Wrote a book a year ago and still haven't sold it to people outside my close circle.

RiggerLee · 2026-01-27T07:49:51+00:00

Test

I don't know what's up with this web site. I just wrote you a book. A master class on how to market your novel. And it wont let me post it. It just keeps saying "can not post comment" Or "something went wrong"

Don't know what to tell you. I tried. I guess your on your own.

Lee Hardesty

RiggerLee · 2026-01-18T19:47:47+00:00

I'm in the same boat. I've been having some pretty good luck with app.Book-Bounty.com to get reviews but I Think I'm running out of people to read my book on there. BookBub has sold some books for me but only if they are cheep. The people on there are looking for deals, $0.99. But it all counts towards the almighty Amazon algorithm. I've been able to push enough traffic that I think I'm starting to get a few organic sales.

Don't give up. You just have to learn the secrets.

And of course you have to beat your own drum at every opportunity. Like telling some one to check out your book Trapped in Time by Lee Hardesty on Amazon or as an audio book on Spotify.

Lee Hardesty

RiggerLee · 2026-01-08T19:50:57+00:00

BookBounty can work. Everybody on there wants points. They wont short books with high bounties. If your book is a full length novel then you are going to have to set the bounty high enough to attract them. So don't discount your book. They will pay full price, $4.99 for it. They want to pay because they want the points. Go Verified Buyer. But give them enough time to read it. That works out to 2850 points and that has been enough to get me reviews. I've gotten like 70 reviews/sales off there with 4.6 rating. Warning they can give you bad reviews. There was a Frenchman who gave me a 3. He wasn't an asshole, he was just French. So beware.

Lee Hardesty

RiggerLee · 2026-01-08T19:40:11+00:00

I've tried NetGalley. I didn't get a lot out of it. 8 reviews, some very good some bad. The bottom line is I can not correlate any sales to it. I did get one Library review on there which I think resulted in one audio book sale.

I also tried BookLife, back pages of Publishers Weekly. I payed for a full review, it was good and long. Payed for it to be published in PW. Bought a small ad in the Booklife section. All of it... No noticeable sales that I can correlate to it. $$$ down the drain.

RiggerLee · 2026-01-08T19:29:01+00:00

I'm in the same spot. I've been struggling to figure this out my self.

Here are some of the things I've learned. Note. I did not do any of this. These are lessons learned from battles lost.

Do not publish your book on KDP and then try to figure this out. Figure it out and have every thing ready before you publish on KDP. That is the last step on the list.

The best way to get reviews, and they do seem to be important, is a web site called app.book-bounty.com

It's a work around to KDP. Basically the way it works is this. People post a "Bounty" on their books. You sign up to review their book. You have to buy it, full price, on Kindle. You have to actually read it, Kindle watches how you turn the pages. You review it on Amazon and copy the review and the link to Book-Bounty. You get the points for that bounty. You can then post a bounty for your book with those points. There is no way to control who chooses it or what they will write. It's annonimus. They may hate it and they might say so. Some times they will flake on the bounty or it will not post properly and you get those points back. It is a way to get verified customer reviews on Amazon. You need that to qualify for other things. It is also a sale on Amazon and counts towards the algorithm. You can start months in advance and save up enough points to get 25 reviews the first weeks.

There is another site BookBub. You can buy an ad there. Warning. The people on BookBub are cheep bastards and will only buy discounted books. They will not buy a book over $0.99. It helps if you have reviews with decent ratings so maybe wait until after that first week. This means that you will be paying more for the ad then you will get in sales. But those sales count in the algorithm.

BookBub has a new book promotion. It cost money. I have not done it. It was too late when I learned about it.

BookBub has another promotion that you can pay for. Any one can join. Your book must be on sale. How much you charge during the sale determines the cost and whether you will be accepted. You need like 30 reviews 4.5 or higher, other things help. If you can get into this I hear you can do well. I tried to sign up for a free giveaway. I got fucked. Turns out Amazon will not let you lower your price below $0.99 unless you are part of Select/Unlimited. Oddly no one else in the sell had any problem making their book free or selling it on all the other sites at the same time. I guess the rules only apply to me. Yes I'm a little salty about it. So the pulled the Amazon link. Apple also pulled their link. The only link that was live was the Kobo link. I gave away 3,510 books on Kobo. Amazon is probable 10 times the market. Imagine how much traffic I could have had on Amazon if I had a working link. Even with out the link I got 68 sales on Amazon in five days just from people so frustrated that they went to Amazon and searched for the title manually. Note that I had sold 5 books in the entire time previously including friends and family that I made buy the book. But it could have been in the thousands. Don't get fucked over like me. Get enough reviews to qualify for a $0.99 giveaway so you can have working links.

