Is there a better way to reach more weirdos?

Today, I ran across this blog post from Raw Dog Screaming Press, which was talking about how some people are publishing a few thousand ebooks, often with knockoff titles of bestseller books to confuse readers. While there’s a number of small press publishers and indie writers who work to make quality ebooks, there’s also a lot of operations set up strictly for the purpose of making a quick buck off of impulse buyers. What this leads to is reader fatigue with book promotions of any kind. Readers can’t be sure who to trust, so they stop paying attention to announcements of book releases. These ebook spammers are only in ebooks for the money, and that makes it so much harder for the rest of us to get our message out through all the noise.

Raw Dog wrote:

Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. “I am a single mother who home schools her children,” says Peebles, who says she sells “thousands and thousands” of books a month. “Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month.”

Reading a quote like this makes me a very sad Zoe. I could be accused of a lot of things on my writing, but trying to trick readers will never be one of them. So yeah, it offends me that someone like Karen is enjoying so much success by taking advantage of people. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a similar kind of success. Yeah, I’m not in it for the money, but that doesn’t mean I find the idea of making a few dollars offensive.

Thing is, I can’t rightly say that I’d be selling more if only people like Karen would grow a conscience and stop selling their crap titles. Even with less authors in the pool, I’m still an acquired taste. With their focus on bizarro fiction, I suspect Raw Dog Screaming may also have the same problem. We’re not looking for just any reader. We’re looking for the distinguished connoisseur of weird shit.

The article goes on:

At 10 years I expected RDSP to be lounging on a small but sufficiently comfy bed of laurels, getting its belly rubbed and wagging its tail. Instead we’re going back to the hungry dog days, planning a new attack with fresh ideas about how to bring great, but overlooked, fringe fiction to the world. Next year we’ll be celebrating 10 years of publishing but mostly we’ll be trying to reinvent RDSP to keep up with the changes in publishing. We think it’s time for something drastic and a new approach. Hopefully this dog still has a few more wags of the tale left.

I have not been toiling at this writing thing for nearly as long as Raw Dog, but I share their dilemma of finding readers. Back when I first got started, I’d read books on publishing, and the message that I took away from them is that there are two ways to make a living off of writing. The first is to make one book so good that everyone has to read it. The second is to write a lot of books and make a few sales off of each title. Obviously, I chose the second route, but my plan never really worked out the way I hoped it would.

For most of the time that I promoted my work, my big question was “where can I find readers when they’re actually in the mood to receive a book pitch?” I didn’t want to do hit and run ads, or resort to asking friends to write glowing reviews. I was looking for legitimate methods of gaining interest, which in theory is easy. Or it is if you’ve got a book so good, nobody can resist the premise. It would be fair to say that a great deal of my stories require a leap of faith in shaky premises. Sure, if you stick with them, I can promise you’ll get a story like no one else has out there. But first and foremost I have to generate interest in each new premise.

I’ve seen a lot of potential answers given for how to woo readers, but none of these options worked out for me. Word of mouth promotions had a very limited reach. I got some reviews for a few titles, but apparently never reached the saturation point to make the right impression. Forum posting didn’t work, and social media just led to me building lists of other authors. Which is great when I want to figure out what to read, but it’s not so good for selling copies of my own books. I signed up with Project Wonderful, and while I did get some impressions and clicks as a result of banner ads, these never converted to sales. Interviews and guest blog posts all had similar results. The same goes for my Goodreads giveaways. I’m not saying these methods can’t or don’t work, only that they didn’t work for me. But, does that mean I’m doing it wrong, or that I’m simply too weird for any traditional marketing plan to work?

One might assume that after all these failures, I might start looking into desperation tactics like naming my books similar to bestsellers. But I’m not in this just to make a buck or rip people off, and the one time when I had a title conflict with another writer, I changed the name of my book. William Meikle was releasing a book titled Berserker, and I had a book coming out around the same time with the same title. Of course I could have just released the book with the same name. And since I was on schedule to release mine first, it’s not like his book would be confused for mine. His was about Vikings versus yetis, and mine was about a pack of werekin being adopted by the FBI. But I chose to host a poll and ask my blog readers to pick from a list of titles, and folks overwhelmingly voted for Blind Rage. So Willie’s book went out with the Berserker moniker, and I got the title my readers felt was the best fit for my beastly story.

Ironically enough, another book was also titled Blind Rage, which was released not long after my own first edition went live. And ultimately, the title didn’t matter because the book flopped. I think that was my second flop, but every story after that also flopped, and nothing I did could get any book to make a blip on peoples’ social radars. I’d send out requests for review copies, but months would go by, and not one of the copies I sent would get reviewed. I literally couldn’t even give my work away.

This year, I gave up on promotion, which I assumed meant my sales would die out completely. But right up until Smashwords dropped some of my books, I was getting regular quarterly royalties worth writing home about. This told me that the books were good enough to warrant attention, if I could just find the right readers at the right time. But because I’m not doing anything, it’s hard to build a promotional formula for new titles. I can’t even point to cover art as being the defining factor for a title’s success or failure, because many of the later releases that sold without promotion also had no cover. The blurbs alone were good enough. So how do you build on what works for you, when what works is apparently doing nothing? You can’t do more nothing, can you? Well, maybe a gifted procrastinator could, but for a workaholic like me, I’d much rather find a proactive plan for presales promotions.

Which brings me as always back to my quandary: if I have a new book that I want more people to know about and remember, how do I find the right time and place to court readers? I’m still convinced that there has to be a right way to do this, but I haven’t figured out where I need to be, or what I should do to generate interest.

Which I suppose is why I keep wandering to every blog post where someone else talks about generating sales. Because I’m looking for something I haven’t done that’s worth a shot. So, I’ll be watching Raw Dog Screaming Press to see what new ideas they come up with, and if they report success with their ideas, I’ll also try a similar tactic. Sure, I’m just playing follow the leader, but lord knows my efforts at being a trailbreaker didn’t work out so well. Raw Dog’s stated goals are very much in line with my own, and so if they find a successful formula for finding readers of fringe fiction, of course I’ll want to find the same kind of readers willing to experiment.

I agree with Raw Dog that something new needs to be done to help break the ice. After all, anything has to be better than doing nothing at all. Because doing nothing only works for about 10-15 sales a month. And that’s not quite enough to afford my 150 euro a month pot habit, to say nothing of my much more expensive video game addiction.