Well yesterday was the first year anniversary of my book being published and I thought that was the best excuse ever to toss all advice out the window and do a free book promotion. Historically my book Honoring Echo has not exactly been a best seller. The first two months it was out I sold a few copies to family and friends and in the year since it’s sold about four copies to strangers and garnered glowing compliments from people in real life but not a single Amazon review. Soooo…. I figured it was time to give it a good nudge now that I have much bigger platform than I did then.
I spent that entire morning blasting the news everywhere I could. I put it up on my personal FaceBook page as well all the other pertinent FaceBook pages I was running (in total of six pages) as well as most of my blogs, an additional seven pages, and my Twitter and Instagram. I did it well! I made it positive and happy. I did everything I am told works… and I was rewarded with the deafening sound of complete and utter silence.
As the day plodded along I noticed no one was visiting the blogs. It was like I put up a big blinking sign saying, “If you click this your computer will die of viruses!” Now I don’t normally get a ton of visitors to my blogs but I do get a few on a day to day basis so the sound of crickets was a bit deflating. Even my biggest blogs which both get about 25 visitors a day gave me a combined THREE hits to the promotional entry. FaceBook was no better. For the past few months everything I posted has been getting about 150 engagements. Today it got 25 views, no engagements. Instagram which I routinely get 30-50 likes per photo came back with four and two of those people I knew. And Twitter, where I am the most active was ablaze all day with people liking my tweets about bear fat, delicious raccoons, mushroom dying techniques, and the most resoundingly popular was a review I wrote for someone else’s book which got not just over 50 likes but over 20 retweets which was wonderful. But my self-promotional tweet with a link to my free e-book? Three likes, no comments. The saddest amount I have received in over a month of shit tweets.
The day was almost over and only three people bit and took a download. Three. I hated to do it but I resorted to pity and posted again on Twitter. “Hey guys! Three brave souls have uploaded my free e-book today, will you be the fourth?” This actually worked better. By the end of the night I had nine downloads. Granted I am not counting one of those because it was to a friend who was having a hard time reviewing it because I sold her a physical copy directly and Amazon didn’t accept her review because it wasn’t a verified purchase.
I am told that you get a review for about every fifty people that buy your book and one for about every hundred people who get a free download. Welp… I am still nowhere close to that so I can’t say I am particularly optimistic about receiving that first review. And my failure to get anyone interested in it hasn’t exactly stoked my desire to keep going with this. I felt like I was running a table at the local bake sale reading, “Not Poisoned Cookies.”
Things I have learned:
- No one reads memoirs unless they’re of famous people no matter how many times people in real life have said your life is fascinating/interesting/funny.
- Building a massive platform takes YEARS and should ideally be done long before you publish a damn word. It’s also insanely taxing to an introvert.
- Self promotion is a crock of shit. If you want your book to really sell you have to have someone else vouch for how great it is. That’s not self promotion, more like friend promotion.
So where am I going from here? I’m taking it in stride. I am looking at this book as “practice.” Something I did to learn the ropes for when I write something someone actually wants to read and yes, one of those lessons is “Go back to writing fiction.”
When I first published my book I was so excited I order 150 copies and was intent on going to book fairs and donating to libraries while offering to be a special guest at any book clubs… but the fairs didn’t sell anything, the libraries acted like I was trying to slip them something covered and anthrax, and now I have several boxes of books wasting space and making me look like an egotistical hoarder. I have resorted to just giving them away to people I meet, leaving them on benches for people to find, and continue to donate them to libraries who will give me the chance. And I will continue writing and publishing…. this time fiction.
And maybe that’s the key. I mean I have reduced a lot of friends and family to tears of laughter telling them stories about my life – everything from that time a ten year old stole the car, to when I was ambushed by a cockatoo, and yes the ever popular and highly inappropriate article Pop! Goes the Speculum and Other Gynecological Horror Stories. But the time I had the most severe reaction to my writing was when I strolled into a writer’s read around containing 25-30 people I did not know and read them a three page work of fiction. They were fidgety for everyone else’s reading but when it was my turn everyone fell dead silent. I swear everyone stopped breathing and when I was done I was met with a painfully awkward silence before everyone took in a deep breathe and someone just exclaimed, “WOW!” And at a different point I had three separate people ask if I was OK because I “hit the nail on the head” in a scene about cutting. Thing is I have no history of self harm so this was of the highest compliment and yes, I’m fine, really!
So that’s my plan. Write fiction and continue blogging. Draw comics, sculpt, travel… and pay very little attention to what should be happening. The Universe will provide when it sees fit and that just isn’t right now.
