After printing 8 of my books by myself, I embarked on two summer's worth of vending opportunities at children's festivals, church bazaars, and book festivals. I barely made enough in sales to pay for my travel, hotel, and table fees, but I kept plugging along. When I finally switched to Amazon KDP and IngramSpark, I thought, "My books are now available to the world, I don't have to do anything now."
WRONG! They say that writing the book is the easy part. That is not true. Writing is work, repetition, revision, agonizing over the words, crying when you have to delete them, and deciding when it's done.
But, writing is the part authors like to do the best. We get excited when our words are in print and we feel the rest of the world should be just as excited. BUT, they're not. We have to generate the excitement for them in order for them to want our words. I believe that's where the expression, "Writing is the easy part." came from.
If an author is lucky, they are a good businessman. They will understand how to sell, where to sell, what to price things, how to advertise. Traditionally published authors, with the 5 big companies, get a little help with that since the publisher decides some of that, but self-published authors are on their own.
BEWARE the scammers. Investigate any agency that offers you help for $$$$. Some will do great things, others not. You have to do your research and decide which is best for you. Do you use Amazon targeted ads, pay per click advertising, or branded ads, (daily rate) or do you take out ads in news media, or stand on street corners hawking your book like they did newspapers i the olden days? Do you do author visits or in-store book signings? I have a long list of marketing ideas that you can try.
Something I found most helpful, is subscribing to newsletters, reading blogs, and attending webinars. I attended a Wix website building & SEO webinar once. The webinar was free because they were trying to sell their services. If you are strong, and resist the sales pitch, you can learn a lot from these free webinars. I don't think I understood much of what they were talking about in this one, but I was placed on a newsletter list and I receive email blasts that I normally just delete. (I can't figure out how to unsubscribe from that one. However, I'm glad I didn't. Today's email was about MARKETING.
After reading it, and I'll paste the link below, I realized that I've approached marketing all wrong. I've approached it from the standpoint of, "I have a great book and ya'll should read it." Obviously, that doesn't work. Turn the tables around and think of your book as a business. It's a product and you need to make your audience want it or need it. It may sound the same, but the first is passive, the second is not.
Anyway, all this to say, read this article and think about your books as your business. Here's the link to the article.
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