How do they do it?

Colour me confused. I’m a member of several little groups on Yahoo and Facebook that offer advice on marketing. How to get your book out there into the world – to make it visible amidst the thousands of others.

There are hundreds of blogs, thousands of potential reviewers, loads of specialised marketing organisations who for various sums will do all the work for you. You can try to get your book on Bookbub or similar – offer a book free, aim for massive downloads and hope that trickles into sales of your other books. Marketing what you write seems to be a full time job. And some are much better at it than others.

I’m firmly in the others camp.

I blog – a bit.

I interact on Facebook as much as I can and I don’t go on and on about my books.

I tweet – rarely with a link because I like little sound bites of life not – buy my book, buy my book, buy my wonderful book.

I tried Pinterest but I struggle to manage that.

And I write – and hopefully each book I write is better than the last. (Not sure that’s true but I try my best.)

Mention the word marketing and almost all authors groan. We’re fine with the writing, but sag at the prospect of convincing others to buy our stories. Reviews on Amazon are seen as the holy grail. I’m sure they are – I have very few reviews there compared to many. I have loads of reviews for some stories and hardly any for others. I have no idea why.

So marketing remains a mystery to me but one I have to solve because I’m venturing into the do -it – myself market! I have the rights coming back to me on one book. I have two others in edits. One I’m transcribing from typed pages (yep, it’s that old) and I want to publish all of them myself. Partly as an experiment. Will I sell more or less than I do with a publisher?

I’ll soon see.

Wish me luck!