Book Promotions.

Back in the days when I sold my stories and novels to publishers of various sizes, my major responsibility for promotions was something akin to press assists and not much else. I'd send out some review copies, do Q&A with reporters, chat up the books to journalists and magazine editors, and do author appearances in bookstores and libraries. But that was pretty much the extent of my involvement.

The way I saw it back then (and justifiably so), it was up to the publishers to promote and advertise the stories, scripts, and novels I had spent so much time creating. As I like to paraphrase, "I'm a writer, not a salesman, dammit!"

These days, of course, I have to promote and advertise. All on my own dime. And I have to do a lot of experimentation, because by and large other authors who know how to do this will not share such information in a market that is already packed beyond capacity and highly competitive. (Writers some years back ceased to consider fellow writers as colleagues and see them now as competitors.) So a huge learning curve has ensued.

I have had to learn where to advertise and how to do it. I won't belabor the finer points but even when you find a good spot to advertise you have to tweak the parameters of what is advertised and how to utilize various codes to ensure maximized results. It's not easy and even though I've figured out how to get positive results, I'm still not skilled at it. But what I have learned over the past few months is where to put my ad dollars and how to pull an ad when it's not generating more income than the cost of the ad campaigns. Fortunately, the two methods I now use most often do give me that option. I can edit, or pause, or completely halt an ad campaign if I'm not making more than it's worth.

Disappointingly to me, most of my sales--in fact about 90%--come in the form of ebooks. I never have become accustomed to reading ebooks, but I reckon it's because I'm too conservative to have ever given my reading habits over to that format. I do read more ebooks than I once did, but I prefer to buy print books. I will be purchasing more of my books in print format to sell at convention and library appearances in future and hope to see those gain a larger portion of my overall sales.

At any rate, the books I've been pushing most of late are titles that I've gotten back into print since retrieving the rights from a former publisher. All three have been rewritten, re-edited, and graced with new cover art and contain my preferred texts. So grab one or all of them if you want to spend some quality time living in another world for a few hours. All books are now also available in audio book versions.

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman.

THE COALITION Zombie Trilogy. The three original titles all contained under one cover as a single volume. In audio book, ebook, and paperback!

DEADLOCKED. My first zombie novel back in print in my preferred text with many added and restored sequences. Three formats: audio, ebook, paperback.