FREE this Wednesday April 30, 2014, my quirky short story collection TWISTED RIXTER. If you’ve got a Kindle or a Kindle app and you’ve ever wondered what I write, here’s your (free) chance http://amzn.com/B00HQ0PH1O .
Monthly Archives: April 2014
AGGIECON and selling books
I didn’t get to go to Aggiecon, but my sister Roxanne and our friend Janet Christian went in my place.
For those of you who don’t know, Aggiecon is a science fiction convention. And one that’s been in existence for more than forty years.
Roxanne sold my books in the dealer’s room all weekend (and Patrick Kampman’s books) and Janet sold her books. They had to work pretty hard at it, but there was a lot of opportunity for people-watching. Enough of the attendees wore costumes to make it quite interesting. I’m really sorry I missed that.
Roxanne sold 31 books!
That’s a lot of sales at a small event that was more geared this year to gamers and cosplay than books and movies.
People bought Arroyo and Talking To The Dead Guys, and we even sold a couple copies of my romantic comedy novel The Cowboy’s Baby. We sold Patrick Kampman’s YA horror novels. And Janet sold her mystery novel The Case of a Cold Trail and a Hot Musket and her new science fiction book Born Rich.
From what Janet and Roxanne said, their experience mirrored the other science fiction conventions we’ve attended as book saleswomen (Armadillocon and LoneStarCon 3). You have to do some work to get people to come on down. We gave away cute little red wind-up dragons as a way to get people to our booth. Janet gave away chocolate coins. In the past we’ve given out cookies specially made to compliment the books.
I’ll post some photos next week.
You can see my books at
http://amazon.com/author/gretchenrix and http://barnesandnoble.com/c/gretchen-rix and http://smashwords.com/books/view/105559 and http://kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=gretchen+rix. Or ask at your local bookstore. They can be ordered.
Here you can find Patrick Kampman’s books
http://amzn.com/B00INHZ7BE. Here is Janet’s latest http://amzn.com/B00IWVE834
WHAT I FINISHED READING THESE PAST FEW WEEKS: To Iraq and Back by Jessica Scott. Inner Harbor by Nora Roberts. The Goblin Brothers Adventures by Lindsay Buroker. Street Justice by Kristine Nelscott. Eulalia! by Brian Jacques. Killing The Top 10 Sacred Cows of Publishing by Dean Wesley Smith.
DARWIN’S CORNER
She can leap onto couches in a single bound (It’s really interesting to watch). Chew up our leather chairs before we notice it (What’s the dog whisperer’s phone number). And prefers canned dog food to dry (No surprise there). Feels like she’s been our dog forever.
Promotional sites
By the way, promoting your book and successfully promoting your book are two different things. I’m not going to go into whether I’ve been successful with the following sites or not. I’ve promoted my books on two. No money lost on either, since they were free.
Here are two sites that will at least get your title seen: Clean Indie Reads (for non-sexually explicit romance novels with no “F” words) and EbookSoda. I will only mention BookBub in passing since I haven’t used it. Their services cost, and can be relatively expensive. http://bookbub.com These other two are free (at the moment).
Clean Indie Reads utilizes Twitter and their own web page to promote your book once with a group of five to six others, but one real useful extra they offer is the continued Tweet way after your promotion time is over. They are quite generous with their attention. http://cleanindiereads.blogspot.com
EbookSoda is a service similar to BookBub coming to us from Great Britain that sends out email blasts touting your book in a group of six to ten and sent only to subscribers who have indicated they like your genre. http://www.ebooksoda.com/
I was happy with the promotions from both, and as I said, at least it got the books out where they could be noticed. As a courtesy I subscribed to get the EbookSoda emails, and I regularly scroll through them every day, sometimes even following the link back to the Amazon page. So I figure many people also pay attention.
WHAT I READ THIS WEEK: Cross by James Patterson. Lady 52 by Jude Hardin and J.A. Konrath.
DARWIN’S CORNER: This shorty bulldog is a good barker. Too bad she seems to bark at invisible creatures invading our front porch. I’m not going to let it turn into the story of the boy who cried wolf, though. I get up to check (yeah, right). Photo by Roxanne Rix. 