Here’s a lesson in going with your gut instinct.
A Bitter Swill to Swallow, my paranormal mystery, isn’t selling as well as my other books. I suspect that’s because I’m marketing it all wrong.
Here’s what happened: I originally bought a book cover, and I had a title, and then I dumped them because I doubted myself.
Since then, I’ve been trying to push a square peg in a round hole by marketing A Bitter Swill to Swallow as a paranormal cozy or paranormal women’s fiction.
Meanwhile, Amazon is pushing it as a horror book, a ghost book, a haunted book, and an occult book. No matter how many times I tell Amazon to switch those categories, it doesn’t stick.
Amazon has an algorithm and/or AI that scans your book and sees who is responding to the book listing on their website. Then Amazon decides where to categorize your book.
And Amazon is marketing it the way I originally meant to do.
So, I unpublished A Bitter Swill to Swallow and I published The Haunting of Ivy May.
There’s a new cover and a new title. I’m pretty sure the book will sell much better now because it looks like the other books in Amazon’s chosen categories. (And the title is clearer.)
What do you think? I’m hoping it’s the right decision. Feel free to email me at nancy@mediamedusa.com to tell me what you think.