I am trying to market my books right now… and it isn’t going that well.
Now, part of the issue is that one of my two books is free and the other one is free if you join my mailing list. That means of course they aren’t making money (I was surprised to find that my first book had actually sold a paperback copy the other day – completely out of the blue!)
The thing is, even with that my mailing list isn’t growing very much.
I have book downloads every day, at least for book 1. Book 2 isn’t getting much in the ways of downloads – well, it gets a few, but the numbers are pretty low.
The strategy I’m using is to give away book 1 and then have people subscribe at the back of the book. Of course, I’m not ranked terribly well on Amazon right now, so not a lot of people know about my book.
It should be discouraging. It should be making me sweat, panic, whatever. I mean, I’ve decided that I want to make money off of this and so far that isn’t working.
Here’s the thing – I know that I haven’t put in the work yet.
Yes, my book has been out for a long time (about four years) but I’m just now starting to really promote it. My mailing list went from a few people to twenty-four over a month. That’s a tiny mailing list – I have plans to make it grow.
I also know that the genre I have picked for my books isn’t the most popular in the world and I have defied genre conventions in both my titles and my cover art. That’s a decision I made when I was trying to sell a few books while making most of my income from a day job. It was also naivete. I thought that I was being smart, being literary, doing something that was new and innovative. Turns out I was mostly just making sure that fans of the genre I write in wouldn’t pick up my books.
For my next series, I’m doing things a little differently. The Strange Tales of Jenny Dark is a more popular genre (urban fantasy with strong horror elements and a degree of romance thrown in). I’m also going to make sure that my covers look more like the books I’m trying to emulate.
Yeah, keywords don’t mean as much now as they used to, at least on Amazon… but I’m baking it into the core marketing methods.
I’m also going to be publishing a lot more material.
I write every day, but I’m upping the amount by a large margin.
One thing is the number of hours I put into this work per day. I have been putting in short days. Not nearly enough. I plan to actually write for at least fifteen hours a week.
That doesn’t seem like a lot right?
Well, I write around two thousand five hundred words an hour. That means around thirty-seven thousand five hundred a week. That’s a pretty decent output. It also means I have time for editing, outlining, research, and marketing. The goal is an eight hour day at least five days a week, probably with a few hours left over on the weekend.
So I’m failing right now, but I haven’t failed and I won’t. Failing is a temporary state, one that exists before you put in the work needed to succeed.
Join my mailing list for lots and lots of free resources for writers including a copy of my upcoming book once it is released – http://bit.ly/2PfXo00-bcwritelist
