Here is my update on the promotional effort so far for Sword of Trueterra. To date, I have no reviews from my ARC readers, maybe. There was a glitch.

It took me a while to realize that on my Amazon book detail page—the one customer most often sees—my ebook and paperback each had their own page. The customer could not toggle between the two formats. On one detail page, it looked like I only had a kindle format for the book, and on the other I only had a paperback. The two were not linked.

I “chatted” with KDP Support, and it turned out I had published one book under the author name of Charles B. Kiernan and the other as Charles Kiernan. Amazon treated them as two entirely different books! I was assured that when I made the correction, the two would automatically link.

I corrected the error, and they did not automatically link.

I chatted again with Support, and they manually linked them for me.

However—isn’t there always a “however”—an acquaintance of mine, who reviewed my first book, also reviewed my second, but that review has not appeared. This led to a third chat, with me asking if the reviews had to also be linked. I was advised to contact Community Support.  That was done via email. I wait for a reply.

Therefore, I will ask, if you have written a review, please give me a heads up at cjkiernan01@gmail.com, so that I will know how many reviews to expect. Thanks.

I mentioned Reedsy last month. I applied for and got a review by Shubaboti Bose; pretty stellar. She reviewed my first book with the same quality and thoughtfulness. I have added it to my detail page as an editorial review, which is different from a customer review.

Editorial reviews are entered in the Author Central. You will need to google “How do you enter an editorial review in KDP?” The page is buried, and there are a number of steps to get to it. Once there, the page is pretty much self-explanatory. The editorial review will show up near the top of the detail page, labeled as such.

By the way, please go HERE and upvote my book on Reedsy. If I get enough votes, I could be featured in their newsletter.

As of this writing, I am only part way through my promotion. I have decided, rather than “stack” my promotions, I will spread them out. With the stacking approach, the idea is that Amazon will see a spike in sales and take notice. The other strategy is that Amazon will see a consistent rise in sales and take notice. Getting noticed means Amazon will start promoting your book themselves. They do want to sell books and will back a good prospect.

My first promotion was with Best Book Monkey on November 9^th. I took advantage of a 50% discount, so it was cheap. From it, it appears I got three or four sales. On the Amazon side, I have to guess where sales came from, since, to my knowledge, Amazon does not share that information.

My second promotion is with BookBub and is ongoing. BookBub ads are set up similar to Amazon ads. You decide on a budget, bid, and duration. You upload a predesigned ad or use their ad generator—not bad, I used it—and answer a few other parameters. I set mine up for a week that started on November 10^th. So far, it has sold around ten books.

However—there is that “however” again—the sales were not all the $.99 promotion.  Only half were. The other sales were A Vacant Throne, divided between paperbacks and ebooks. On the whole, I have been selling more paperbacks than ebooks. I think I am also seeing readers wanting to start at the beginning of a series. My numbers are small and could be anomalous, but those are my observations.

Coming up, I have settled on using ENT, BarginBooksy, Fussy Librarian, and EReaderIQ, scattered through the rest of the month. More updates in December.