Dear Authors,
Blog post written by: Stella Wilkinson
– Young Adult Romance Author
I thought it might be helpful to share my biggest tip to boost those pre-Christmas sales, raise your visibility, and be placed in prime position for the Kindlemas* rush…
Write a Seasonal Short Story! It really is that simple. Right now readers are downloading Christmas books in the millions, I kid you not. If you want a monster boost then write a Christmas short, write it now – get it up NOW! (and make it free if you can)
Obviously write it in your own genre so that it grabs the right kind of readers that will then be interested in your other stuff and link it madly to your other books, but get it out there as fast as you can type and edit the darn thing!!
I have a Christmas short story of only 7k words, it is young adult, the cover is from Fiverr, and it took about three days to write. Right now this book is getting over 1,000 downloads a day on Amazon every single day (it picked up from one to two hundred a day as soon as we hit November). It’s had over 30k downloads so far this month, with not a single bit of marketing. None. Imagine how well it will do in December. Cash in on what the readers want right now and let a quick short book do the marketing for you.
A Christmas Gift is currently sitting (in mid-November) at #33 Free in the entire Kindle store UK! And #24 in the whole of the NL store.
It’s Amazon US Best Sellers Rank: #60 Free in Kindle Store
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Romance > Contemporary
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 45 minutes (22-32 pages) > Teen & Young Adult
Admittedly my book is free, which helps, but it is short and it was always meant only as a loss-leader to link to my other work. So far it has not produced a massive amount of sales of my other titles but I think that is because people are focussing on seasonal books, but it has created a huge amount of sign ups to my mailing list, which I will then utilise in the New Year with reminders and new releases, so I see a lot of on-going benefits to this. And the total cost for me was $5 for the cover and $14 to get it edited. How is that not worth it? 😉
Just think about it… But don’t think for too long or you’ll miss this opportunity!
Sincerely,
* The first few months after people get new kindles as Christmas presents and go crazy downloading all the ebooks.
Definitely a great idea for romance and the many sub genres of romance. I however don’t think anyone is going to be buying up Post Apocalyptic or other sci-fi christmas stories. Really not a genre fiction thing.
Carl Sinclair maybe. But I would be interested to know if humanity still makes an effort to celebrate christmas or other holidays after an apocalypse. Mystery could work, especially cozy ones. Horror could be another candidate. Some other sci fi like time travel. The holiday or celebration doesn’t have to be the main theme of the story, just part of the setting, a reason for family gathering. Have some kind of a presence.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to finish my NZ set roller derby romance Christmas short story 😛
Interesting that this article is dated 24th. November 2015 but, according to the author’s page on Amazon, A Christmas Gift was actually published nearly a year ago on 12th. December 2014.
This short story was not written, edited, formatted and published just a few days ago. What else might not be entirely true?
thomasm12964 I’m not sure I understand. Stella doesn’t say when she wrote the Christmas short story, only that she has a Christmas short story that took her three days to write. She does say that it used to have about 200 downloads and she is now seeing 1,000 downloads, which is probably because the book is currently free. I just checked the rankings for the book in the US and it’s sitting at #72 in the Free Kindle Store.