Adventures in Publishing – Week 9

This week I have been concentrating mainly on our publisher’s website (www.millenniumbirdhouse.com) even though I am acutely aware that it is probably the least important thing I could possibly be doing. What I need to be doing is putting together a sweeping marketing strategy for the book in the form of a coordinated free hard-copy giveaway on Goodreads, a 48-hour free book promotion through Amazon KDP, and strategically place banner adds on selected websites. Alas, this is the nature of procrastination: establish exactly what must be done, then do something else entirely.

I have also been giving a great deal of thought to the subject of virology. No, not the medical kind, the kind defined by the semi-hysteric proliferation of some fad or personage over the social mediasphere. What is commonly refereed to as “going viral”. The daydream most common to first-time authors as they approach the end of their debut offering is one of near instant mass recognition of their undying talent. I know this not only because I have suffered the malady on several occasions myself, but have witnessed testimony to its existence by many others. So I should be over it by now. But I’m not.

There is, of course, no formula for setting this proverbial tidal wave in motion. One of it’s primary characteristics is unpredictability. And yet I keep harking back to something my dear mother once asserted. I can’t remember where or what the exact context was, but it came down to this: most people who “make it” do so either by sheer chance (and often with some reluctance), or at the tail end of a long and arduous battle for recognition. The later being by far the most common path. Netflix, with its large back-catalog of current A-listers appearing in long-forgotten B-rate movies, is a revealing testament to this. This, in turn, got me thinking about what “going all out” really means to an aspiring author or publisher with limited time and even more limited human and financial capital. The internet, for all its seeming reach and relatively low cost of participation, can be deceptive in this regard. The average blog or website is a mere drop in the ocean, as likely to attract the attention of a single browser as a grain of sand. The most recent book I read on the subject of marketing put the point succinctly by first asking, rhetorically, why no one was buying your books, then stating that it was because no one knows who you were. This, incidentally, must be the driving force behind many of the car crashes out there posing as works of fiction. It’s the perfect fall-back, especially when you consider that the last thing most authors seem to take into account when chewing on the problem of low or non-existent book sales is the book itself. But I digress.

I have concluded that to have any chance of infecting the populace with enthusiasm for our books we will have to start by shedding all preconceptions about which avenues seem worthwhile, and just going for broke in every direction possible. There is a feel of shamelessness to this course, but I’m starting to believe that pride and dignity may be the first and necessary down-payment on the long (or short!) road to eternal bliss.

What all this adds up to is that I am going to have to fundamentally alter my approach. So far, I have relied more on the things I am comfortable doing, rather than what convention dictates to be effective. Ironically, I have set aside a pretty decent advertising budget, but remain reluctant to commit it to action in case I end up wishing I had sparred myself the agony and just burnt the money instead. Yet something must be done.

I should probably start by terminating this post.

Watch this space.