Making your own success in self-publishing
It would be lovely if, a couple of days after hitting the publish button on your new novel, it shot to the top of the bestseller charts and you could sit back and relax from your marketing.
In reality, this happens very rarely. It does happen, sometimes, for some authors. There’s nothing in particular to say why some books do amazingly well almost straight away and yet millions of others struggle to break through. It’s the nature of self-publishing. For most of us, any success we have with self-publishing will be down to us. We make our own success.
One of the big positives of this is that no one has more invested in seeing your book succeed than you do. You’ve taken the time to write it and perfect it and publish it, and you naturally want to see it do well. The trick is knowing how to use that desire and turn it into practical steps you can take to try and sell the book.
Self-publishing isn’t easy, but there are lots of ways for authors to promote their work and give it a shot at success. Success is, of course, never guaranteed, but I believe it is possible to achieve your goals if you put the work in. It means taking advantage of platforms such as social media to get your work out there to as big an audience as possible.
It might sound a bit too obvious to say ‘use Twitter and Facebook to promote your work and achieve your self-publishing goals’ because everyone says it these days, but everyone says it because they are genuinely useful platforms for self-publishers. For one thing, they’re free, and when you’re on a budget trying to make your own success, that counts for something.
You could say that books used to sell before the days of social media and you’d be right, but that would be to miss the point, which is that things have changed – marketing has changed, readers have changed, how we publish books has changed. To ignore social media as a self-publisher is a risky strategy. You can’t just rely on luck
It also pays to look where other authors’ success comes from. Most successful self-published authors will have more than one book out, and will be actively promoting themselves and their work on a regular basis. They’ll also have written books that people really want to read.
That can be the hardest thing of all to crack – it’s hard to know what people really want to read, and trends are changing all the time. That’s one of the reasons why there is always an element of luck involved in succeeding through self-publishing, but it’s also one of the reasons why the industry is so exciting. There are so many books still waiting to be written, and once they have been written, it’s up to us to help them succeed.
