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Archives for February, 2016
Reviews are King – Book Marketing Pt.2
Reviews are king. Books with good reviews sell way more copies than those that haven't. Even when you do a free giveaway more people will download a book with positive reviews than the same one with none. (See my A/B testing post). Getting Reviews You don't want to rely on people who buy your book leaving reviews. There are two reasons why not. Without reviews you won't sell many copies Very few people review products (compared to the numbers that download/buy it) So you need to do some research. Google book review sites for the genres you think your book is a reasonable match for. Read the reviews of books you've read and see whether you think they might like your book. (You have read other books in the genre you're writing in? If not go do so immediately, you must understand…
Disaster at Havendale by Richard E. Davis [Book Review]
Disaster at Havendale by Richard E. Davis My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was sent a free copy of Disaster at Havendale by the publisher as a prize in a twitter competition. I started reading it when it arrived, but then lent it to a friend to read, and then it sat neglected in the bottom of my work bag when it was returned to me (because I was then in the middle of another book). Disaster at Havendale I finally came back to Disaster at Havendale a couple of days ago and read it on my daily commute over two days. It is a bit of a slow burn to start with, taking slightly more than half of the book to set the scene and establish the characters. This would be fine in a full length novel, but its…
Innovation – what exactly is innovation?
Innovation, like strategy, is constantly talked about yet greatly misunderstood. Government and business alike talk of innovation as driving economic growth. Innovation is a Holy Grail. So what is it? What is Innovation? I think that the best definition is 'an idea that is developed and implemented to bring something new into being'. Lots of people confuse ideas with innovation. I have this great idea for a self-cleaning car. Am I not innovative? Unless you build the self-cleaning car, I don't believe that you are. Ideas are easy. We all have ideas all the time. To be innovative the idea itself does not have to be novel. However the product, service or system you develop as a result should be. The key thing is to bring something new. Incremental Innovation How new is new? It could be a very small increment over what has existed before.…
Brexit – what will the European Union do?
There's been discussion on the potential for a British Exit (Brexit) from the European Union. 98% of the noise is uncritical electioneering from the Brexit supporters. Even the pro-EU folk have their anglocentric specs on. Good strategy looks at different perspectives. I think we should look at how other European countries might see Brexit. European Perspectives on the EU Britain sees the EU quite differently from the original founding members. We were one of the first wave of joiners, nearly twenty years after it started. Our membership has always been about economic benefit to the UK. In contrast the French, Germans and Benelux countries view it as providing political stability to Europe. Their driver was avoiding another European war. The original treaty was signed in 1954, nine years after WW2 ended. Much of Germany was still in ruins, France was little better. So…
Book Marketing Plan – Part One
Here's my book marketing plan for my novel Perfects that I will publish in January 2017. My current planned publication date is over 11 months away. You could be forgiven for thinking that I'm jumping the gun a bit. However what I've learnt is that doing this properly takes time. Planning the Book Marketing Plan A book marketing plan is no different to any other sort of project plan. You need to work out what you need to do, break it into bite sized chunks and identify the dependencies. I've done that and also identified my critical path. Working back from the start you need to be able to send out advance reading copies to reviewers. Many of the more popular, and therefore more useful, review sites have a wait time in months. So you need to allow about three…