The router finally arrived! Of course it arrives today (Monday) and you just know it’s been sitting at the post office allllllll weekend *sigh* oh well. It’s here now! And that’s all that matters. Finally I will be properly connected to the net, instead of skulking around, waiting for Glenn to go the loo or have a cigarette so I can pounce on his PC *grin*. It’s been a very busy weekend for my gmail this weekend too. I’ve been getting to know the Kindle forums as another method of advertising and getting my book ‘out there’. Though let me warn anyone considering this.

DO NOT MENTION YOUR BOOK!!

Seriously they skin indie authors alive on those forums. So the only way you can ‘advertise’ your book is by putting a link to it under your name when you sign off each post. This way it’s inoffensive and it also means you have to be talking about what ever the post is on. I do understand how annoying it is when a newbie gets on and starts shrieking ‘buy my book – its amazing!’ (I have seen posts like this on the forums. You can tell which ones they are as the other forum readers hit the ‘ignore’ buttons enough times that Amazon hides the offensive post). But I’ve also noticed authors recommend their book because it suits the discussion. Which I personally think is fine. Others however don’t. So I’ve just had fun chatting with other posters about what-ever the thread is about.

Then I noticed an interesting thing. Threads that were headed ‘free e-books to first 20’ etc. I popped on for a look and discovered that this is the acceptable way to advertise. Basically you start a new thread offering so many free copies to whom ever responds and then the posters that normally want to skin you, are suddenly your best friend. Sounds very high schoolish doesn’t it?

Now I have to stress here that the majority of the people I’ve chatted with on the posts are lovely. It’s just that there is a very obvious group of posters who want to take Indie authors DOWN! And it’s a bit of a shock as it’s the first time I’ve come across it. No it wasn’t directed at me but I found a thread titled ‘A dark cloud in forums’ (okay can’t remember exact title – but it was close to that) where all the posters just put up vicious, nasty comments about Indie authors. Bleah.

Anyway! Back to the free books. I had a look at a few threads offering free books and remembered Joe Konrath saying that giving away free copies in no way affected his sales, in fact they increased them! So I decided to give it a shot.

I started a thread offering 50 free copies and figured it might run all weekend..

Oh how wrong I was!

As much as they detest Indie authors they love free giveaways! I’m not joking, in the first hour that thread went up I had over 100 e-mail requests (course I didn’t know this till I got home and checked my g-mail..) and I was delighted!

I have to say thanks to those who responded and actually read the blurb and review and asked for it because they were genuinely interested in reading it. I realize I’m just an indie author but I have to say the emails that came through with ‘book offer’ and nothing else urked me. Maybe I’m being over sensitive but really if you’re going to express interest in something – then EXPRESS GENUINE INTEREST!!

Ahh what’s the point?  As the title of the blog post states it’s really one of those ‘murphy’s law’ things. I just hope that a couple of the people who received the free copy do read it and love it *grin*

And the book is selling at least two copies a day which is an increase from 1. So hey! On my way to full time writing…*lol*