Joel Andre Virtual Tour

Guest Post:
When I first started writing, I thought all I had to do to gain exposure was to post my book to Amazon. Over the years, I have found out it is a little more complex than that. If people don’t know your books are out there, they won’t pick them up. But getting noticed can be difficult. It took a few years for stories like A Death at the North Pole, Autopsy and Brutal to pick up in sales and get noticed. This can be attributed to a few things.

Let’s start off with the fact the running ads is expensive. I dropped about $10,000 in advertising through online book tours and advertising on various websites. This proved to be effective to a point, but once the ads went down, sales dropped as well. But I have found there are things you can do to keep sales up and most of them won’t cost you a fortune.

Now, it is likely that, even if you think your sales are doing okay, you want to see an increase in your sales. You can do this. You need to make sure that people find your books easier by building a good online presence. Among the best tools you can have to help build your presence online and give your sales a boost is knowing keyword use and LSI.

Most people are familiar with keywords to some extent. They are basically the search terms people type into a search engine when they are looking for something. When publishing a book, especially in digital format, many publishers provide a field to enter keywords you want used so your book will be among the results when someone uses one of them on the site the book is sold on or in a search engine. But this is just the beginning if you want your sales to increase.

You want to create an online presence to make people aware of who you are and what you offer. You can do this with a blog related to the genre in which you write. Here you definitely need to use keywords so people find your blog. Each post should have at least one main keyword and maybe a secondary keyword relevant to the topic of the post.

The days of using a lot of keywords numerous times each are gone and search engines will penalize content that is 'keyword stuffed' as it is considered keyword spamming. Now, the trend is toward solid content that offers value to the reader so keywords should not be crammed in so much the content is unreadable. About once per hundred words for the main keyword is as much as you want to use it. It can be used even less if the placement is optimal. A good example would be in the title of the post, the first sentence, somewhere in the last paragraph and once in the middle of 400 to 500-word post.

Keyword use alone can be fairly effective but to be even more effective, adding in some LSI terms is essential. LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, seem somewhat mysterious but it is really rather simple. The idea is to say the same thing as the keyword without repeating the exact keyword over and over. You talk about the same thing in different wording so it reads more naturally. If you think about the way to talk to someone about something, you don't refer to it in exactly the same words all the time. For example, if you talk about dog training, you may refer to it in other ways as well, such as training a dog, pet training, teaching your dog, etc. These are examples of LSI terms and it is easy to see that using them ensures your post will read better than if the keyword 'dog training' were used every time.

When both keywords and LSI are used, search engines will find you and your readers will get to know you and look for your books, resulting in more sales. Websites like www.needanarticle.com have the ability to help you with that. Since I work there when I am not writing my own stories, you can actually hire me on to help you build your online presence.

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About Joel: Joel M. Andre was born January 13, 1981. At a young age he was fascinated with the written word. It was at fourteen that Poe blew his mind, and Andre began to dabble with darker poetry.

Between the years of 1999 and 2007 Joel was featured in various poetry anthologies and publications. In 2008 he released his first collection,Pray the Rain Never Ends.

Knowing there was something deeper and darker inside of his soul, Joel decided to take a stab at commercialism. Releasing the dark tongue in cheek, A Death at the North Pole, created a dark world among the death of Kris Kringle. Ultimately providing a tale of redemption.

October of 2008 saw Joel release his second book, Kill 4 Me. A tale in which a woman is haunted by a vengeful spirit through text messages and instant messaging.

Taking some time off and doing a lot of soul searching, Joel took things in a new direction and dabbled in the Fantasy Genre with, The Pentacle of Light. The tale dealing with five major races battling for control of Earth, and the acceptance of their God.

Finally, after missing his detective Lauren Bruni, he released the book The Return in October 2009, this time moving the action from the North Pole and placing it in the small Arizona community he was raised in.
Andre’s latest book is The Black Chronicles: Cry of the Fallen about a dead man who seeks revenge on the woman that tormented him in peaceful Northern Arizona.

Currently, he resides in Chandler, AZ.