Ugh!

It’s been forever since I’ve posted anything. What can I say? Sometimes life gets in the way. And it certainly has over the past couple of months. But, it’s really more than that, I think. It seems like forever ago, but I posted a while back about my adventures in marketing. Well, these past couple months have shown me what happens if I don’t market my book. Nothing happens. Absolutely nothing.

But, that’s actually good in a way. That will give me a chance to see what individual channels do. Before, I was trying to market every way I could. I was doing Facebook, the Goodreads thing, and, of course, my blog. There was some other stuff, but those were probably the main channels. This time, I’ll take a little more structured approach, I think. Maybe just start with one, add another one in, and so on. Remember, as much as I (might) sound like I know what I’m doing, I’m still figuring this stuff out.

And that point brings me to what I really wanted to post about today. I was having a conversation with a guy the other day who wants to be a writer. I’ve known the guy for a really long time. I don’t know him well, but… Okay. I guess you can say I’ve worked with him for a really long time. Anyway, we were talking in the hallway, and he started drilling me with questions about writing. He’s got a gazillion ideas floating around in his head – more than he knows what to do with (I wish I had that problem), but he can’t get any traction with an actual story. Actually, it might be better to say he gets traction for a few chapters and then stalls.

So, he wanted to know how to do it. He wanted to know how to get from the idea to the finished book. Never mind publishing and marketing and all that junk, he wanted to know how to bring order to the chaos. His biggest challenge is to not jump ship to another story when he gets stuck. As a result, he has scores of unfinished stories and books, and he has no idea how to start finishing them.

So, I remembered my blog. That’s exactly why I created it. Because I believe there are lots of people out there with a genuine talent for writing, but without the confidence or know-how to move to the next step. So, here I am, writing another post. This one doesn’t have any grand words of wisdom (as if any of them do), but it’s a start.

And that’s the best lesson I can teach people like my colleague. You have to start. Then you have to keep taking steps, and stay on course. Refuse to listen to the Siren Song, calling you off to the next shiny thing that is surely going to be easier than what you’re working on.

Until next time…

A Series Dilemma

When should a book be part of a series? For some authors, it seems like the more appropriate question is when shouldn’t a book be part of a series? Everybody and their uncle has one these days. You know what I’m talking about. It seems like half the books on Amazon have the parenthetical A Bobbaloo Buttkiss Mystery or the like. And then there are the trilogies. Hunger Games, Insurgent, Fifty Shades, etc., etc.

I don’t think it’s a secret that this is a marketing technique for many authors. Not all, but many. If people like the first book in the series, then guess what? Chances are good that they’ll buy the second book, the third book, all the way up to the eleven-teenth book. It’s a little hard to fault this logic if your primary goal is to increase your sales. After all, book marketing occurs over the long haul. Very, very few authors can earn a living off a single book.

But this does raise a question. Is it a bad thing to write a series? Even if the logic is sound from a business perspective, we’re authors. We make stuff up for a living. Is it wrong to take the easy path and produce a bunch of sequels?

Hard Lessons in Marketing

I have a confession to make. In the month since my book launched, I have been obsessing over its performance. I was extremely excited when my book first launched. My launch day giveaway yielded over 1,200 downloads with 20 to 30 sales a day for the next few days. But it didn’t take long for everything to change.

As the days and weeks wore on, I started watching my Amazon sales and rankings with a keen interest, feeling almost sick as I watched them plunge into nothingness. I felt discouraged and helpless as my sales dried up and my rankings dropped. I went from 7,000 to 15,000. Then I dropped from 15,000 to 30,000 to 50,000 to 80,000, and so on. I found little solace in the idea that a sales rank of 80,000 is still in the top 8%. You see, I had the unrealistic expectation that my sales would at least stay flat, if not increase a bit each week.

What made it even worse was that nothing I tried worked. Tweeting about my book didn’t help it recover. Neither did Facebook or Goodreads ads. New four and five star reviews didn’t help either. It seemed that nothing could slow my ranking’s steady decline and it just didn’t make sense. Scores of people on various Kindle boards felt the same way about their own books: surely, something is wrong with Amazon’s reporting. We can’t possibly have dropped off a cliff into obscurity, could we have?

The simple answer is this: Yes, we could have, and we did. Of course we did. You see, the real problem is that I didn’t understand how book marketing works because I’ve never done it before. But now, I’m smarter. I know more than I did a month ago.

The Timekeeper’s Son is Free Today

Just a quick blurb today.  I wanted to let everyone know that my book is free today for Kindle.  If you haven’t downloaded it already, give it a read.  And, of course, reviews are more than welcome…

You can get it on Amazon.

Goodreads is Great for Writers

Goodreads boasts something like ten million members, but, in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a flourishing online community for readers. It’s a bit like Facebook in the notion that you can friend people and share status updates. It also has a collection of online forums geared specifically toward reading and/or writing. It allows you to rate and review books, and it has a recommendation engine, too.

These features make it an excellent resource for readers, but it is also an amazing platform for writers. I’m still trying to get this whole marketing thing down, but I’m convinced that Goodreads has been the single biggest influence on my book sales to date. Thanks to Goodreads, somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 people have expressed specific interest in reading my book. I can’t say how many of those folks will actually read it, but that is a huge jump start above where I would have been without it.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

I’ve been thinking about marketing a lot this week. A whole lot. As some of you probably know, my book, The Timekeeper’s Son, released a week ago yesterday. Because of that, I’ve been all about watching sales and trying to figure out how to make them climb. Unfortunately, I haven’t learned a whole lot in that regard. What I have learned is a bunch about what not to do. I’ve been scouring the web looking for effective marketing strategies and I’ve been diving into to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

I think I’ve learned a lot this week about the things that don’t work. I thought I’d share some of those and, this time, I’ll focus on Twitter.

The Timekeeper’s Son Launch was a Huge Success!

First off, I want to thank everyone who went out and downloaded my book Monday. More books were downloaded than I thought possible. By the end of the day, it reached 973 downloads, making it number eleven in the free suspense category and 351 overall. That is absolutely amazing, at least to me.

If you’re one of the folks who have gone out and downloaded it, I have one request. Please review it. Whether you love the book or not, reviews are gold to an author; they really are.