Summer is almost over? I can hear authors rejoicing!

If you are following any forums where authors hang out you have probably seen a lot of authors complaining about bad sales over the summer. I have seen it with my books as well. It wasn’t unexpected though as people in the USA take vacations during the summer since the kids are out of school.

Good news! The summer is almost over and readers will be looking for new books. I like to think that readers are actually reading all the books they put on their reading device they have been storing for a while. This means they will soon be looking for new books.

Let me take this time to give you some updates about the Awesomegang family of sites.

Awesomegang

We spent the summer cleaning up the email list. While most book promotion sites are always thinking about increasing their email subscriber counts I don’t focus on that. I would rather have a responsive list that opens emails and clicks on the links and puts books on their device.

We removed a few hundred inactive emails from our list and our list is now just below 5500.

Our social stats have been growing 51,000 on Facebook, 11,500 on Twitter and around 750 on Google+. Like everyone else we have seen our reach with Facebook moving all over the place. I have set up our software to post 2 or even 3 times to Facebook for our featured ads in response to that. I have noticed this has helped move some of my own books because now it post at different times of the day.

Another thing we did when it comes to our featured ads is change the length of time they stay on the homepage. Instead of 2 days or 48 hours they now stay on the homepage for an extra 10-15 hours in most cases.  What was happening was our software was removing all the books at the same time and putting up the new books at the same time at 1am PST.

This was causing server overload so I made the decision to keep the featured books on the site for a few hours more and have them removed randomly at different times. I made this change 3 weeks ago and it is working better than expected and the authors get more exposure so it is a win win.

Another thing I have done is set up a rotation of author interviews to go out on a steady basis into social media. In case you didn’t know we do author interviews for free for authors and put them out into our social streams. Now when I see an interesting one I put it in rotation to go back out to social every 35-120 days. This is working so well that it is also being implemented across all our sites that offers free interviews.

I know not every author has a marketing budget and spending $10 for an ad isn’t in the budget so I try to give them exposure for free. The author interviews do that. Another secret thing that authors can do when they are submitting their books with us is add awesomereads in the part where we ask for a Genre or other keywords. I have it set up to use this keyword as a trigger and put it out in our social stream. It is a 1 in 4 chance that this goes out though. If I did it for everyone the streams would be flooded. Can’t let that happen.  

Submit your book here.

Submit your author interview here.

Pretty-Hot.com

In case you didn’t know the history, Pretty-hot.com was started because we were getting a ton of erotica and romance book submissions to Awesomegang when we first started. I didn’t want Awesomegang to be flooded with just those genres so I started pretty-hot. What happened was the opposite. Authors discovered the site and started submitting all genres so I opened it up to all books. Of course this put a big strain on me having 2 sites and taking care of all the book submissions. Then I found Jenny who runs the day to day operations on the site.

The site just like Awesomegang has a nice email list filled with responsive openers. The email goes out a little later in the day 12:30 est and that seems to be working well. I didn’t want the email list for Awesomegang and Pretty-hot going out at the same time for two reasons. One was with the authors in mind. Many authors advertise on both sites and I wanted to give them a better chance of opening in case there was people who signed up for both list. Sending both list at the same time makes no sense.

Reason two was I wanted to extend the time of the initial promo push. If the book goes on the site at 1am, then gets pushed to the social streams before noon then the email hits at 12:30 it makes the push over the first 6 hours all at different times.

Of course with pushing the featured ads out 2 or 3 times just like Awesomegang does, we extended that even further now.

Facebook fan page has 5700 fans, Twitter has 7900 followers. I do keep the books on the homepage for 5 days (really 6) though. For that we only charge $25 for a featured ad. With authors in mind I also set up some coupons for repeat customers.

Using coupon code kboards you can save $10 off a featured ad. This makes the price only $15 for a featured ad. I like the authors over on kboards so I use that coupon code on all the sites as a coupon. Makes it easy to remember.

Submit your book here

Submit Your author interview here
 

BookReaderMagazine.com

I started the site and only posted featured books from Awesomegang and Pretty-hot for a year while I built up the email list and web traffic. Although BookReaderMagazine.com doesn’t take free listings for books it has increased by leaps and bounds using the same strategies that worked well on Awesomegang and Pretty-hot.

I was constantly getting emails asking to keep their books on the homepage longer so BookReaderMagazine keeps the books on the homepage for 7 days. Same thing with the software on Awesomegang we keep them an extra few hours so it is really closer to 8 days.

With this site I wanted to try something different. Not only does the site have a facebook page it also has a facebook group. Facebook page has about 570 fans, the group is up over 80 members. We are starting to discuss books in a drama free zone. My neighbor Joan runs the day to day on this site for me. The Twitter account has over 24,000 followers.

It cost $20 to post a book on the site. Of course we use kboards coupon code to save $10 off that. I haven’t really made that code public before and was saving it for repeat book postings.

The email goes out an hour after Pretty-hot for authors that decide to book on all the sites.

Submit your book here.

Submit an author interview here.

Join the Bookreadermagazine Facebook Group.

DiscountBookMan.com

With Joan running BookReaderMagazine and Jenny running Pretty-hot I decided to make a site that focuses on books that are under $2.99 which seems to be the sweet spot according to Amazon. Kindle unlimited put a wrinkle in the game and readers started to email me whenever a book was priced over $2.99 on the sites.

Just like with Bookreader last year I spent a year building the traffic and social following with the lessons learned from the other sites.

Of course we have a coupon to save $5 off the $15 featured listing using kboards but since the site is still only a year old and I want to help authors I decided to have another coupon code which is trail and this takes $12 off the $15. Just enough for me to get a Starbucks. Since the books are under $2.99 it should only cost authors $3. Why not!

What is coming on DiscountBookMan is an email list by genre. While I can’t put the link here yet it will be set up soon. So besides the main email list the book will also go out in a genre specific email also. I already have lists set up for a few categories and it is working better than planned.  I am very excited about this. I am sure it will be a few weeks before they are all done.

Our Twitter has over 5,000 followers. Our Facebook is over 700 fans. Main email is over 1000 subscribers and is building quicker than the other email lists when I started them.

Submit your book here.

If there is anything I can ever help you with just let me know. Thanks for being part of the Awesomegang family.

Vinny