Daily Archives: November 17, 2017

One of the things I really did not understand about writing when I finally managed to get a book published back in 2009 is that writing the book is the easy part. Marketing the book is the real challenge. I recently read an interview with an author who was asked for tips on marketing books, and not one of their responses was even marginally useful. The recommendations were all basically “make the story as good as you can,” which doesn’t help you at all if you can’t get your book in front of people in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, whenever you write you do want to make the story as good as you possibly can. But aren’t we already working on this? Maybe the author interviewed was talking about a strategy that I’ve seen some ebook authors use of cranking out as many books as possible without much editing or revision on the grounds that it gives them that many more chances for readers to happen upon their work. I will grant, that strategy can produce some really bad writing, and when people do come upon it they are less likely to be captivated by it – even if the bad stuff does get popular sometimes.

But still, all of that is on the writing side. I’m convinced there has to be some sort of trick to cracking book marketing – some people seem to be good at it and others not so much. Part of it seems to be surprisingly old-school, as I wrote about awhile back – you need to get your book mentioned on the largest media platform possible for it to get traction. That’s old-school in that it’s less of a change to the market than a lot of people think. Twenty or thirty years ago publishers were the gatekeepers, and now it seems that media companies serve the same role.

Over the next couple of months I’m going to be experimenting with some of the book marketing services out there, and I’ll let you know what my results are. The first one I’m trying out is free promotion from Shout My Book. They have paid plans that are not that expensive, and if the free promotion gets results I’ll go ahead a likely do one of those as well. I just submitted Trump Card for promotion, and it should go out sometime in the next week.

Instead of linking directly to Amazon or any other retailer, I’ve retooled the links here and over on Augoeides to point to my book landing pages so I can analyze the traffic more easily. One of my first takeaways is that I get basically zero click-throughs on my fiction from my magick blog, even though it racks up something like twenty thousands hits a month. I do get some click-throughs on my non-fiction magick books, but it seems that Augoeides is totally the wrong market for fiction. That’s one of the reasons I’m trying to do more blogging about writing over here.

But I don’t really know if that’s the answer, either. This author site gets nowhere near the traffic that Augoeides does, and it has to become more popular before I get a good sense of all that. That’s another reason I used the landing page link for my Shout My Book submission rather than Amazon. Hopefully some of the folks who click on Trump Card – which, by the way, is just terrific, will find themselves on this site and like more of what they see.

So the whole point is to find out. If I keep getting a good sense of the traffic from my various promotional efforts, I can focus on keeping what works and not wasting my time on stuff that doesn’t. Not only that, I hope that by sharing those results I can help other authors understand the game of marketing better as I learn about it myself.