing blend of genres – a suspenseful thriller, as well as a spiritual sort of love story.  Read the excerpt below, then head on over to Amazon!

The CONTRACT between heaven and earth

By John W. Howell & Gwen M. Plano

Thank you, Teri, for inviting us to join you today. We are so grateful to be featured on your beautiful blog to share with your readers a bit about our new book. Your YA novels are super reads. All the best to you.

Available on Kindle and Paperback

Kindle priced at $0.99 for the introduction.

The CONTRACT is a different story for writers John W. Howell and Gwen M. Plano. For either of them, it is their first attempt at co-authorship. After a year of Hurricane…

I love quotes. I love reading them. I love using them in my posts as a way to flavor my thoughts with another voice. The trouble is it sometimes takes me ages to find the perfect complement to whatever topic I happen to be writing on at the time.

Then there are the follow-up problems.

How to determine whether a quote is legitimate or not and who really said it? Take for instance the story about the valedictorian in Kentucky who attributed a quote in his commencement speech to one US president only to change its source moments later as a joke that wasn’t viewed as funny by some members of the crowd.

Stories like that prove that no matter how meaningful, empowering, or thought-provoking a quote’s message is, the quote’s mouthpiece also matters. So I try to be careful how I use them.

“With great power, comes great responsibility”…

on Insights: BookBub:

Whether you’re promoting a specific book or trying to drive exposure to boost an author’s brand, posting eye-catching images is imperative to capturing readers’ attention on social media.

Some social platforms revolve around sharing visual content, including Instagram, where photos still generate 36% more engagement than videos. And on platforms where images are optional, including them dramatically increases engagement. For example, Facebook posts with images see 2.3x more engagement than those without images.

You don’t have to be a professional photographer or have an expensive DSLR camera to take original high-quality photos for your social media marketing campaigns. Your smartphone can take excellent pictures, and there aregreat articles with tips and tricks for easily shooting and editing pictures, including guides specifically from book bloggers. And you can use free tools like Canva or RelayThat to easily create custom graphics.

So what kinds of images…

This is a guest post by Anna Hubbel, staff writer at AdvertiseMint, a Facebook advertising agency. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Even though her approach is rather generic, I believe there are a lot of useful tips here to help you improve your Facebook ads!

5 Ways to Create the Perfect Facebook Creatives

When we see them in our News Feed, Facebook ads look simple. But a lot of work goes into making them that simple, because they have to say a lot as non-invasively as possible.

To make the perfect Facebook ad creative, you need to diligently implement best practices that make your creative amazing every time. There are five ways, in particular, you can make an ad creative that reaches your desired goals.

1. Use Listicle Headlines (For Article Posts)

Headlines are the text that appears directly below the main visual of your…

Images from Shutterstock

KINDLE EBOOK GIVEAWAYS AT AMAZON—GONE?

You can run an Amazon Giveaway for many new products at Amazon.com.

Basically, if you scroll down to the bottom of a product page and see an offer to run an Amazon Giveaway for that product, then that product is eligible.

Amazon Giveaways used to apply to Kindle eBooks.

However, for the past couple of days, I haven’t seen the option to run an Amazon Giveaway for a Kindle eBook at the bottom of product pages for Kindle eBooks.

I still see the option available for print books and other new products.

I checked the giveaway FAQ’s yesterday, and it still stated that you can run giveaways for Kindle eBooks. Yet I didn’t see the option to do so.

Well, I was able to host a giveaway for unclaimed prizes for a previous giveaway. I just couldn’t create a new giveaway for…

The Secret Women of the Civil War

To transcend gender, through loyalty on both sides of the American Civil War, was the women who disguised themselves as men to fight alongside in this bloodiest of wars raging.

To get around the law preventing women from fighting, hundreds upon hundreds of such women took to a male disguise of the time, risking prison and being sent home, some even keeping up this disguise for many years afterwards. Some identities were kept and some were widely known about amongst their fellow soldiers.

The perception of equals in today’s standards was far different to the time of a far lower esteem women held in the eyes of most men of the time, hence being the Victorian Era. A woman’s place was in the domestic realm and this was all there was to it. Among the daring and forbidden nature of such actions by…

Hello SErs! Harmony here 🙂 Happy Wednesday.

Today, due to popular demand, I’d like to outline an easy way to format your books for ebook publishing. In the past, you had to know HTML to do any serious editing on your converted book, and using Word meant deleting lots of extra coding that did you no favours. More recently, however, we’ve seen new programs that can do so much for us. One such writer’s program that makes the conversion process so much easier and stress free (once you know the software) is Scrivener, on which PH Solomon has so kindly written lots of posts on the ins and outs here on Story Empire. If you haven’t seen them yet, please do look through our archives.

Word of Warning: this is a long post. Apologies for that. To make it easier to navigate, or take a break and find your place…

Indie authors often focus primarily on ebooks because that’s where we can compete in terms of price and readership.

But there are still a LOT of readers who prefer print, and an underserved market with Large Print editions.

Continue reading HERE