A Voice In The Wilderness

Can you hear me?

I still haven’t cracked this thing called Marketing. I don’t think it’s coming easy to me. I hate the idea of screaming into a void and not knowing whether anyone is really listening, or whether they’re just finding me rather annoying. Hello, it’s that woman shouting about her books again.
I know marketing is the key to success. As a writer you need to reach out to new readers and bring them onboard if your readership is going to grow. Even if you are signed up to a big publishing house and they’ve set aside a budget for your book, you are still expected to do a certain amount of marketing for yourself too. I have many writing friends who are published by a wide range of different publishing houses from big names through to self-publishing and marketing is the one thing that bother us all. Yes, if you are lucky enough to be with a publisher who has invested in creating an ad for your book, it does help with the marketing, but still you need to find places to share and promote your work.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Pexels.com

Everyone is surrounded by advertising every day from washing powder to fancy electric cars, but how does someone make their work stand out in a sea of books on the internet. I joined over sixty Facebook sites that allow you to market your books for free. I was careful to follow their rules. I know from running my own online writer’s group how easy it is for someone to post an advertisement that screams buy my book and disappear, never to be seen again until they next need to market a book. You can get an author who markets the same book on the hour, every hour on one site. This makes for boring reading and it is why I set up the clubhouse bookshop so writers could advertise their books there rather than in the main clubhouse. Here’s the link to the Clubhouse Bookshop

I tend to advertise my books every few days, on Twitter, LinkedIn, and across the Facebook sites. I have found a few readers requesting recommendation for books and have mention mine, but these are few and far between. I do try to be active on the sites I’ve signed up to, but some of them are just full of buy my book type ads and it makes me wonder how successful the authors are at selling their books continually on these sites. I got thrown in Facebook jail for three day for spamming. I posted my Tearoom Chats and a series of ads for my crime novel, Stone Angels over all the sites on the same day. Oops, it was tough as I could only post on my own groups and personal page for three days. Yesterday, while out walking I chatted to a dog walker I had spoken to before. He told me he’d recently finished reading Stone Angels and had been impressed by it. Hopefully, he will pass the word on to others as word of mouth is the best marketing tool.

I must admit some of the book ads are brilliant, and I wish I had the time to learn how to make them for my own books. My time is precious, like all writers. Writing a novel takes time, and can’t be done in a rush. Well, for me I can’t. I need time to think outside the box and plan my plot line. At the moment, I’m editing while planning and writing a 7k short story and working a new novel too. So where do I find the time to fit marketing in while doing everything else I need to do? Good question. My publisher for Stone Angels has a promotional weekend coming up in March so to try to increase my readership I have invested some money into paying for marketing for two of my books, Stone Angels and my collection of short stories, Days Pass like a Shadow

My gentle ad…. Come Buy My Books

Yesterday, I signed up with Book Cave and Fussy Librarian, both I have used before. I’ve see a slight increase in my sales by using these company and they are both inexpensive to use too. The problem is as both companies are American and market to the own country. I’ve yet to find a British promoting company that’s within my price range to use.

I shall let you know how I get on.