Friday 18 May 2012

Promotion


One of the interesting things about watching the whole "indie publishing" thing has been seeing what other authors are doing to "promote" their work. There are several places where readers gather and authors make themselves known, set out their stall. Kindleboards is an obvious example: GoodReads is another. A less obvious place is Amazon itself.

How obvious it is depends on how the site works, but all of these places are flooded with "indie" authors like me, hustling for sales. In every one of these sites, hustling for sales is severely restricted or outright banned, so the authors find less direct ways to promote.

The obvious one is lots of social networking. They spend a long time on the discussion boards (or groups, or whatever they are called) chatting about other works in their chosen genre, or about completely unrelated matters, in the hopes that someone will be their friend and buy their books. Maybe it works.

There are other ways of promoting, too. And I'm not doing them.

You see, I think my readers would rather I concentrated on what they like: my writing.

And the people that are yet to discover me? It would be better if, when they discover me, they have more to discover.

I'm sure I will get around to more serious promotion. But I'm going to write a whole lot more first.


http://www.readerviews.com/Articles-Marketing_Why_Authors_Need_To_Write_Second_Book.html

http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/06/the-business-rusch-promotion/

Thursday 17 May 2012

Small Moves

Last night I passed the 90,000 word mark on Book 2, "Hermes and the Sea People." So the first draft is a couple of chapters from being done.

Also, Rachael at my publisher, Cnoc Mhuilinn, has added a buy button to my website. You can order "Venus and the Sea People" in trade paperback, and if you wish I will sign it for you when I am next in their office.