Walking Away from the Stress of the “Big Release”

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Kirkus Reviews interviewed me Tuesday for an author profile in the indie section they’ve got now.  I had a nice talk with Sarah Rettger, who is writing the story.

One question flustered me, though, and usually does whenever I’m asked it.  What type of promo has worked well for you? I answered, as I always do, that I don’t actually really promote.  I do build up my name as a platform online (Twitter, blogging), but that’s mostly to increase my profile in Google rankings so that readers can easily find me.  This strategy appears to work since readers seem to have no trouble finding me.

My lack of promo is something that I’ve always felt guilty about, though, especially for my Penguin books. I feel, there, as if I’m letting an entire team down by not promoting.  I don’t feel that way for my self-published books because no one is making profit on my sales except me…and whatever retailer sold the book.

I’ve been encouraged in the past by Penguin to do some small-scale promoting.  I suspect that they’re baffled by my platform, which is clearly writer-centric. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not marketing to writers…I’m connecting with them.  But it makes things difficult when Penguin does ask me to do a bit of promo—a tweet, for instance, for a giveaway they’re doing for one of my releases.  I’ll do it when asked…but I’m tweeting writers.  You know?  It doesn’t make sense to me.  So what I’ve done is  promote their giveaway on my Riley Adams Facebook profile instead.  That’s a place where I’m mainly connected to readers.    If they directly ask me to do something, I’ll try to figure out a way to do it (usually).

What I’ve done in the past as promo:

Radio interviews

Skype interviews

Podcasts

Blog tours

Reader conferences (I’m with my author friends at the circa 2010 Malice Conference in the photo above…and we did have fun. Always love spending time with writers.)

Guest posts on Penguin’s various blogs

Emails to extended friends and family (ugh)

Facebook updates

Goodreads giveaways

Bookmarks

Author panels at libraries and bookstores

Signings

Postcards to bookstores and libraries

The absolute worst…cold calls to bookstores

As a side note, I never paid for ads. Not in magazines, not on local radio, not on Facebook, not on Goodreads.  I didn’t feel as if I was making enough to justify ads.

But I even, for my first Penguin release, went on a very centralized book tour with several other Penguin authors.  I enjoyed being with the other writers…although public speaking and appearances are stressful for me and I was exhausted afterward.  There was an additional problem, too—I guess some of us are just going to feel guilty no matter what, because while I was feeling good about the promo I was doing, I felt guilty about not being at home with my kids.  Parents can’t win in the guilt department, of course.

And, y’all, this sort of promo is expensive.  The tour, the conferences.  I’m a midlist writer.  I should have been writing.

And don’t think any of the promo really did any good. I haven’t noticed that sales have declined since I’ve stopped this stuff. And I have a lot more time to write and am a lot less stressed.

At some point I hit upon the perfect excuse.  I frequently had three or four releases in a year…was I seriously going to do heavy promo for each launch?  I figured that promoting that number of releases would irritate friends and family and spam readers and writers. If readers wanted to find out about releases, they could sign up for my newsletter or follow me on Facebook…I didn’t need to try to stick my new release in front of them.  Besides, Amazon’s marvelous algorithm (however it works) always seems to kick in after a few days.

What I’m doing now:

Goodreads giveaways occasionally

Facebook announcement of releases

Updated website

Reader newsletter

Fussy Librarian

As for ads/paid promo, one exception is that I may consider BookBub soon since I’ve heard some good stuff about it (Joanna Penn’s piece from April of last year, for example).

The biggest thing that I do to promote is to write more books.

With my book releases for my publisher, I did feel pressure to promote in the first few weeks after the launch.  That could be tough to do—especially if I was under deadline for another book at the time (which was frequently the case).

With the digital revolution, there’s now the so-called “long tail” of publishing.  The important thing is to look at sales as something that take place for a long time…over the decades of our career.  Writer Joanna Penn interviewed industry expert Jane Friedman and there’s a fascinating transcript of their conversation on Joanna’s post “Money, Writing And Life With Jane Friedman.”  I’ve read the article several times over the past couple of weeks and found something different and interesting each time.  Highly recommended for any career-minded author.  Regarding the topic of promo, Joanna Penn stated: “…most books sell very few copies every day, whether you’re indie published or traditionally published, but hopefully that continues for a long time, that is the business model, small over time.”  Jane Friedman responded: “Right, and I hope that traditional publishing gets away from this launch mentality. I think slowly we’re getting away from that. I think the independent authors have been so good at pointing out to the larger community, ‘Let’s not focus on the first three months or six months, because the real potential is over the career.’”

So this is where I am with the issue. Convinced enough that promo doesn’t help to avoid doing it…but still susceptible to guilt when asked about it!

How about you?  What sort of promo have you done…and what were your thoughts on the outcome?

 

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