Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

All the things people tell you to do...

Geared mainly at promoting and selling your books --

1. Do social networking -- well...I already do facebook, Shelfari, LinkedIn, GoodReads, and have my own author page on Amazon and Kobo. But you also have to do Twitter, Plaxo, Ryze, BranchOut, MeetUp, Digg, YouTube...and the list goes on and on.

2. Have a website...which I have but is pretty basic, as in 1 whole page, right now. I could do a lot more with it.

3. Direct Marketing -- like by post cards or blast e-mails and fliers. You can buy into e-mail and postal lists to inform people of your work.

4. Blogging...which I already do.

5. Attend trade shows and book fairs and events. We're not taking about the book fairs I currently go to; those are for books long out of print or general availability. We're talking things like trade fairs and specialty fairs. Where you buy a booth and hop you sell enough books to pay for it.

6. Enter for awards and hope you get some.

7. Ads. I've done that on facebook for "The Lyons' Den" and "Bobby Carapisi" and gotten a lot of notice for it, but not much in the way of sales. And while it's not massively expensive, it's still cutting into my budget.

8. Ask for referrals from your friends. Been there, done that, can't even get them to give me more than 17 likes on my facebook pages.

9. Get reviews. I've tried that like crazy. I've got plenty on GoodReads and a few on Amazon and Barnes & noble, but other than that I can't even get Rainbow Book Reviews to do one for LD. Seems they like puffy sex stories. And the magazines I contact either ignore me or say it's not what they want to do.

This is a 40 hour a week job where you pay your own way to do it. The guy who hosted a webinar about this as much as said so. It took him years of work to get to where he made decent money in return, and during that time his wife supported him. Well...that ain't happenin' with me, that's fer dang sure. And I'm too old to find a sugar daddy. So I guess I'll keep plugging along.

This old gray mare ain't what she used to be.

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