Self-Promotion
May 25th, 2012I do it. Anyone reading my blog knows that. But last night I had a reality-check.
I’m in a writers group with four members, myself included. We usually meet once a month, but because of scheduling conflicts, last night was the first time we’d gotten together in six weeks.
I was bemused to discover that, despite what I thought was a thorough promotional blitz across twitter, facebook, G+, and this blog, not one of my three fellow members was aware that I had a short story out this month from Lightspeed Magazine–a story they critiqued, no less.
This is a very supportive group, and we follow each other on twitter and facebook. It’s not like they don’t care. So the situation begs the question: if I can’t get the word out to people I actually know, if I can’t get their attention, what hope for the wider world?
Unfortunately, I have no answer for that. We’re all busy with our own lives and thousands of things are vying for our attention. But it’s my business to write and sell books and stories. Obviously, how to succeed at the “sell†part is going to take further thought and innovation. People cannot buy books or stories if they don’t know that the books and stories exist.
Time for new ideas, I think. Or magic pixie dust.
Posted on: Friday, May 25th, 2012 at 7:35 am
Categories: Promotion.
Tags: indie publishing, promotion
May 25th, 2012 at 8:38 am
The larger problem is that you can’t really successfully promote yourself, because you are assumed to be biased in your own favor.
This doesn’t explain the problem with your writer’s group—there it’s probably just that Twitter is an _extremely_ lossy medium, as are facebook and G+. I’d say that in order to be sure everyone will read what you write, you should put it in your blog, except that that probably doesn’t work either because most people don’t use RSS feeds.
I think the communications aspect of this is a hard problem, and not likely to get fixed anytime soon, because I’m not aware of anyone who’s working on it. Of course, that’s usually how it is until the new amazing software comes out and everybody switches to it, so maybe I’m being overly pessimistic.
As for the trust aspect, you probably already know this and don’t need me to belabor it, but being the pedant that I am, I will anyway: you need to get influential people reading your stuff and liking it.
May 25th, 2012 at 9:21 am
Ted, thanks for the feedback! My Internet just went down. I’d like to comment more when I’m not on my phone…
May 25th, 2012 at 9:35 am
Oh, the irony. I’m in a chair in the sky and have better connectivity. I hope it gets fixed soon!
May 25th, 2012 at 10:45 am
Power and Internet are now restored!
Anyway, Ted, thanks again for the feedback.
This blog does serve as the announcement board for just about everything I’m up to, but experience has shown that the only way to get traffic here is to post links and teasers on social media, which at this point seems kind of ironic. Word-of-mouth is supposed to be the best way by far of promoting a book, and I’ve had some devoted readers really put out the effort for me (thank you!!), but I have to admit I haven’t yet seen much gain from it–maybe because my work is kind of quirky and off-center, and has a narrow audience to begin with.
For me, so far, the best results I’ve seen are from what you suggest: the endorsement of someone influential. I’ve been lucky enough to get nice write ups from Alastair Reynolds and Tobias Buckell, both of which boosted sales for a brief time. It’s definitely an ongoing effort though to keep those sales happening–in the hope that eventually they reach some sort of self-sustaining critical mass.
May 26th, 2012 at 10:05 am
Well I finally saw that tweet! and followed it here. I will always do that, and promote you as best I can. But I pop in and out of twitter throughout the day and only have my Tweetdeck, where you are in a Special Column, on my home computer. So there you have it. Gotta be flagged in some way!
XOXOX
Toby
May 26th, 2012 at 6:19 pm
You’ve been hugely helpful, Toby! I’m just bemused at my own inability to get the word out, and then there’s always that fear of overdoing it, and spamming. But the twitter app on my phone sorts stuff into lists, and of course I’m addicted to that. (Not the tweetdeck app, btw. That crashed constantly.)