In Today’s Journal
* Welp, I’ve Hired a Publicist
* Of Interest
Welp, I’ve Hired a Book Publicist
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been getting a lot of scam emails. By “a lot” I mean at least one a day every day and often three or four.
Most of them mention “your book” or other phrases that prove they know absolutely nothing about me. I quickly mark those as spam and block the email of the sender.
But every now and then I get a good one. Recently I received one that was so convincing that over a period of three days I actually researched him/her and the single “reference” that scammer sent me. (I’m not being snide. The scammer referred to itself as “her,” but the single “reference” the scammer sent me referred to it as “him.” Go figure.)
I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say after three days of back and forth emails, I finally uncovered enough to realize it was just another scam.
But that was a good thing in one definitive way.
I’m unable (or more precisely, unwilling) to spend the thousands of dollars that are required to enlist the aid of a mainstream book marketing expert.
Then I finally remembered Fiverr. So I keyed into a search engine “Book Promotion Services on Fiverr.” During that search I happened across a video by Sean Dollwet, an ‘influencer’ who had spent $600 to test 15 different book-promo services hosted by Fiverr.
When the smoke cleared, one of those really stood out: a service called Joel’s Books. The guy has 10 years of experience, and around 1200 rave reviews. He offers three tiers of service at $35, $55, and $85.
As a test, I decided to promote Writing Better Fiction and chose the Standard ($55) tier plus a couple of add-ons for a total of $125.
My reasoning? As I told Joel in my application,
Most writing-craft books out there are simply tired, reworded regurgitations of the same old stuff: you must outline, you must world-build and do character sketches, you must depend on the advice of critique groups, and so on.
Writing Better Ficiton breaks that pattern. It offers a new, self-confident approach, one the author used to write over 120 novels, 10 novellas, and well over 300 short stories in less than ten years.
Writing Better Ficiton is an ambitious, comprehensive guide to writing any form of fiction from short stories to novellas to novels and novel series and in any genre.
In his video, Sean Dollwet even displayed a screenshot showing his earnings increase at Amazon that was the direct effect of Joel’s efforts. For a (back then) $30 investment, Sean made a little over $1000 on Amazon. That is a great ROI (return on investment).
Joel’s Books has about a two-week lead time, so I expect my results to begin on or about about May 8. Sometime in May or June I’ll report those results.
In the meantime, here’s Sean’s two-year old video that started me on this journey. The video is not quite 14 minutes long, and I encourage you to watch it. Sean drops a lot of great tips and insights.
Hope this helps. Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The Best Book Promo Services on Fiverr Note: I did not vet this since I’d already decided to go with Joel’s Books. I advise you to watch the Sean Dollwet video before you investigate these.
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Always up-to-date guide to social media image sizes
Shopify Can Now Sell Your Products Inside ChatGPT (If you’re not on Shopify, they rolled out a free “Agentic” plan. He talks about it in the article. I’ll personally stick with Payhip.)