Marketing.
It’s the doom of all of us. Oh, there’s a hundred and one books out there about how to use social media to market your books. Facebook’s crap for it. Twitter doesn’t lead to sales, because it’s too short a form. And Goodreads groups have taken to creating spaces for authors to dump their promotional material where nobody needs to look at it.
The internet is saturated with assholes like me, writing blog posts about writing and desparately trying to claw our way over one another to make a sale. I’m no better. I’ve got the Facebook page, the Twitter account and (ta da) the blog. I’ve done it all. And it’s led me to a moderate amount of success, but nothing where I can quit my day job.
This has gotten so bad that people are selling snake-oil books to authors about how to do this kind of digital marketing. Like this guy over here to the right. If you got 10,000+ Preorders as a first time self-published author, then you don’t need to actually sell a book about how you got 10,000+ preorders as a first time self-published author.
But you’re hoping to sell books to desperate authors, because that’s actually an easier market to sell to than the flooded genre fiction market.
So we keep blogging, and tweeting, and it keeps yielding limited results. Because this? It’s not where the readers are.
They’re not even at the cons. Bless the cons, I love them. The fans you meet at cons are rabid and wonderful and the best people in the world. And there’s marketing to be done there, sure, but it’s not going to make you a big seller either.
There’s one thing that will. One place that makes the difference between selling your books, and not selling your books. That place is the Amazon “Best Sellers” list.
See, if people are buying your book, then Amazon figures your book sells. That means Amazon wants more people to look at your book, so you move onto their “Best Sellers” list. The higher your sales rank, the more easily people can access your book. The more easily people can access your book, the higher your sales go. You can see the spiral here.
The big publishers have this figured out. They run massive campaigns to make sure their material is cranked the heck up, hoping that they can breach that Top Sellers list and get that snowball effect of sales going.
I don’t have their resources. All I have is you. If you’re reading this, and you’ve come this far in, you realize that you are the only hope that indie authors have of breaking their way into that list. So I’m issuing a call. I’m trying to do, with nothing but my handful of friends and the viral nature of the internet, what the big publishers are doing using all of their marketing resources.
We’re trying to, for one brief moment, punch into that “Best Sellers” list.
Falling From Grace releases on February 12th. I’ve got a number of fans who read our books. If I can get all of those fans, all of the people who would buy the books over the course of the month following their release, to all purchase on the date of release instead, then there’s a good chance I break into that list. It’ll be temporary, but once we’re there, others who’ve never heard of Frog and Esther Jones will notice us, and have a chance to keep us there.
So it’s an experiment. Can we, using nothing but you, break our way through the corporate structure and make some sales? I have no idea.
But damned if I don’t want to find out.
So, here’s a link to the Facebook Event, if you haven’t seen it already. Chipping in is no more than your daily cup of coffee, and if we all do it together on February 12th, maybe we make a bit of a dent in how this marketing thing happens.
Thank you in advance for joining me in this effort.