Christopher Spencer's Blog: C. Lee Spencer's Blog - Posts Tagged "ebook"

For the past week I've been investigating marketing my books to get a wider audience. I've created a twitter account. I've made this facebook page. I've started a blog. The advice I've gotten is that you should spend two hours a day creating content for social spaces. All successful self-published authors on Kindle are also successful bloggers. This is backed up by a pretty solid basis in evidence.

Yet I always come away from those articles with a queasy feeling in my gut. It's not the work involved. I don't mind working hard for results that can be measured (like increase in book sales). I'm not against success. Yet doing a tweet or opening an account on LinkedIn felt like walking across broken glass to me.

Then, a few minutes ago, I was "tricked" into watching a motleyfool video about cable companies and their problems with cord cutters. The video kept doing the, "I'm going to present an interesting bit of fact. The interesting fact is... coming up in just a minute, but first..."

I put up with it for a while, kept on the hook by the information I was REALLY interested in, which was ALWAYS two fucking minutes away. They had me on the hook. I was ready to be landed...
Four minutes of promised, but delayed facts later, the video went into "sales pitch" mode. The hard sell started...

I turned the video off in disgust. I found the topic interesting. I wanted to hear facts about cord cutting. And I might've been "sold" on whatever they were peddling. But I needed to get the bloody FACTS, and come to my OWN conclusions as to what actions were desired. This is the essence of the "Socratic Method".

I am very interested in having people read my work. I am very interested in getting the word out that my work exists. And I wouldn't mind getting compensated for not just the tens of hours it took to write "Event Day", but the HUNDREDS of hours I spent world building and researching. Even if it just translates to below minimum wage earnings, some return on that investment would be nice.

But it's a slippery, SLIMY step between getting the word out and becoming a salesman. My instincts are to just give the facts and hope everyone will come to their own conclusions. I have no idea how to be a Howard Hill in "The Music Man", hawking a bunch of band equipment.

My terrible, terrible fear is that one of two fates waits for me. I'll either write in total obscurity, undiscovered. Or I will become a salesman doing book equivalents of that motleyfool video.

Marketing doesn't work unless you are either independently wealthy or already have a large reader base.

I've been reading more and more articles about marketing your Kindle book. The ones that are backed up by solid marketing data are also the authors who ALREADY have thousands of sales. In other words, marketing for them is about increasing their audience or more effectively selling to an existing one.

For people who start from an audience of a handful of friends? There are no effective marketing strategies. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Fuck all.

Yes, you can "buy" a marketing campaign, but there are authors who spend up to $60,000 a year to rise above the chaff to get noticed. Sixty THOUSAND DOLLARS. That's a "six" with FOUR zeroes after it. And that's just to rise above the chaff.

You look at Hugh Howey, who wrote "Wool" and went on to a huge career in writing fiction. He basically got lucky. He was discovered without any real marketing on his part and suddenly he got a reader base that spiraled upward (which goes to show that EVERYTHING you publish better sparkle, because you don't know when it's gonna fall into the hands of a completely random blogger with an audience).

And Andy Weir, who did "The Martian"? NO one can explain how his book exploded in popularity. It was an oddball story posted in segments in an out-of-the-way blog. He posted it on Amazon so he could distribute it more easily. It was basically abandon-ware. He did nothing to market it. Zero. Zip. Nada. Nothing. It just kind of randomly exploded on Amazon.

Time and again I see that the largest discoveries of the indie author world are made with the author doing little to absolutely no marketing whatsoever. The only thing that they share is a high quality to their writing, so when the magical luck fairy comes for them, they actually have books worth reading.

There's nothing I can do short of robbing a bank to pay for tens of thousands of dollars of marketing to increase the visibility of Love/Kroft. I wish I could come to another conclusion. So, if it's a matter of writing the best fucking stories I can and hoping for lady luck to give me a French kiss? Then I'll write the best fucking stories I can and live on that hope.