I need your help with my free Kindle book promotion

Hi

My new novel TICKLE ME WHITE is being offered for free throughout Wednesday 20/02/19 to Friday 22/02/19 as a downloadable book for either Kindle or Tablet.

UK readers click here and for US readers click here

Now one of the two central characters in this book has a tickling fetish, and that is a major theme in the book. However please note this is meant to be a mainstream (as such) novel, and is not a collection of erotic tickling scenarios. Some of the themes in the book are: BDSM, Loneliness, Murder, Suicide, Public Transport etc.

So how can you help ?

1) If you download the book and only get as far as reading the first page, it will still push it up the list of free Kindle downloadable books.
2) If you finish and enjoy the book (or have any critical comment) a review on Amazon would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

It has just occurred to me that there may be some of you who aren't familiar with Kindle (or think you actually need to own one to read Amazon Kindle books).

All you do is download the App from here to be able to read Amazon Kindle books on your: Tablet, Mac, PC or Smartphone.

I'll be honest, I saw you advertise your book here and I even went to the Amazon page to read about it in the summary, but I still have not downloaded it or opened the preview of it, and that's because your summary is very lacking and, unfortunately, uninviting.

For our purposes here, you haven't said if the story has M/F, F/F, F/M, M/M, etc, which might give some folks a bit of a heads up on if its for them or not. However, more importantly than tickling preferences, you also haven't told us anything really about your story. You haven't told us any character names, told us about the primary plot of the story, or even given us a central concept like a question the plot raises or a situation the characters face in your story. All you've told us is that it's "a pre-financial crash morality tale about: London, fetishism and public transport." While that's okay for setting search engine tags, it's not the best for drawing in readers, especially if you're aiming for a mainstream audience. Even harlequin romance novels will give us the names of the characters and the main problem they're facing: "Sarah's long lost lover John is back from World War 6. Can their love rekindle when John discovers a son he never knew he had?"

I don't mean at all to be harsh, because I know that writing is a lot of work and it's tough to put your baby out there to share with the world. You just really need to sell it a bit better to get folks to want to invest their time into it. I know I'm not the only person who uses summaries as a means of determining if I want to commit myself to a novel reading experience. If we can get some better information about it, that would just help so much.

Good luck to you with promoting your book!

Fox2000 said:

I'll be honest, I saw you advertise your book here and I even went to the Amazon page to read about it in the summary, but I still have not downloaded it or opened the preview of it, and that's because your summary is very lacking and, unfortunately, uninviting.

For our purposes here, you haven't said if the story has M/F, F/F, F/M, M/M, etc, which might give some folks a bit of a heads up on if its for them or not. However, more importantly than tickling preferences, you also haven't told us anything really about your story. You haven't told us any character names, told us about the primary plot of the story, or even given us a central concept like a question the plot raises or a situation the characters face in your story. All you've told us is that it's "a pre-financial crash morality tale about: London, fetishism and public transport." While that's okay for setting search engine tags, it's not the best for drawing in readers, especially if you're aiming for a mainstream audience. Even harlequin romance novels will give us the names of the characters and the main problem they're facing: "Sarah's long lost lover John is back from World War 6. Can their love rekindle when John discovers a son he never knew he had?"

I don't mean at all to be harsh, because I know that writing is a lot of work and it's tough to put your baby out there to share with the world. You just really need to sell it a bit better to get folks to want to invest their time into it. I know I'm not the only person who uses summaries as a means of determining if I want to commit myself to a novel reading experience. If we can get some better information about it, that would just help so much.

Good luck to you with promoting your book!

Click to expand...

Yes these are all good points, and I realize finding the correct way to promote something is a (marketing) art form in itself.

The problem with the whole F/F, F/M, M/M etc', point is that it is straight away pushing the book into a box marked erotic tickling fiction (and that would be a completely different book and genre). Or to put it another way no-one would be looking to read a book like that, only to find that half of the book is about driving buses in London. Now that in itself may be of no interest to anyone on here. However I am taking the view that all of us have movie, TV and book interests outside of the tickling fetish fantasy world.

