Relax! It’s only one book

I spend a lot of time reading other writing blogs. This makes perfect sense, as I am a newly-minted indie writer. I want to know what is happening in the world, what I should be working on, etc. The more I read these various blogs, the more I keep seeing the same “lessons” popping up over and over. One lesson I keep reading about is marketing. Once you put out a book, the story goes, the easy part is done. Now you’ve got to market it. OK, I agree. But the lesson keeps harping on marketing. You’ve got to promote it relentlessly. Everyone has to hear about your book. Blast announcements from the mountain tops. Get on Twitter and find a “friendly way” to shill your book. Basically never stop selling this one book you’ve written.

I have grown tired of this stale message. Of course marketing is important and we all want the world to know our books are for sale. But the trouble is these days there are a lot of new writers, and they want to sell you a book. A book. One. Uno. Why would you invest a huge chunk of time to market this?  Is one hour per day of “social media marketing time” really that important? How about one hour per week, and use those other six hours to write your next book?

I follow a self-publishing guru with a big name, at least among indie authors. This writer is selling two books and a short story, and has only had that to offer for the last 18 months. Where is the next book? This writer seems to pop up everywhere, doing all the right marketing things, etc. I guess it is successful, but a career cannot be built on one or two books. I doubt it can be built on eight or ten books. Most of us will need a backlog of books to represent our work. I think that’s where the heavy-handed marketing plan makes sense. For the author I mentioned, I read the two books and I’m done checking back with the writer. I just keep hearing about those two books I’ve already read.

For the new writer, it is important to master the basics of craft. We do that by writing, not marketing. If I followed all the advice to log on to Twitter and Facebook all day, whoring for “likes” and “re-tweets”, I’d never get anything done. I’ve got about two hours per night to write. I’m better off chipping away at a challenging scene rather than finding a way to mask blatant sales pitches.

Of course, I don’t like marketing, so it’s easy for me to fall into this line of thinking. But honestly, one book will not excite many people. When you are writing a series this takes on a whole new significance. I don’t like to read series until all the books are out. I don’t want to get burned with an incomplete series. I bet I’m not alone. So, producing the next book is the best thing you can do to sell the books you already have for sale.  Once you’ve got a good list of books out for readers to enjoy, then it’s worth shouting from mountain tops. Readers will have something to discover, rather than merely finding a potential “one-and-done” writer.