But How Will They Find Us? Book Marketing and Promotion

If you’ve been publishing for any length of time, either traditionally or independently, you know that there’s little money in books. If money’s your goal, sell real estate (but make sure you’re good at it).
So let’s agree that we’re not in this for the money. Still, we’d like to have readers. How can they find us?
The odds are against a reader simply stumbling upon your book. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and put your book up for sale on all the major platforms and see who notices.
No one.
Simple principles of supply and demand are at work here. Solid figures on titles published are hard to come by, but take two recent numbers from Bowker on US publishing alone—391,000 self-published titles in 2012, and 347,000 traditionally published print books in 2011. Do a little extrapolation and it’s not hard to validate a figure that gets tossed around quite a bit: 3,000 books published per day, worldwide.
And here’s the thing: books no longer go out of print. With e-publishing and print on demand, these books will be around forever. How can your book stand out when it’s competing with a million books this year, two million next year, three million the next year, and so on?
There are some very good reasons why the average book sells only 250 copies, and why most self-published books sell fewer than 150 copies. (For more on the numbers, check out these articles in Forbes, the New York Times, and Out:think)
My point is not to discourage anyone from writing. I believe in the power of the written word and feel privileged to have been a published author for the past seventeen years. My point is that if you want more than 150 readers, you either need to convince a traditional publisher that your book will generate sufficient corporate profits after their substantial costs of production, distribution, and marketing have been met, or you need to enter into this adventure of independent publishing with both eyes open and a strategic plan for building a readership.
This week, I’ll be moderating a panel at a statewide convention on the arts that brings together writers and also musicians to address this question of how our creative work finds its audience. Since their industry imploded/exploded a few years earlier than the shake-up in the book industry, I’m looking forward to discovering what musicians have learned about “discoverability.”
Already, in our planning session, my fellow panelists have offered these helpful thoughts on discoverability, to which I’ll add a few of my own:
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