I completely get what you are saying in terms of book summaries that are normally attached to novels, usually on the rear of the cover. I have to be honest though, I personally hate them. The problem I have is that once I have read them (in much the same way as when I see movie trailers) I find there is not much left to make me want to bother with the book/film, as I can pretty much guess where it is all going. Again that is my personal preference, which I accept is probably not how most people like to make their decisions.

As a quick aside, I used to be a regular attendee at the London Film Festival, and one of the most exciting films for me would be the 'Surprise Film' where you would have no idea what the film was about, or what it was called. Yet for most people that would drive them mad, and they would take the view that they would not pay money to see a film without knowing who was in it and what it was all about.

Also and I am not sure based on your reply if you saw this, Amazon have a click button on the cover called 'Look Inside' where it allows you to read the first few pages as a taster (or in the Kindle link that may actually be the first few chapters). I tend to make all my Amazon book purchases based on that facility, as I tend to know within a few pages whether I am going to like a style of writing or not.

Anyway I am grateful for your feedback, and I have taken your points on board. Part of the idea behind this limited free promotion, is to generate promotional ideas as well as reviews.

TMeWhiteauthor said:

Yes these are all good points, and I realize finding the correct way to promote something is a (marketing) art form in itself.

The problem with the whole F/F, F/M, M/M etc', point is that it is straight away pushing the book into a box marked erotic tickling fiction (and that would be a completely different book and genre). Or to put it another way no-one would be looking to read a book like that, only to find that half of the book is about driving buses in London. Now that in itself may be of no interest to anyone on here. However I am taking the view that all of us have movie, TV and book interests outside of the tickling fetish fantasy world.

Click to expand...

Oh, I didn't mean putting the gender tags on your summary on Amazon or the back of the book. I just meant putting it here for us in the forum post, since that's a good way to drum up interest among tickle-lovers if they see their thing there For instance, some folks may not ever want to touch a book that has M/M tickling in it or scenes of homosexual romance, and if you don't tell them that's there up front, they may react extremely negatively and review your product poorly because they felt 'tricked' or whatever. Folks can get very passionate about such things.

I understand where you're coming from with enjoying the mystery of an unknown story and feeling like a back of the book summary can ruin elements of a story. However, I would argue that that's mostly done with *bad* summaries that just tell you the story rather than drawing you in with an interesting premise. Of course, that is entirely your choice to make! Even so... what will you do when you start getting reviews on your Amazon page that tell people the summary anyways? Won't that basically bypass your entire concept? Or will you block such reviews? I know I was personally looking so that I could at least get an idea of some aspects of the book, and I'm sure others will too. I guess I just think about such things because I know that publishers rip manuscripts apart for having poor summaries, so it's on my mind for fiction. If I see a poor summary, then it makes me less inclined to dedicate time to the book when the author couldn't dedicate time to describing her own story.

Is that lack of information going to be present in the entire work? It seems like an unfair question, but books can be a major time investment and there are tons of demands for attention these days, so one needs to find a way to filter work. I don't read every story that pops up in the 'Stories' section of the TMF, for instance. I don't have the time. I browse through and see what sounds interesting.

I am aware of the 'look inside' feature, yes I hadn't done that with yours because I couldn't get it to come up in my kindle store for some reason. I'll try to give it a look.

Sorry again if the response seems at all harsh. From one writer to another, I understand a bit of what you're going through! I wish you the best of luck with your book.

Fox2000 said:

...For instance, some folks may not ever want to touch a book that has M/M tickling in it or scenes of homosexual romance, and if you don't tell them that's there up front, they may react extremely negatively and review your product poorly because they felt 'tricked' or whatever. Folks can get very passionate about such things.
... I know I was personally looking so that I could at least get an idea of some aspects of the book, and I'm sure others will too...

... books can be a major time investment and there are tons of demands for attention these days, so one needs to find a way to filter work. I don't read every story that pops up in the 'Stories' section of the TMF, for instance. I don't have the time. I browse through and see what sounds interesting.

