Shoveling Manure and Marketing.

The Marketing Game, AKA “Sales”

Artists are usually terrible at marketing; worse than terrible. There is no interest, no skill, and no ability. It is a strange foreign land best avoided. There are plagues there, and wars, terrible diseases and piles of manure.

I just finished a David Baldacci thriller, and in the acknowledgments section he thanked all the people who helped him get the book out. There were many editors, consultants, proof readers, and a few who he thanked because, “books don't sell themselves.”

Well, that's for sure, even for a known writer like him.

A writer who enters the market with his first novel must work hard to get his work noticed. But how? There is very little chance of getting a big publishing house to take you on, so it all has to be done by the poor writer who just wants to go to his corner and write. Some may delude themselves into thinking, “If I build it they will come.” Not likely.

So the writer is forced to learn to sell. It is a terrible situation. To the writer, selling is like learning to speak Chinese with a mouth full of Laffy Taffy, or maybe Ivory soap. It is a daunting task. It can strike paralyzing fear in the hearts of the artist who just wants to create. Someone else can do the other stuff. Please.

If the writer has a nice fat bank account, he can spend a fortune on publicity and promotional campaigns run by people who do those things. After a while, if his work is good, he might get noticed, and maybe even get a nice buzz going. But he will probably never recover all the money he spent, unless someone like Speilberg comes along and buys the movie rights.

There are hundreds of thousands of currently published books out there, maybe millions. That means there are just about as many authors who would dearly love to be noticed, and maybe sell a few or a lot of books. Me included. Readers mean appreciation and validation, and that is a great reward for the work. A little money is nice too, unless you need sales to pay the rent, and then it is a terrible and usually hopeless necessity.

After almost a month of being on Amazon my first novel ranks around 381,000 in sales in the Kindle store. Honestly, I don't know how many books are available, maybe 381,001 for all I know. But I have sold a few copies, twenty five or thirty, and I am very happy with that. I have not done any promotion at all, and maybe half are family and friends. So half are strangers! Yea!

Smashwords reports only a couple sales, but over 200 free downloads from the first week, so we will see how the free ones convert to an interest in the follow up novel. (Amy Allen: Superhero will be free on Smashwords this weekend 4-26 and 4-27, and you don't need a kindle or a tablet. There are several formats offered.)

So, I will move out of my warm and cozy writing corner and take the cold marketing plunge. I am going to run a couple ads in our paper, and try to get a book signing lined up at the local book store. The print copy will be available next week after I finish doing the final approval. I will put out a press release, and our little weekly will likely print it since it involves a local author. Those are my big plans. So stay tuned.

And if you are so inclined, you might want to review my books. Reviews help, and people read them.

Maybe I'll get a sign board and hang out with the sign wavers over by Costco! Fat chance. Can you see me dancing on a corner doing the Happy Dance, waving the cover of “Finding Amy” around? We can have a sign waver convention and barter. I'll buy your pizza if you buy my book! Or maybe I can do the homeless beggar on the street corner trick. I can make a cardboard sign saying: “Desperate writer and Viet Nam vet needs readers. Just a page helps. God Bless!”

But right now I am going to shovel manure. I am not being sarcastic or injecting a clever metaphor. I really am going to unload a truck full of dairy manure for my garden. And you thought I was talking trash about being a salesman, didn't you! Well, I thought about it, but the manure is real, and the stink is too. Sometimes we just have to dig in and shovel.