The Trouble with Descent Macabre

Descent Macabre is a dark occult drama written by one of my long-time beta-readers and the narrator of the audio book version of Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss, Chicago-area actor Kat O’Connor. She published Descent Macabre in May of 2013, and while it gets good reviews and is generally considered well written, it hasn’t moved very many copies.

Why Doesn’t It Sell?

The simplest reasons Descent Macabre doesn’t sell is discoverability and marketing. It’s a dark story of manipulation, abusive relationships, and death, a twisted tale of obsession and resistance, but the cover doesn’t really reflect any of these aspects. Any description of the plot alone would lead one to believe that it’s an entirely different sort of book due to market conditions, a paranormal romance, when really it’s the genre’s inverse.

The protagonist meets the domineering stranger with paranormal aspects who tries to pull her into an abusive relationship, using classical brainwashing and conditioning techniques. She does not give in to him, she does not fall in love, he is not a poor misunderstood alpha male looking for the right girl to settle down with.

The protagonist is strong. The antagonist is weak, vile,  a user, and the book doesn’t glorify that relationship.

There is no happy ending.

So yeah, it’s a tough sell.

Why? I think that it’s simply a matter of not being able to find its audience.

What Would Help

The only advice I can give Kat is to write more books to better establish her brand presence within publishing. The more books you write, the more of each title you’ll sell. This isn’t feasible, however – while Descent Macabre is well-written, Kat isn’t an author, she’s an actor, which is a full time creative job on its own, and she’s busy trying to get her own production company, Burning Brigid, off the ground.

It’s not impossible to write just one book and have it sell, but it’s unlikely. Winning the lottery while getting struck by lightning unlikely. So, in the absence of writing more books, I would council Kat to just accept that she’s not going to sell a lot of copies of the book. Which is too bad – it’s good, and more people should read it.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

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