I hate to sound like an old fogey, but I think it was easier in the old days. In the old days, you wrote a novel, sent it to a publisher, got a rejection slip, and moved on to the next project. Now it’s far more complex. I’ve done the first part, I’ve written a novel, and, instead of sending it to a publisher, I’ve gone through CreateSpace to self publish it. That was a fairly easy task. CreateSpace, if you know nothing about it, is an Amazon company that will eventually change the world of publishing. It allows you to upload a PDF file of your book, create cover art, set up pricing, etc. When all that is done, and CreateSpace makes it very easy, the book magically appears on Amazon just like a real book. In fact, it is a real published paperback with an ISBN number and all. You can also go through Amazon directly and upload the same book for publication on the Kindle.
The only hard part of this entire process, apart for writing the darn thing in the first place, is editing it. You have no idea how many stupid little mistakes you make even with a good spell checker. But since I can’t spell for beans, I have my daughter-in-law handle the terrible editing task.Anyway, after all that, you have a genuine paperback novel for sale. And you can actually talk some of your friends and family into buying the thing. But your friends and family are hardly going to make it a best seller or even move it past the threshold where they’ll actually send you a royalty check. What you have to do is market the book.
And this explains why publishing houses exist. They can actually force bookstores to take copies of your book and maybe even put them where people will trip over them. And they can get reviewers to read them and even put a well-placed ad somewhere if they think it worth the effort. That doesn’t mean you’ll sell even one copy or that the reviews won’t call it the worst drivel ever written. But at least it’s marketing.
None of this exists in the world of self-publishing. Lost in the hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells and the just-over a hundred thousand self-published ones, your little book shines like a tiny star in the night sky. You are the only one who can see it because you know where it is.
In order to self-market your self-published book, I am told you must do three things. First you need a web site. The web site is to bring you closer to the faithful fans that don’t exist yet. I was a programmer in my real life, so creating a web site was sort of fun. I’m now having it reviewed by my son who has experience with this sort of thing. When that’s done I’ll put it up on the web through a web site provider who will charge me a monthly fee for hosting my site. Now I will be a little shining star in a whole other universe and still no one will know I’m there.
Next, I’m told, you have to try to sell your book of Facebook. I’ve been on Facebook for a while and still seem to miss the point of what it’s all about. Not to belittle my ‘friends’, but I seem to get an awful lot of nonsense from them, generally with pictures of people I don’t know. And one of my friends keeps trying to sell me imaginary items from his imaginary world. I recently bought two books on Facebook to see if I was missing something. One was how to market stuff and the advice was common sense that any blithering idiot would know up front. The other was how to set up Facebook, which I’d already done. Maybe I’m just too old to understand the value of Facebook, however young at heart I see myself.
The other channel the experts suggest is Twitter. To show you how out of touch I am, I thought Twitter was just for phones! I signed up the other day, and am still in the process of learning how it works, but my first impression is that Twitter is ten times better than Facebook. I see the point of it. It will take time, but I can see how you can build up a list of followers who are interested in what you say and the articles and books you recommend. And like the six degrees of separation we’ve heard do much about, your follower’s followers will give you a huge network of people who can look for that littler star of yours gleaming in the night sky. And who knows what will happen then.
So let’s review what it is you have to do to market a self published book. You must maintain a web site, make constant updates to your Facebook account, send dozens of Tweets, and even write a blog like this. Of course, none of this leaves you time to writer another book, which was what you love to do far more than any of the things listed.
Maybe rejection slips were a lot simpler.
I can prove I actually did write a book by sending you to http://www.amazon.com/Good-People-William-Ramsay/dp/1463545649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325626827&sr=8-1
You can Tweet me at @RamsayW1.
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