The Sixteenth Task

So I read this post the other day. It was about marketing your own books. It’s something I’m really bad at, so, even though all these posts say the same thing, I read them anyway, just in case the next one contains that brilliant insight that will make all the difference.

This particular post was about what to do on the day of a book’s release. I’ve got a book coming out soon (Cargo Cult, a sci-fi comedy, will be available on 1st April) and I’d really like the release to go well, so I was ready for this post. It was framed as a checklist of things to do on the big day and listed sixteen different activities (like remembering to update your Amazon author’s page, posting links to the book on social media sites, and so on). It was disappointing stuff, not because it wasn’t all sensible, but because of the sixteen things, I already do fifteen of them, and the sixteenth, well…

The sixteenth was to send out a mass email to your readers to let them know that the book was available to buy.

I know that book marketers swear by this but I’ve always eschewed the practice because it seemed sort of, you know, tacky.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” I hear the marketing gurus cry. “If you ask people to subscribe to email updates” (they tend to use the term “newsletter”) “and they do, it’s because they actually want to hear from you. They are genuinely interested.”

And I suppose it’s true, they must be. In fact, I subscribe to over a hundred websites myself – shops, news sites, magazines, individual bloggers, other authors, publishers, social campaign sites, political parties, cartoons, and on and on. Yet, I would still feel guilty asking people to subscribe to my site, knowing I was doing it just so that I could email them about my books in the hope that they would buy them.

So I looked at that sixteenth activity. I turned it round in my head. I imagined doing it. I worried about whether it was the all-important missing ingredient. In the end, I decided to bite the bullet and just do it. So there it is up there at the top of the right-hand column (if you’re reading this on my blog, otherwise, click here to see it). A subscription form.

I feel cheap. I feel like an evil spammer. But, above all, I want my books to have the best chance they can possibly have – especially Cargo Cult, which I’ve been nurturing for fourteen years now.

So, please sign up. I promise there won’t be many emails and there may even be news you want to hear in the few you get. I’m also thinking about ways I can “add value” to the subscription by offering free content and that kind of thing.

And, if nobody signs up, at least I can continue to go broke with a clear conscience.