When the Georgia Bulldogs play the Oregon Ducks next month in the Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Classic, an estimated 78,000 fans or more will fill Mercedes Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta to watch a game of football. I went to the University of Georgia, so I'll be watching from home. If even ten percent of that audience bought The God Conclusion, I'd sell almost eight thousand books. In truth, if even eight hundred books had been sold by this point, I'd be dancing in the street like a fool. Selling a book is hard work. Is my book not any good? In my opinion, it's the best book I've written to date of the seven that have been published, but I'm biased. My opinion doesn't count. Yours does. In addition to the hundreds (well, dozens for sure) of books sold so far, I've given away more than twenty additional books to readers who promised an honest review when they finished reading the book. About three weeks have passed since the giveaway, and thus far only one person has attempted to publish a review, which Amazon then rejected for some unknown reason. I'm not having any luck getting book reviews. None whatsoever. There are a lot of books in reader's hands, but no reviews except one from a reader with a rather strong bias against the content. I don't mind a negative review, but when the only positive review isn't legitimate in my mind, I'm left with only negative feedback. Which begs the question -- do people not read books anymore? I've noticed that when I write an article, or even more than a couple of sentences, that those posts and advertisements tend to get … [Read more...]
An Ominous Warning
Recently I posted a short video of actor Denzel Washington talking about how Satan will leave you alone if you aren't bothering him. Conversely, if you're doing something right, Satan will do his very best to interfere. It turns out that Satan's best might turn out to be very effective. Earlier this morning I received this rather ominous email/warning from Facebook: Greetings The God Conclusion,We have received numerous reports against your activity and the content you have published violates our rules.Reports sent proof that your advertisements, posts or the overall fanpage activity violated Facebook Policies regarding third party intellectual property rights and based on our policies robotic growth of followers, sensitive content, human rights violators, animal rights violators or even the smallest copyright infringements should be prohibited and permanently punished.Referring to these claims which target you as the fanpage representative your page has been set up in the deletion process and it requires immediate attention.We try to stay as transparent as possible with all of our customers henceforth compliance with the Facebook Policy is required to ensure a quality and brand-safe environment for Facebook's users.Please check your website activity closely and if you think this is a mistake, appeal in the form as soon as possible.For appealing and more information on the status of your website follow the link below:https://facebook.com/100310942791795Contacting us too late, respectively more than 48 hours after this email is received might not be taken into … [Read more...]
The art of selling a book
I've written seven books that have been published thus far. My most recent book, The God Conclusion, just became available on July 7th. For the first decade of my writing career, the focus has been on putting more books on my virtual bookshelf instead of promoting my work, operating on the theory that people will look at a single book and think, "well, anybody can write a book." But how many people can write and publish six books? The answer to that question alone should limit my competition. Marketing was mostly limited to announcing a new book to my friends on social media in the hopes of selling a few copies. I sold a few books and wrote books that won a few awards while biding my time and waiting for the perfect moment to take the literary world by storm. I've decided that moment has come with the publication of this latest book. We've shifted our thinking from "future" to "current", which means actively trying to sell books. And now that I've decided to market my work to the general public, I see a potential flaw in my plan--I haven't got the slightest clue about what it takes to sell a book, so I'm going to have to wing it. On the other hand, advertising means spending money, and I'm reticent to spend money when I don't know what I'm doing, so I decided I needed help. Therefore, I hired a marketing consultant. My consultant says we're in that phase of the marketing campaign for The God Conclusion where we're still trying to increase awareness through social media. We want to generate positive connections with potential readers as we work to persuade people to … [Read more...]
A negative book review
The God Conclusion is my seventh published book. In my own horribly biased opinion, it's the best I've written, and that's not completely meaningless boasting, given that three of the previous six books won gold medals in their respective categories from Reader's Favorite. The book is doing okay on sales (at the moment #50 on Amazon's Top 100 books in Religious Studies -- Science and Religion, but I think that changes by the hour) but what I really need is book reviews so future potential readers have an unbiased opinion (that would be yours) on which to base their decision to buy my book. So far, I only have two reviews on Amazon. The first review is a four-star review, which is good, but I'm reasonably convinced the person who wrote the review didn't read the book, unless she's an incredible speed reader. She downloaded the book one day and published her review the next. Although Amazon claims the book is over 550 pages long, the print copy is actually 322 pages, translating to a little over 90,000 words. It's theoretically possible she read the entire book, but not very likely. The content of that review is basically a generic description of the book. The reviewer says my argument is from the perspective of a dualist view derived from Judea-Christianity, which isn't true at all: I defend Judaism and Christianity against the attacks Dawkins made against them in his book. Then I attack the best arguments for atheism using logic and scientific evidence. It's not impossible to think that this person really did read the book; however, given the fact she came … [Read more...]
Honest book reviews
From almost every measurable point of view, my new Facebook advertising campaign is a smashing success. In just a couple of months, we've reached well over 100,000 people and gained more than 4,000 new friends who like the Facebook page. According to the advertising consultant I've hired, we are absolutely killing it on the cost per click at only about 3 cents per click. In fact, the only measurable input that isn't absolutely breaking records is actual book sales. While The God Conclusion recently cracked the Amazon Top 100 books in the Religious Studies -- Science and Religion category, sales continue to lag well behind the trajectory of the advertising campaign. If only ten percent of the people who like the Facebook page bought the book, I'd have more than twice as many sales as I currently do. It's only been on sale for two weeks, but I'm not ever going to be able to retire on these numbers. I'm only kidding about retirement--I intend to keep writing until I die--but writers do like to be rewarded for the fruit of their labors with book sales. Thus far, I've had one published book review through a campaign I ran at a company called Book Sprout, and I expect another review to go live at any moment because the person who left the review told me how he rated my book. Frankly, I'll soon have two published reviews, and neither of them will give the potential reader an accurate portrayal of what my book is about. In the case of the Book Sprout review, that reviewer rated the book four stars, which is good. However, the reviewer in question downloaded the book on … [Read more...]
