How do I Market Kindle Vella Novels

A down-and-dirty four methods that could get more readers, more reviews, and promote your novels further than you realize?

By JLNicky

I must admit I’m newly published on Kindle Vella. My current two serialized novels are my first attempts at working with Kindle Publishing. I’ve also hired an SEO company to help me launch and share the word of these novels. In 2022 I put my work out there for readers and started my self-publishing adventure. Investing in myself, I intend to continue with Kindle Vella with additional books. Not because I’ve found it amazing, no. I have my complaints. The tools offered are not the best and it’s new. Consistently writing a serial novel is demanding, and I’m having to learn how to manage my chapters for this type of book. However, I have found Kindle Vella is an easier route to take if you are more fearful and unsure. I mean, if you don’t like something you can withdraw it, change it, repost it, or take it down. It’s not as cut-throat as the e-book self-publishing route to becoming Indie. Don’t get me wrong, it is publishing, but without a permanent commitment. And it has the potential to be self-published through Kindle KDP once the serial novel is complete.

After posting the initial chapters of my work and holding a launch event, I did not find many readers. It was hugely disappointing. After a week of nada, I looked for Kindle Vella marketing tools and or methods to increase my followers. Unfortunately, there was very little information. To finish out 2022 with such a miserable, minimal readership is just a small step in the process. Sort of like rejection slips without anyone actually saying so. But then this article would not have been written.

Lone Wolf
By Tessa Kane

My latest LGBT novel Soldiers In Arms is moving along with serial chapter # 15 of 25 coming out in a few days. And most of the marketing options I’m about to discuss were not in place before I began my journey. So, in other words, my marketing is abysmal. I currently only have 4 followers, and 2 thumbs up. The idea is to get hundreds of followers and many, many thumbs up, for Kindle Vella to help promote your novel. In comparison let’s look at the top LBGT historical romance. Oh wait…there are none. An unfulfilled niche, so I thought. Let’s examine LGBTQ Romance, Fantasy, or Western categories instead.

Immortal Passing by Ess McKinney, 47 episodes, 488 favorited thumbs up, 1 review
Lone Wolf: M/M Shifter Omegaverse Romance (S1: Complete, S2: Updates Every Sunday) by Tessa Kane, 42 episodes, 4794 thumbs up, 2 reviews
Indigo Ink by Liam Meilleur, 17 episodes, 126 thumbs up, 4 reviews

I can go on and on about the rankings, but I want to share with you how to improve yours. Of course, you can say the body of work counts the most and yes, you should write your best. And you might consider that as a series of books you can promote book 2 using book 1 right out of the gate. That’s true. Does it get you more followers? Not sure. But here are four opportunities you can use for Kindle Vella specifically.

The following steps are what I’ve come up with for marketing in 2023 and we shall see how it fairs with my new serial book I’ll be releasing soon. Using the four following methods, I intend to improve my readership, my reviews, and the possibility of pre-marketing my e-book novels earlier than you’d ever believe.

SEO Shark Tank–This is the art of taking your novel and social media the crap out of it. Is it perfect? No. I’m not so sure this is the route everyone should take because-
A) It’s a lot of work. Post, post, post, post, and post some more.
B) It doesn’t really count as trackable unless you set it up to route back through your site. Which means you have to have a website or some tangible location to track from. Kindle Vella has crap right now for this. In fact, if you revise a chapter (take it down to change something, then post it again), it knocks out any old, ranked data. So really, KV doesn’t have a great tool for count tracking.
C) It takes a boatload of effort to find the right groups. Hence why I hired a company to do this for me. A crap-ton of FB groups have posting limiting rules about self-promotion, or they have hash-tag groups within the group that sort and separate news. It’s a process. You have to work at it hard before getting the right places, and so begins the rejected post notifications. Nothing is worse than getting rejected for your post. Jeebus! My SEO company is running my social and my website media so I can focus on my writing. But I could never just step back from it. I’m constantly on FB and Twitter answering questions or making remarks about feedback.

Viral feeding. I’m into this right now to really figure it out. I want to post once and have my ad viral out of control. And once you find the method, you can use it on a couple of different media. First, I’m starting with the easy playing fields.
A) I’m currently using Pinterest. I post a motivational quote, linking back to my websites, one PIN every week for 52 weeks. The moment someone clicks on it, they are taken to my website. If they save the pin to their saved Pinterest pins… all their friends are notified. This is a cheap viral out of control if you find the right pins or pinners. You can even ask or pay for others to pin it that have robust or 100K followers. Sometimes it’s barely a $50 spot to do this. I’ve not yet paid for any buddy pinning yet, but it’s possible to do it and extremely effective if you get the right sponsor. There is not much traffic after 12 ads but once I hit 52 weeks, I’ll post another 52 weeks, then another. One day, I’ll viral my website OUT OF CONTROL. And, of course, the ads link to my website, which links to my books, which should give me conversion. Look that bad boy word up.
B) I have not tried Instagram, but I’m thinking of it next.
C) I will also be attempting YouTube since they just introduced 1080P video blog tools that allow you to really create dynamic stuff. Once you have YouTube set up, you can snippet portions to use on TikTok. Videos are exceptional marketing and give a face to the product. Lots to learn but well worth it. If you go out to Pinterest, you can clearly see videos being used to catch the eye. So, YouTube is the beginning then snippets to TikTok, and circle back to Pinterest.

