Who's the reigning Indie Book Queen of the moment? Colleen Hoover, of course. Ms. Hoover is now topping all the self-published book charts and cracking the New York Times bestsellers list in the process....
I just wrote these books less than a year ago, so I never tried to get them traditionally published. In all honesty, I wrote them for fun and never thought of myself as an author. I uploaded them to Amazon so friends and family could read them, which is why I made them free the first week.
I never in my wildest dreams thought they would become bestsellers. If I had this goal while writing them, I probably would have freaked out and not finished them. It's honestly insane how this has all sort of snowballed. It's been amazing, to say the least....
When I first put my books out, I took advantage of Amazon's KDP program. I really think the KDP program is a great way to get your book into the hands of readers. I had over 4,000 downloads in two days. I can't think of any other marketing tool that can get your actual book into that many hands in such a short amount of time.
After that, it was a whole lot of word of mouth. Of course I marketed to my Facebook friends, but at the time I had 10 Twitter friends and only 2 followers.
I spent the first three months after writing Slammed working on the sequel, so I didn't spend a whole lot of time on the internet. After putting out the sequel, I was getting about 10 downloads a day of both books. Those ten turned into 12, then 14, and so on and so on.
By the end of March, a blogger at Maryse.net read the book and blogged about it. She's got a huge following and the books received over 100 downloads that day. Since then, the sales have steadily climbed. I've noticed when a blogger reviews it, especially bloggers with a huge following like Maryse, it really makes a big impact on sales.
I didn't really focus on getting the books in the hands of bloggers in the beginning because I was really new at this and wasn't sure what worked. Now that I know, you can bet I'll be sending out those ARC's of my next release.
Again, to read the entire interview, go here: http://jeffrivera.com/index.php/for-writers/748-colleen-hoover-reigning-indie-a-ny-times-bestselling-author-.html
A fan made this book trailer about Colleen's novel, Slammed. Very cool.
Hachette Book Group, the publisher for James Patterson's novels, announced that he has now sold 1.14 million units of ebooks for Kindle, iPad, and other ebook readers.
