Screaming Into the Void

After a few months of promotion I am dialing things back now that MFoDB is out in the wild. Sales online have been so-so. When I do physical appearances it seems to go much better. That's just the way it is for a lot of writers, I think. There are so many of us out there (upwards of 12 million, according to Amazon) that we really have to aggressively try to capture our own little piece of the pie.

That brings me to the subject of promotion curve. Before publishing my debut I heard that it was a learning curve and WOW has it ever been. There are a million people using a million different promotion strategies so I won't even pretend that I know enough to offer any kind of advice. What I did want to talk about was exactly how much of a grind promoting my work has been.

Social media was a huge help with me along the way, in building a readership, and getting a lot of good advice...and by social media I mean Twitter because Facebook is a crap filled dumpster that really should be burned to the ground. I do feel sorry for people that get sick of seeing books spamming their Twitter feed, though, but I hope they also understand that for authors (especially new ones like myself) we really have to throw our books out there so often just for it to saturate the tiniest fraction of the potential audience.

More often than not promoting - be it on social media, or with paid ads on a venue like Amazon, Bookbub, etc - feels like screaming into the wind when no one is actively listening and you just have to keep at it until someone finally hears you and checks to see what all of the hollering is about. I don't mind sinking some change into promotion but when I looked at impressions vs click through rates it was such an eye opening experience for me. People who sell things have to do two things -- create a lot of something to sell, and advertise the heck right out of it until sales lead to reviews, then word of mouth starts circulating, and so on.

If you're a fledgling author please don't expect your book to sprout wings and take off. Stay humble about expectations and realize that, much like with a child, you're going to have to nurture the crap out of the thing until it stumbles out on its own - to succeed or to fail. Just don't give up on it, like a parent would never give up on their child.

Keep on screaming into the void, folks. Believe it or not, someone is actually listening.