FREE Kindle Book Klondike House

My new Kindle book Klondike House - Memories of an Irish Country Childhood is FREE on March 15, 16 and 17. The paperback will follow in another four weeks.
Please help spread the word on email, facebook, twitter or whatever you use. It would be a huge help and very much appreciated.

Klondike House on Amazon.com
Klondike House on Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com Description:
"The eldest of six children, John Dwyer recounts his memories of a rural childhood on the remote but beautiful Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland. Complemented by a series of childhood photographs, his stories are told in vivid and colourful prose.

He describes the hard but happy work of saving the hay, cutting the turf, shearing the sheep, and digging the potatoes. His humour comes to the fore in the stories of a rampaging sheep and an innocent hobby that nearly caused a local outcry. His account of his own family connections with America and especially Butte, Montana are a microcosm of all Irish-American stories of immigration.

Sprinkled with a selection of fitting works by some of Ireland's best-known poets such as Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh and Paul Muldoon, this gem of a book is a chronicle of the simple but happy life of an Irish farmer boy."

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New Book - Klondike House - Memories of an Irish Country Childhood

I'm delighted to announce the release of my new book Klondike House - Memories of an Irish Country Childhood. It's a collections of memories from growing up on a farm in rural Ireland. This book will be FREE for March 15, 16 and 17. Here's the Amazon blurb:

"The eldest of six children, John Dwyer recounts his memories of a rural childhood on the remote but beautiful Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland. Complemented by a series of childhood photographs, his stories are told in vivid and colourful prose.

He describes the hard but happy work of saving the hay, cutting the turf, shearing the sheep, and digging the potatoes. His humour comes to the fore as he describes a rampaging sheep and an innocent hobby nearly caused a local outcry. His account of his own family connections with America and especially Butte, Montana are a microcosm of all Irish-American stories of immigration.

Sprinkled with a selection of fitting works by some of Ireland's best-known poets such as Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh and Paul Muldoon, this gem of a book is a chronicle of the simple but happy life of an Irish farmer boy."

Don't have a Kindle? No problem. You can still read this and millions of other titles with a range of free reading apps from Amazon.

Is Book Promotion a Waste of Time?

Yesterday, I read J.A. Konrath's post about the value of publicity and spent the rest of the day thinking about it. The article posed a lot of questions about how the relationship between publicity and book sales. This led me to ask myself - is book promotion a waste of time?

New authors like myself tend to spend a lot of time promoting our work on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Kindleboards, etc. I probably spend between six to eight hours a week on those sites and I'll bet that's the low end for many authors. Has all that promoting and community participation sold me many books? It's hard to say but I don't think it has. I'm guessing that the number is in the low double figures and that's a poor return for a full year of promotion.

Based on that, you'd imagine that my kindle book High Road to Tibet - Travels in China, Tibet, Nepal and India is struggling badly in the vastness of the Amazon. Far from it in fact. "High Road to Tibet" has held a steady spot in the Top#5 best sellers list for Asia Travel on Amazon.co.uk and Top#10 on Amazon.com for categories such as China and Tibet. So how are readers finding my book?

For example, if I want to find a book on Amazon about fixing my car, I do a search there for "car maintenance". I'd then check the results, check some reviews and, if the price is right and it's available for the kindle, buy it there and then. This is the same way people are finding me on Amazon. They don't know I have a Facebook page or Twitter account and probably don't care either. They just want to buy an entertaining and informative read about travel in Asia and that's what I'm hoping to give them in High Road to Tibet.

So, don't worry if you're not sending out a hundred tweets a day or on Facebook every hour. I wrote a previous post on how to improve sales on Amazon so that's worth a read if you want to make it easier for people to find you on Amazon. Time spent this way will do more for sales that anything else you could do.
John

High Road to Tibet on Amazon.com
High Road to Tibet on Amazon.co.uk
High Road to Tibet on Barnes&Noble
High Road to Tibet on Apple iBookStore