Author Support with Julia Hughes

Thank you Laura, for inviting me around to your place, to talk about Indie author support, especially during free promotions – I've got some hard acts to follow!




An author at last!

If you're new to the Indie scene, you're probably flushed with success – you've written a book, and published – congratulations you! Now comes the steepest learning curve of all – alerting potential readers to your book's existence.



As the new kid on the block, and an Independent author at that, you need a way to prove your credentials and the easiest way to achieve this is via a free promotion. 

However, you'll be competing with over 40,000 free books on Amazon alone, that's without taking into account the other big sites such as Smashwords, and of course the Guttenberg project. To get into Amazon's top 100 free charts requires 2,000 –  3,000 downloads within roughly a twelve hour period. Unless you've tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, and the same kind of numbers liking your facebook fan page, you're simply not going to accumulate those figures within that time span. Unless ….

Indie author community to the rescue!

By invoking your secret weapon, you can maximise tweets and facebook alerts. Put simply, if you have ten indie authors sending out tweets on your behalf, and each of those ten indie authors have say 1,000 followers – right there you've tweeted to 10,000 tweeple. Sound good? A little too good to be true maybe? Don't other indie authors have enough to do, being their own agent, beta reading for friends, searching out book cover designers?

Yes to all those questions – but here's where you come in.

To maximise Indie Author community support, you need to be a good member. If you join author forums such as the Writers' Café, and World Literary Café, you'll soon notice there are 'karma chains'. Simply follow the rules, and before you know it – other indies are tweeting and sharing details of your promotion on their facebook pages.

There's more to a successful free promotion than tweeting and via facebook.

There are also websites (Freebooksy, Pixel of Ink, etc) who will alert readers to your promotion. However, some sites will not accept submissions unless your title has been reviewed at least five times. The easiest way to attract reviews is to offer a free copy of your title weeks before your actual promotion to book bloggers and reviewers. You can also make an announcement in GoodReads, and of course if you ask very nicely, there are some very generous indie authors and book bloggers who will allow you to guest post on their site. So once again, a massive thank you to my gracious hostess, and I hope this post is of some interest to your readers.  

Julia's last promotion achieved almost 17,000 downloads in five days, rocketing A Ripple in Time into Amazon's top twenty free charts.

The sequel An Explosive Time will be free to download over the August Bank Holiday, August 5 – 7 – come share another adventure with the Celtic Cousins!

For more details about this free promotion and Julia's other titles, visit JuliaHughes.co.uk


Thanks for the tips, Julia! I know my readers will love them! If you have questions for Julia, please leave them in the comments, we look forward to hearing from you!