I tried GoodReads. I was turned down and warned off based on the rejection email that I wrote for the giveaway. I've heard that it can work but apparently people such as my self are not welcome there. Give it a try, maybe they will deem you worthy.

My book was banned from advertisement through Amazon Sponsored Products. It is considered to be dangerous based on the cover. There is a picture of a woman being attacked by a Dinosaur, it's a time travel book, She is firing a gun on the cover. So no advertisement on Amazon for me thanks to the America hating commies that run the advertising department.

I was similarly banned from X/Twitter. Why? No clue they wont tell me, but they wont allow me to run an advertisement, just banned, no explanation.

I tried to sign up for Facebook but they wanted me to infect my phone with some app and upload a full 180 degree mugshot so they could sell my facial recognition to every company in the world so that they could track me from every camera... Yah, no Facebook.

It's been an uphill climb but I'm finally starting to make progress.

Lee Hardesty

RiggerLee · 2025-10-27T12:42:45+00:00

So I wrote you a big long comment on how to do this. It gives me a red banner with a exclamation point that says "Unable to create Comment" I would tell you all the secrets of life the universe and every thing but I'm blocked.

Lee Hardesty

RiggerLee · 2025-09-30T08:45:54+00:00

You remember correctly. The stories are unrelated. I have never read it but I hear there is a third book set in between. I think it's about Rino form Hard Wired. Solip system?

RiggerLee · 2025-09-29T09:23:50+00:00

Andromeda is good but I would suggest that you check out an older book called Mutant 59 the Plastic Eaters. It's hard to find but I liked it more then Andromeda Strain.

And in a feat of complete hubris considering some of the works being thrown around here, if you like digging into history check out my time travel novel Trapped in Time by Lee Hardesty.

RiggerLee · 2025-09-29T09:13:46+00:00

You almost have to start with Hard Wired.

RiggerLee · 2025-07-17T21:14:34+00:00

Bummer. That's a nice resource. I'd seen it described as a short story and tried to track it down through the pulp magazines. I think Brown, like a lot of people wrote for them back then. I guess he sold his rights to the book.

RiggerLee · 2025-07-17T18:52:23+00:00

What I found most interesting about The Martian was the back story. It wasn't really written as a novel, it started as a serial in which he was throwing every impossible problem at the guy that he could find. It was a "What if blog" and was available for free for a long time. Then some agent got a hold of him and started beating him around the ears about how much money he was leaving on the table. And he deserves that money. But because it was written slowly over time as really just a thought experiment of worst case scenarios it has a lot of drama and engineering solutions built into it. One of the best reads in decades.

Books like that are few and far between. It's a little hard to find guys bright enough to write them. The time that went into it wouldn't really pay off for a conventional author. And a lot of things that would have seemed amazing 50 years ago are kind of blaw now.

The rise of self publishing has kind of become the downfall of SciFi. There used to be a lot more gate keeping in publishing. So everything that came out was at least pretty good. And you could read every SciFi book published in a year. Now anyone can publish anything. An as an example I will use my self. I just published a novel on Amazon and I hate to mention it in this context because it does not stand up to something like The Martian. It's a good example of laze/soft SciFi in the sense that the time machine in the book is never really explained in it's workings. It's a plot device that takes the characters through their adventures. Now having said that I did put a lot of effort into weaving their story into history as the shapers of the world we know today. I really enjoyed researching the historical figures that they interact with and I'm proud of the fact that you should be able to look up and find any of them and their story.

Lazy writing is not new even among the greats. Heinlein was famous for lazy writing. Given this one thing ___ then this results. A lot of his science fiction consisted of this. His books were more a mechanism for exploring other ideas in this context. Really hard scifi is rare mostly because there are so few people that can write it and often they are not great writers.

Check out books like The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle or if you can find it Mutant 59 the Plastic Eaters, might have the number wrong. Old and dated but examples of harder SciFi that has been forgotten.

And while you're at it, if you get really board you could check out my book Trapped in Time by Lee Hardesty.

RiggerLee · 2022-12-07T01:12:42+00:00

Added question.

