My Last Two Months in Review

Publishing a book is exciting. There's all that anticipation. Will it be a best seller? Can I compete with the big boys/girls? Will word of mouth propel my novel to the top?

Of course, books aren't just discovered by accident. I knew a bit of promotion was going to be required. I could afford "a bit". I was familiar with several book promo sites from the times I advertised a few of my novellas. No, those campaigns didn't work out, but these were novellas, after all, and people are hesitant to pay for short reads, even at the low, low price of $1.99. Not when they can get full-blown novels for the same price or even for free. I didn't go hog wild with those promotions because I understood my books' limitations in that regard. I managed to sell three or four copies, and sure, I'd hoped for more, but it was what it was. My own fault for going down the novella road in the first place.

Running From Herself was a different animal all together. It was meaty; hefty. It's the longest novel I've ever written. When I wrote Once in a Blue Moon and The Apple, I really had to stretch to even get to 80,000 words. RFH is almost twice as long, with no filler. Best of all, I had no doubts about its quality. It's damn good. I just needed to get the word out.

In the end, I did more than "a bit" of promotion ~ I booked around 30 different promos. See, the first ones weren't doing the trick, so I had to keep trying new options until I found the magic.

I never found it.

Clearly, my blurb wasn't cutting it. That had to be it. I at first thought I did a really good job writing it, but as sales continued to be stagnant, I began picking it apart. I started in the wrong place. It's not intriguing enough. Too much detail. Not enough detail. The wrong detail. It doesn't flow well. It's vague. 

In all, I probably rewrote my blurb six times (I just rewrote it again two days ago). 

I'd determined not to send out ARCs before publication, because I'd been burned by ARC reviews in the past. Yes, I'd gotten a sprinkling of good reviews, but also a sprinkling of cutting ones. My mindset was that no reviews were better than negative ones. I couldn't risk the novel getting off to a bad start. Well, both bad reviews and no reviews can kill a book, so what's worse? Both options are equally bad, I suppose. Thus, RFH is sitting out there with one US review and one from my only fan, who's in the UK. I did get a great editorial review, though, which I posted to Amazon.

Once I ran out of promo sites and money, I had no choice but to start using social media. No, I don't like it, and I don't like pretending that I want to interact with people by posting cutesy things that have nothing to do with my book. So I just pushed my book; that was it. I'm sure it came off as mercenary, but then again, who was even paying attention? Certainly no potential readers were. 

I started by analyzing Instagram, which I'd joined a long time before, but only posted on a couple of times with the aforementioned novellas. I'd rarely paid attention to other people's posts, but now I wanted to see how other authors promoted their work. I found that just posting my book covers wasn't the way to go ~ pretty bland ~ so I went to Canva and created some more interesting visuals. I have a Canva subscription, which I've used to design all my book covers, but I'd never explored its other capabilities. Now I found templates for Instagram posts and also for reels. Reels were hard to figure out, and the first few I did were basically silent films, because I had no idea Canva offered audio (music) clips as well. Even when I did discover that, I still didn't like making reels. The pre-made templates never really worked for what I wanted to do, but I made a few anyway. Regular posts, though, were fun. And eventually I worked my way up to about 120 followers, but only by posting every single day.

I'd used X a lot in my private life, but I also had a separate author account that I was big on using at one time, until I realized it was fruitless and stopped. Now I just posted my Instagram posts on X and that was it. The same with Facebook, which I hate, and which I'd abandoned a long time ago. But copying and pasting posts was simple enough.

The only "results" I managed to attain was the attention of scammers.

Everyone always talks about how great TikTok is for promoting books, and there's even a separate BookTok hashtag. I finally decided to give it a try. By far, TikTok is the worst, most useless means of promotion I've ever used. Generally with most social media, even the blandest of posts will get a few eyes on it, but TikTok gave me nothing. I began to wonder if I'd posted in "invisible mode", if that was even a thing. (I still don't know.) I posted maybe four reels before finally giving up.

While this frenzy of social media posting was going on, I stumbled upon book contests. For some reason, one particular contest caught my eye and I was determined to enter it, even though it cost something like $75.00. After that, I began searching out more competitions. A few of the legitimate ones were free, but most cost around forty dollars, and I entered a few. Only later did I learn that I'd uploaded a version of my novel that was somehow missing one important passage. How that passage got deleted in the first place, I'll never know. But I do know that I threw all my entry money down the drain. Of course, the few copies of my novel I managed to sell were missing that important passage, too. I'm awesome, I tell ya!

Just wanting to see my book do something, I went with a FreeBooksy ad, which again, I'd vowed not to do (give my book away). The FreeBooksy ad was the only thing that worked. It resulted in 1,264 downloads, and you know what? I'm not sorry I gave my book away for free after all. I just want someone to read it!

I created an "audiobook" of sorts, which can only be accessed by visiting a specific website, so no one will ever find it, which is fine. It's AI-narrated, so the quality pretty much sucks.

Which brings me to my not one, but two Facebook ads. Obviously desperate by now, I finally bit the bullet and tried creating one, and it truly wasn't as hard as I imagined it. But it didn't produce more than one or two sales, so I tried a new ad with different graphics. That one resulted in zero sales, but the two ads combined did take a big chunk out of my wallet.

And here I am. 

What would I do differently in hindsight? Well, I would have retained 99% of the money I spent. I definitely would have done the opposite of what my instincts told me (e.g., I would have offered my book for free far sooner than I did).

Actually, I just hit on it. I would have offered my book for free. And that's it. And then let the chips fall. No social media, no asinine book contests. I just realized I did a whole lot of work for absolutely nothing.

As it stands, I'll end my writing career the same way it started. With utter failure.