October, my favorite month is almost here, and with it I have a free ebook promotion scheduled. So today’s episode is about the freshening up I like to do to get ready for a promotion. It’s a mild stretch out of my comfort zone, more of a getting things done I’ve been putting off, but there is a bonus stretch out of my comfort zone I’m going to mention at the end.

I decided to try out the new Hello Books promotion service from Mark Dawson and James Blatch—I’ll let y’all know how it turns out after it runs. For those who aren’t familiar, this is a newsletter ad. Basically, like similar services of Bookbub or Fussy Librarian, they have an email newsletter that readers subscribe to and choose the genres that interest them, and they sell spots to authors and publishers to feature a book in a particular category.

I didn’t get to choose my date, but I got approved for my first historical cozy mystery on October 1st. So I set up my five free days from KU to run Sept 30.-Oct 4 (you can choose 5 days to make your ebook free per 90-day period or 7 days of a discount period). I made my second historical cozy 99 cents using a Kindle countdown deal for 7 days to encourage readthrough.

I also set up other ads around this one, a process authors often call ad-stacking. I set up a Freebooksy ad and a Fussy Librarian ad. I intentionally left Sept. 30 for only my own reach, my newsletter, any newsletter swaps I’d set up with other authors, posts to my social media and in appropriate groups, plus whatever visibility Amazon gives me. Basically, I’m testing my nonpaid reach.

I also wasn’t able to set up a newsletter ad for Sunday Oct. 3rd, so I’ll be running a Facebook ad to keep bumping things up. Basically, the idea is to get lots of visibility for the series by giving away lots of the first book. Hopefully I’ll get folks reviewing and reading through to other books in the series and perhaps my other series and/or my mailing list as well.

Naturally with this big push, there was some cleaning up I wanted to do. I had a few minor errors to fix in book 3, along with a historical note I wanted to add. I needed to clean up the backmatter for all three books, to make sure it had accurate information and listed the other books in the series. I needed to reevaluate the seven keywords Amazon gives you to help readers find your book. Some keywords are more useful than others, so I did some research using a tool called Publisher rocket to find keywords that described the book well and were something folks were searching for…and that had books ranking that actually sold decently.  I also needed to email Amazon and ask them to put my books in additional categories. Amazon only lets you list two categories when you upload a book, but you can be in up to ten per book. You just have to ask. You may need to do this more than once. I’d emailed about this in the past and still not been added. I tried to choose a mix of larger and smaller categories. Larger categories have more readers, but it’s harder to rank. Smaller categories are easier to rank in, but they have fewer readers. Finally it was past time book 3’s paperback copy got launched.

Now, because I didn’t pick my date for Hello Books, of course most of this fell during a time I’ll be out of town, but luckily I can set up most things in advance, and while I’m traveling, I’ll only need to check in from time to time, see where my rankings are, take screenshots, and post when I get high in the charts, fingers crossed.

Now for the bonus real stretch. I’d been wanting to experiment with video for a while, and I’d decided on a project a while back as a treat for my email list if nothing else. Once a month, at least for the fall, I’ll be reading a classic mystery and trying an activity from that novel. This month, I baked seed cakes from Agatha Christie’s Bertram...