A Note From the Author

Kindle Vella Reviews–they are priceless. You need them. You have to get some. For 2023 I’m going to campaign through Kindle Vella to get reviews. Here is my method. Each serial chapter has a “note from the author” option. Within that note area, I can link to my blog, my website, my leader page for filling out a review, and an email signup tool, etc. And so far with over 40 chapters posted I’ve hardly used it. Just picture me slapping my head over and over right here. Now that I’ve figured out that can be used as a marketing tool… I will use it to move forward with my marketing. In fact, I’ve come up with some fairly innocent templates that I will use. For example:

I think that XXX (ßplot note for this chapter) will flow right into YYY (ßplot note for next chapter). If you are enjoying this novel, I have an easy quick 3-question review at HTTP ZZZZZ and I’d love to hear your feedback. You can even pick up a free copy of my novella WWWWW if you sign up for my email list, after the survey. Thanks.

Or another twist is:

Check out my Sexy Scholar blog https://jlnickyauthor.com/blog-sexy-scholar/ for articles that discuss some of the historical research I did specifically for this novel. Many a time I’ve fallen into the black hole of research and found gems galore. If you wouldn’t mind leaving a review, there is a link to a quick 3 questions on that page. Thanks.

(NOTE the author area does not allow embedded links, unfortunately.)

Pay Per Click

Spending Cash – Well the last marketing effort I’ve explored is paid advertising. The link to your site can generate conversions and you have to really understand and track the clicks. If you are just paying for an ad, you are doing it wrong. For an author, you are looking for impressions that will lead to conversion. And you need to study this opportunity to know if you are doing it right.
A) You’ll want to know who is clicking the ad, when did they click, what made them click, and why? This can lead to testing out the article Header, the sub-title, the novel cover, and the general time/length/quantity of the ad. Ask the question of did posting this ad in the evening work better or worse than midnight or morning. Did running it for 2 days work better than 1? Did the header directed to capture women get more clicks than the gender-neutral header? What if I change the font on my book cover to red vs blue?
B) There are so many workshops on advertising for Pay-Per-Click. I watched a free tutorial just the other day on YouTube that was really thorough. I would say my favorite is Derek Murphy. But he is the king of book covers so he can really talk a lot. And he offers so much free stuff. I think he has made so many free courses he has old ones running that he’s forgotten he even offers. Check him out.
C) Another quick lesson I learned is the Pie Method of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising by Tai Lopez on Mentrobox.com. You set up your ads with multiple ad groups. Make sure to cover ad groups that are outside of each other but bring in additional groups. For example, select a genre reading group (i.e. LGBT romance), but you also put into the campaign additional marketing to ad groups overlapping but possibly outside that group, such as married women 30-50, or the additional genre of historical romance, and keep redefining and expanding the ad groups. This one ad for PPC can reach thousands. This tutorial for PPC was fantastic. And there are many more on YouTube.com. Make sure to study the important parts of tracking or updating the PPC market for your business.

Soldiers In Arms
By JLNICKY Author

In review, for Kindle Vella my current marketing strategies are specific SEO methods that get you conversion, finding ways to viral feed advertise without having to work so hard, getting KV reviews using KV opportunities, and Pay-Per-Click methods that hold water. While I know there is quite a bit of talk about rocket publisher and keywords/categories, I selected these four methods because they were post-marketing options after looking at keywords and categories and setting up the serial novel. As I post more serial books in 2023, I’ll continue to evolve with my marketing strategies, and I plan to touch back on the changes that have taken place. There is not much KV marketing out there for authors right now, so this is just the tip of a deep iceberg I intend to explore. I’m actively hunting out methods that make sense and are potentially self-sustaining. Good luck if you are publishing in Kindle Vella.

Please check out my Kindle Vella Lesbian romance serial novel Soldiers In Arms, a historical romance during the Civil War. Please subscribe to my website if you want to be notified when I’ll be publishing or to get free samples of my work. Also, see my Patreon to sign-up for exclusive content throughout the year and chapter sneak peeks of my ongoing work.

JLNicky, LGBT Romance Author

If you enjoy this article and want to check out my latest hope reads in the LGBT romance genre, check out these Amazon-offered books on my Affiliate links below. Note: Purchasing from these links at Amazon will enable me a small commission as an Amazon affiliate.

The amazing book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo a historical fiction novel by American author Taylor Jenkins Reid, is offered in both Kindle and Audible. I was enthralled by the ongoing plot and the twist. I rank this as my top read of 2022.

Can’t Fight Love by K.C. Luck is an enemies-to-lovers romance intertwined with the thrill of sports.

Tea Leaves & Tourniquets by Sienna Waters is a women-loving-women romance about finding your soulmate.

Innocent Hearts by Radclyffe is a historical wild Montana Territory lesbian romance of the 1860s, an oldie but a goodie favorite.

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