Dear beloved pledgers,
My book will be published on September 20th. I'm nearly there on a launch party date (likely to be mid to late October now) and I will let you know as soon as it's confirmed. There will be free booze so it's worth waiting for.
In the meantime I need your help. Getting your book noticed is a tough thing to achieve if you are not the kind of person the paparazzi are desperately stalking, or if you're not the kind of author whose books top the charts on a regular basis.
The best way to get bookshops to notice your books is through PR (hard to get for the reasons outlined above) or by somehow managing to get your book high up in the Amazon ranking. It's not widely known that if you can get your book high up on Amazon - into their top 100 - bookshops notice (this is how they use data to track the next bestseller) who then order copies.
So this is what I'm trying to do. Scale the Amazon ranking. To achieve this, I need to get pre-orders of my book up in the run up to publication. If the Amazon algorithm sees a book getting lots of pre-orders it thinks it has a hit on it's hands and the book will start to climb their ranking. Then it gets listed in more places. More people are intrigued when it comes out, buy it and up and up it climbs. That's the theory anyway.
How do you get people to pre-order your book? By making it £1 on the kindle store. Which is what I've done with the Surfboard. We have cut the price to try and build a critical mass of sales. Now I need your help to tell anyone you know you think might enjoy reading The Surfboard this incredible piece of news so they will buy it and help me climb the list.
You may be thinking that it's a bit cheeky asking people who paid £20 and over to buy my book - who then had to wait nearly a year for it to turn up - to now tell their friends they can get it for £1. It is a bit, isn't it? Sorry about that. But there's little dignity left in being an author these days. It's either this or do something that will get the paparazzi stalking me and I don't have the energy for that.
Here's the link https://tinyurl.com/yal53z6c if you could share it with anyone you think might enjoy it I will be eternally grateful.
This weekend I'm doing a talk with James Otter about the book at the Good Life Experience. If you're going, see you there.
Thanks for reading
Dan
PS - I did a medium post on success at the weekend. You can read it here