I am aware of the 'look inside' feature, yes I hadn't done that with yours because I couldn't get it to come up in my kindle store for some reason. I'll try to give it a look.

Click to expand...

The 'Look Inside' feature is a portion of the first chapter, a description of a submissive middle-aged businessman engaging in semi-unwilling electroplay with his prodomme. In all honesty, it would be a great help to your prospective readership if more information about the predilections of the characters and the plot itself were available.

I am grateful to both Fox2000 and Libertine for creating an opportunity for me to go into much greater depth about my book on here, then I thought was reasonable to do so. So here goes:

The inspiration behind TICKLE ME WHITE was a book I read a couple of years ago called HARRY'S GAME, which was actually written in 1975 about the Troubles in Northern Ireland (obviously my book has nothing to do with the Troubles). However the central concept in that book was of two disparate characters who unbeknownst to each other are on a tragic collision course. The two central characters in my book are Max and Natasha (Natalie).

MAX is a London bus driver who has a very cavalier attitude towards his job, and little by little throughout the book this approach begins to catch up with him. So it is worth noting that large parts of this book is about bus driving in London. Throughout his life Max could be described as Asexual, but also driven by a Tickling Fetish. Unfortunately for Max his inability to form normal sexual relationships with women means his opportunities as a tickler are non-existent. Therefore he has tried in the past to visit domme's to play the role of ticklee, only to find his body is completely non-responsive. As such Max is sexually trapped within a fetish that doesn't work for him. His only outlet being the same tickle fetish porn that all of us on here know and love.

NATASHA (NATALIE) is a dominatrix working in London. She is also a Lesbian and lives with her sister and young niece. As a dominatrix Natasha is an amoral person, which means she is unable to find a demarcation line between being a 'service provider' and someone who goes 'much too far'. She lives a lie that her sister is dependent on her, whereas in reality she is emotionally dependent on her sister for some stability and normality in her life. Although she is gay, her personality traits make it next to impossible to form relationships with other women.

Other significant characters in the book are:
ANTONIA: Natasha's (Natalie's) sister, and only living relation.
MARTIN: Max's brother, and only living relation.
GINO: Macho and misogynist client of Natasha's
LAWRENCE: Convicted sex offender and client of Natasha's
THE MAID: Natasha's grudging front of house employee.

There are quite a few other minor characters, however it would get a little tedious to list them all here.

Sexually some of the themes and practices covered in the book within the whole BDSM framework are: Tickling (naturally), ball-busting, electroplay, forced bi-sexuality, chastity play, facesitting/smothering, nettleplay, chinese watertorture, tease and denial, financial blackmail (I think that's the lot).

Some of the other themes I include are: London housing crisis, loneliness in large cities, suicide, commuting, racism, disability discrimination etc.

Anyway this is the last day of the free promo. From tomorrow the Kindle / e-book is available for the price of a large cup of coffee. The paperback (for which I make an absolute pittance due to printing costs) is available for about double the price of the e-book (but I thought it best to have that option available).

Just a quick follow up to the free book promotion (which has now ended).

In total I had 23 free downloads of the Kindle/Tablet e-book (which I am more than pleased with). Thank you to everyone who participated, and apologies to anyone who couldn't make the download work for them.

As we all know of course, nothing in life is really free. Therefore if you do make it to the end of the book and want to pay for it, the way to do that is: a review on Amazon, or a mention on your blog/twitter/facebook, or even a review on here (whatever you feel about it as a novel basically). The great thing about KDP publishing is that you can go back in, and make revisions for subsequent editions.

Now the Kindle/Tablet e-book is back on sale, I have revised the price downwards to bring it into line for what I feel is the price of a large cup of coffee (namely £2.99 UK and $3.90 US).

The paperback version price is what it is I am afraid due to high printing costs, and I make a pittance with those sales (which is why I am keen to push the Kindle version instead).

Also if anyone is looking to do their own self publishing on KDP, I am happy to help based on my limited experience.