"You're Writing Books Nobody Wants to Read"

Maybe I was looking for someone to commiserate with, but I Googled, "What do you do if no one is buying your book, no matter what you do?" (Long search term, admittedly.)

I shouldn't have been surprised when the general consensus was, write the next book. Then I found an article in which the author stated, "You're writing books nobody wants to read." Bingo! 

I've never considered myself to be an oddball. Everyone has their quirks, but I'm just a regular, average person. I wrote a book that interested me, and sure, not everyone is into music (??--really?) or perhaps I should say, not everyone is interested in the "behind the scenes" of music. Although I don't think that's true, either. A lot of successful books and movies explore that exact theme. 

But the truth is right there, right in front of my eyes. No one wants my book. And by "no one", I'm looking at a Meta (Facebook) ad that has 8,048 impressions and 230 link clicks. That's two hundredths of a per cent of people who saw the ad and were semi-interested enough to click on the link. I didn't convert any of those 230 into sales, by the way, so sure, I need to rework my blurb. Still, only 230 out of over eight thousand people? My Amazon ad did even worse.

Tropes are tropes for a reason. Readers are looking for tropes. I didn't set out to write my novel with a list of tropes to include. Some found their way in organically, because you know, people fall in love, they fall out of love, etc. But because my genre is more wide open, my book doesn't follow Beat 1, Beat 2, Beat 3. The story travels its own road. Readers don't want that. Let's just say they want to know the story before they read it. That's why romance is so popular.  

I wrote a book nobody wants to read.

The strange thing about that is, though the novel has only 16 total reviews/ratings between Amazon and Goodreads, my average is 4.6 on Amazon and 4.71 on Goodreads, with nothing less than four stars and a total of eleven five-star reviews. So, sixteen people liked the book's premise (blurb) enough to buy it...and they liked it!

 

Out of the entire book-buying public, which in 2023 was 66 million US residents who bought ebooks (I haven't sold any paperbacks), that means 16 people out of 66 million are interested in the story I wrote. I'm a winner, baby!

This teeny tiny number provides me with a clearheadedness regarding marketing--don't do it. I wish someone had told me before. But I'm still feeling better about the whole thing now, because both success and failure are out of my hands. I wrote the book; that's that. That's all I could do.