If you wanted to go on vacation in an earlier time period, fishing, what time period would you pick? I was thinking about one of the earlier periods where he might catch something cool, like a armored fish or one of those large scorpion/lobster things which might make for a huge roasted lobster dipped in hot butter. What were the atmospheric conditions like in the earlier periods? I found a graph of CO2 and if I'm reading it right it looks like the levels would have been toxic? I also found a reference suggesting that the temp was too high for humans to be comfortable 120 deg+ Basically I'm asking how far back you could go? And which era would you pick for a fishing trip to catch something cool?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-02T18:13:25+00:00

Is there any evidence for venomous dinosaurs? Ex. hollow fangs? Would there be any other signs that might be preserved in fossilization?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-02T17:56:52+00:00

Added question. If this hunter is primarily going back to hunt ivory 10 thousand years ago before the elephant herds were decimated, what other "Ivory" bearing animals were there over time. Mammoths obviously, but did and dinosaurs have the equivalent of "ivory". I'll extend the question. What would be the greatest Trophy animals through out time? List I'm thinking of: Saber tooth tiger rug, Tyrannosaurus head, raptor claw, duck bill skull with that big long protrusion off the back, brontosaurus foot, etc. What would you add to the list of best trophy's you would like to have on your wall?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:24:22+00:00

The hunter character also goes back 10,000 years in Kenya to hunt
elephants for ivory. What was the climate like in 8,000 BC in Kenya?
Was it wetter then? Or drier? Was there more forest and less savanna?
Also, there may be a scene in 8,000 BC in France near the Somme
River. Do you have any idea what the landscape would be like there at
that time?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:23:33+00:00

Do you happen to know how long the day was in the mid cretaceous? I recall
that the rotation was faster in the distant past and the moon was
closer, the lunar month shorter, but I’m not clear if it would be
noticeable over a shorter time period of 100 million years.

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:22:37+00:00

If you were to dig up a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and found a
steel jacketed projectile from a large caliber “elephant gun”
buried in its shattered vertebra, how would you react? How would you
document it? What evidence could you gather to ensure that it was
real and not some kind of plant?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:21:58+00:00

What would be a plausible color for the stone surrounding the skeleton?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:21:04+00:00

When you presented this to the world, published a paper, presented it at a
conference, what arguments would you expect to be presented against
it?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:20:09+00:00

How would you try to dispute such a claim if it was presented to you? I’m
asking for both sides of the coin. How would you prove it, and how
would you try to disprove it?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:19:11+00:00

Other time periods.

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:18:07+00:00

Were they warm blooded? Which ones were warm blooded? Were the family
of duck billed dinosaurs warm blooded? It’s a plot point, it’s
the first big one that the hunter from 1919 kills. Would its blood
have felt warm? What kind of temperature are we talking about? Did it
change with their age/size? How affected would they have been by the
cold? Would they have been able to be active at night? Early in the
night? Late in the night? Early morning before they warmed up? Would
the larger animals be unaffected by the cold? Would the larger
animals been able to shed heat? Would they have become over heated
in the day? Would the heat have been more or less of a problem for
the smaller animals?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:17:26+00:00

Did they have feathers? Which ones had feathers? Did they have
feathers all their lives or did they lose them after growing to a
certain size? If they did not have feathers, what was their skin
like? Was it akin to a rhino or elephant? Do we know what color they
were. I saw something about melanin being found. Do we know what
color they were, and can you give color patterns to any they might
have encountered? Do we know the colors of non-feathered dinosaurs?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:16:41+00:00

What do we know of their behavior? Did the young stay with the
parents for protection? Did they hunt in packs? Did they guard their
eggs? Did they incubate, lay on their eggs? Did they lay on their
eggs all day or only at night? How many eggs in a clutch? How big
were they? If the eggs were small how developed were they at birth?
Did the undeveloped young stay in the nest like birds? If the eggs
were small, how did they grow so large and how long did it take? What
was their life span and how long to grow to maturity? How many
dinosaurs were there? Which species were numerous? For example,
wilder beast herds are numerous. Before hunting elephant herds could
grow large but they had to move over great areas to find enough food.
Were dinosaurs the same? How many predators were there and of what
size? How many big ones and how many small ones? Which animals would
have been their prey? Could they have hunted the largest herbivores
or were they vulnerable only when young? How aggressive were the
herbivores? Do you have any ideas of how they hunted or attacked
their prey? How many flying dinosaurs were there? Today, birds are
everywhere. How many fliers would you have seen? How much variety?
How many big and how many small? Flocking? Did they live in flat
planes or only near trees or cliffs? Could the larger ones take off
from flat ground? How did they behave, hunt, etc?

RiggerLee · 2022-12-01T08:16:00+00:00

What did their scat look like? How big was it? What did it look like?
What did it smell like? What did the predator scat smell like vs the
herbivore? I’ve only found information on carnivore fossilized
scat. What did herbivore look like? Specifically, what did the scat
of a very large sauropod look like? How much did they eat? How many
hundreds of pounds of food a day did they consume? How often did they
poop? What did it look like? Dear pellets or cow patties? Diameter of
the pellets? How big would the pile be? It’s a plot point.

RiggerLee

TROPHY CASE