Marketing – Aaaaaaaaaargh!

I have finished my Open University course and have been producing some short stories which I felt where good enough to let the reading public view. Those of you who have read this blog before will remember my previous blogs on e-publishing How to and the next steps where I talked about turning those stories into an ebook and the simplicity of using Kindle Direct Publishing.

I have now had the book on the market for two months and have so far sold fourteen copies and generated one review.

So what did I need to do? Market it!

All the guides are telling me I need more reviews so that people can find it. To generate these reviews I did a free give away day. This did generate a further thirty six sales but so far no new reviews and no new sales.

I then looked at what I was doing wrong and it is all about marketing. Set up a social platform. I have a twitter account @jojenner40 and I am connected with about 1500 people. They are all writers. This is great for advice on how to write but it doesn’t necessarily generate sales. I also now find out I need to engage on twitter and that I should only spend 10% of my time promoting my book, the rest of the time I should be just chatting, getting to know people and letting them get to know me. The problem is I keep forgetting to do this.

I enjoy writing and won’t give it up but the more I look at self promoting and self publishing the more I am convinced that if you do this as a hobby that is all it will ever be, a hobby. Promoting a book is almost a full time job in itself.

I really see the value of the old fashioned publishing route and once the novel is ready I will be looking into that far more than I thought I would before I tried to self publish.

 

Do you have tips?

Have you been able to promote effectively and do a ‘Day Job’?

Do the publishing houses take promotion away from you or do you still spend hours building a platform?