Be seeing you
Well-p… it’s become abundantly clear to me that I’ve absolutely failed in my efforts to promote my novels online. Spending time on forums, contributing to this blog, using social media both to promote my interests and my books, have netted me a solid goose-egg of sales.
Look at the numbers: I have less than a dozen followers on Twitter and Facebook. My blog post views are generally in the low single digits (unless I mention Star Trek on another site and link back to my Trek posts, in which case I can expect to see obscene page views for a 50-year-old show). I am not shared, retweeted, liked or linked to. And most importantly, no one who sees any of those pages ever—EVER—goes and buys a book.
In fact, saying all this is more to hear myself talk, since it’s not going to be seen by more than 3 people (if it’s a good week).
All of that is a shame… because, when I started producing my books, I knew that the only means I had to promote and sell them would be online. With my day job and my lack of advertising funds, there was no way I could manage anything else. I put stock in the oft-repeated claims by many others that, if you produce enough books and spend the time online to build up your cred, a slow trickle of buyers would eventually become a flood and you’d do… well, okay. (No one promised I’d be famous, and I never wanted to be. I just wanted to see a measurable second income from the books.) So I wrote 15 books and sunk all of my last nine years free time into building that online cred, and waited patiently for all that effort to bear fruit.
As it turned out, I didn’t do okay. I didn’t make a measurable second income. I didn’t make enough to keep my Starbucks card charged. I made less than the change that accumulates in my pockets after a week of buying cheap lunches near my office. I made Bupkis. I got rocks. Charlie Brown‘s rocks. My strategy to leverage the newfound power of the online world managed to turn me into a grain of rice in an enormous pot of stew, doomed to float about unseen in the brothy depths beneath the sumptuous meats and colorful veggies, unable to fight the currents of notice or popularity.
So, come the beginning of 2014 (unless I get into a pique of frustration and do it sooner), I’ll be killing the Twitter account, the books-dedicated Facebook page, and quite possibly, this blog. I’ll almost assuredly kill the website; after all, it’s costing me far more to keep it running than anything I’m actually making. I’ll leave the books in place on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for now, but with no way to advertise them, I expect them to continue their inexorable fall to new depths in the bookstore rankings.
This will obviously end my brief second career, the one I hoped would help finance my retirement… I have become another in a huge statistic of unknown and unmourned indie writers, those for whom lightning never struck, who never escaped their primordial pool, who bubbled once, hopefully, before dissipating in the ooze.
I’ve been told that, in such situations, you should always put on a brave, optimistic face and try to convince your public that you still believe the Sun will come out tomorrow. Well, I don’t have a public; so to hell with the brave face. To hell with recriminations, blame or complaints. It was a nice dream while it lasted; but like so many things, it was always to be a dream only. Time to wake up.
Be seeing you.
