by KennAllan » Wed Aug 15, 2012 9:51 pm
Hiya, Mike.
Nice ta meet'cha.
Yes, promotion is key... which is why we need wide participation among Faithwriter eAuthors.
It is no problem posting well-known Christian authors in the Faithwriters eBookstore; all you need to do is open an affiliate account with either Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or both. Links are provided complete with graphics which will send the customers to the appropriate site. If they purchase the book, Faithwriters gets a cut. But here's the beauty of it - once the customer has used our link, ANY purchase they make on that visit will result in a cut for Faithwriters. I used these programs on my own website - I listed the top 10 CBA books every week. The drawback was the time it took to check the list and find the links every seven days. Very time consuming.
My idea for handling member books is quite simple - we use the program(s) Smashwords already has in play. If you look at their listings, you'll see a lighter box surrounding the book's containing the cover, title, description, number of reviews, star rating, etc. I propose we "lift" this information directly from the Smashwords site and use it as our listing. Authors have the option of assigning a certain percentage of the cover price to affiliate sites. So all we have to do is teach our authors how to publish on Smashwords and move their listings when they do. Smashwords does not allow the publication of their books on independent sites (which is very fair... somebody spent a ton of money developing the programs and they're certainly entitled to their 15% commission).
Here's another idea. Smashwords allows authors to issue discount coupons on their books. I suggest some self-undercutting ourselves. For example, if we want to sell a book for $2.95 (the "sweet spot) on Faithwriters, we put a $3.95 price on it when we publish and issue a $1.00 coupon on Faithwriters, creating the illusion that we're more competitively priced.
Just a few thoughts.
- Kenn
