Sharing Recommendations

Boosting Each Other (And Ourselves) Without Annoying Readers

As indie authors, we often have to be our own cheerleaders. If we don’t do it, who will? But aggressive self-promotion is likely to turn off some of the very readers we want to attract.

That’s one of the benefits of the Based Book Sale. By working together to promote each other, you’re not just asking your own family, friends, and followers to consider buying your own books, you’re introducing them to a host of new authors, and benefiting from those authors introducing you to their followers. It only works, though, if participating authors and readers spread the word. So if you enjoy the sale, and if you appreciate the mission of boosting indie authors’ visibility and bypassing mainstream gatekeepers, please don’t just sit back and let everyone else do the heavy lifting. Kindly do your part to spread the word.

Here’s another way we can help each other spread the word. Substack has a mechanism for Substack authors to share recommendations to other author’s Substacks. This is how it works:

Introducing recommendations: simple cross-promotion for writers

I know many of you are using Substack to promote your writing and to build a reader community. If you’re not on already, and want to reserve yourname.substack.com subdomain, you can click here:

I made a first pass and added a number of author, book, and review-related Substack recommendations to the Based Book Sale Substack. If you have an existing Substack, please add this Substack to your own list of recommendations. I should get notified when you recommend this Substack, but also, please provide a link your own Substack to the comments of this post, so I will know to add it to the recommendations, here. That way, the entire list will be available for reference, instead of just the handful that show up in the sidebar when visitors come to the Based Book Sale Substack homepage. Note: I’m looking specifically for Substacks that focus primarily on books, reviews, works in progress, and the like. There are plenty of political, commentary, current event, and other worthwhile Substacks out there, but those aren’t aligned with the specific mission we have here to promote based books and their authors.

It may have been a bit unclear in the email I sent out to previous participants, but authors are under no obligation to subscribe with a paid subscription. You will get all the benefits of participation with a free subscription. I make a modest amount from Amazon affiliate links which helps make the effort to curate and coordinate the sale worthwhile. Your “payment” is your good faith effort to help us promote the sale. That’s the deal, and I’m fine with that.

I’m happy to allow Book Funnel or other links instead of Amazon links, if you prefer. I won’t make anything on the sales if you do, but I do want to encourage people to consider distribution channels outside the Amazon leviathan. I’m fine with that, also.

If you do want to provide extra encouragement and support for the Based Book mission, well, that’s why I turned on paid subscriptions. Your contributions to our mutual mission here are greatly appreciated, and you should feel free to consider upgrading to paid if you’d just like to provide some more tangible thanks for the service here, or if for some reason you aren’t able to promote the sale any other way.

If you have a book that is always priced at $0.99 or free and want it included in the Everyday Based Book Sale, add it to the comments, here:

If you have a book that is regularly priced higher but will be priced at $0.99 or free between 12:00AM PDT Wednesday March 27, 2024 through 12:00AM PDT Wednesday April 3, 2024, and if you want it included in the Spring 2024 Based Book Sale, add it to the comments, here:

Thanks for your interest in the Based Book Sale. Let’s gear up and get ready to help all those based readers out there “Come And Read It!”

Cheers!

Hans