What's New in My World?

This blog began as a personal one. I don't have anyone to talk to about my writing, so I decided to talk to myself. (No one in my personal life knows that I'm a writer.) I worked out plot problems via this blog, and I whined a lot anytime things weren't going well. You don't have to page back very far before you start running into a river of whine.

 

Then one day I decided that it might be worth sharing all my marketing failures, miscalculations, and yes, my apparent susceptibility to scam artists. 

 

But I'm still here as an author and still trying to get ahead. My quest is going nowhere. While trying a couple of SEO things with this blog, steps that are completely foreign to me but seemed to help, and buying a real domain name for it, I've pretty much ignored my novel. The good news is, while I have no book readers, I do have blog readers! Thank you!

 

With regard to book marketing, there's very little left I can do. I've dismissed book promo sites because they don't work, much like the Facebook ads I ran a while back. So, I'm reduced to Instagram promoting, and I imagine my 354 followers are sick to death by now of seeing my book cover in yet another post. 

 

I simply can't spend any more money on this novel. What that means is, it's effectively dead. I really counted on that book blogger and her vast readership (too many quotation marks to insert, but use your imagination) to boost my book sales. And now I know the whole scheme was fake. I don't feel it's worth pursuing other reviewers, mainly because 99% of them ghost me. The actual popular ones are overwhelmed with review requests, which leaves me at the very bottom of the pile. Some so-called experts tout free marketing, but every article I read includes useless ideas, such as newsletters...or better yet, merch. In what world is merch free? And if no one wants my book, why would they want a bookmark that features its cover? "Buy my book, get a bookmark!" Well, they can buy a damn bookmark for less than $2.99, if they really, really want one.

 

A book blogger/reviewer I used in the past (for Shadow Song) agreed to review my novel, but she's booked up until October or November, and truthfully, while that review was very positive, it didn't drive any sales. I do get positive reviews ~ when I can get them; the trouble is getting them. As you know if you've been reading along, my two FreeBooksy promos resulted in 1,869 total downloads, but I have not received one single review from them.

 

I know that my genre is a tough sell; I just never realized how tough. Books must be siloed now; every reader has his or her own niche. It was always true that everyone had their preferences, except that, believe it or not, there was a time when there were basically two ways to categorize books, fiction and non-fiction. My novel is "fiction". I slapped the word "contemporary" onto it to distinguish it from historical fiction. Today's micro-categorization drives me crazy. I used to pick up any novel that sounded interesting, which gave me a well-rounded reading experience and exposed me to worlds I wouldn't have otherwise chosen to read about. Best of luck doing that now. You gotta know your category!

 

Tagging my works as women's fiction seemed, after a while, to be a curse. As I've often raged about, no one seems to know what women's fiction is; many think it's romance, which it most definitely isn't. (Why would we need two terms to define romance? Doesn't it already hog the market?) The rest seem to think it's some kind of women's rights screed; how the MC "beat the man". I don't write that kind of slop. But the common misconception is that if the main character is female, the book must certainly reflect one of those two themes, and I'm not about to mislead potential readers. Thus, contemporary fiction it is. 

 

Many experts claim that "slow and steady" marketing is the key to success. What is that, exactly? Doing the same things over and over for months? Years? If nobody wants a book within a couple of months of release, despite constant marketing, why would they want it nine months later? I've only been promoting on Instagram since my novel's March 1 release, and even I'm sick of me.

 

Everybody claims to have found a surefire way to sell books, but those people simply discovered something that worked for them. Those methods aren't transferable. If they were, every author would have a million-seller.

 

So, what's new in my world? Every day feels like the day before.