No Kindle Scouting Merit Badge for Me
If you nominated Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, by now you’ve heard it wasn’t selected. I suppose I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up—about one in fifty books is actually selected. Maybe one in ten to fifteen, if you only count the books where the submitter had a professional-quality cover and actually followed all the instructions.
I don’t know the exact reason they didn’t choose it. I understand the reasoning behind rejection without explanation — once you’ve made up your mind, you don’t want to be drawn into an argument. It just sucks. I can understand, though, if they were a little leery about taking on a book where the primary antagonist is a weather pattern. And there’s also the possibility that I was being judged as a marketer rather than an author, in which case the partnership was doomed from the get-go. For what it’s worth, I’ve looked at some of the books that did get selected and they don’t seem to be doing remarkably better than some self-published authors I know.
And I’ve learned a thing or two. Apparently Facebook ads are least ineffective after 5 or 6 p.m. and on weekends. You can also target them to your followers and their friends, if you have a lot more followers than I do. Twitter ads, on the other hand, are most effective around 1 p.m. in the middle of the week… as far as anybody can tell. (Again, I heartily endorse Twitter analytics for anyone who wants the reliability of disemboweling sheep and reading the entrails but doesn’t want to clean up the mess.) You can hire people on Fiverr who are much more effective than either. Oh, and if you’re looking for a book-tweeting service, I recommend Author Shout rather than TweetYourNovel.
So now what? Now I coordinate with my publisher and figure out how to market this thing on my own. Now I try to get some ARC reviews so my publisher will have something to put on the back cover besides my own assurances that this book is awesome.
And I get back to doing what I’m supposed to be doing—writing.
