I Know It Doesn't Mean Anything...

As I close out my marketing for good, it's nice to take a brief look back. It's especially good in lieu of crying. 

Things weren't all bad---really. Sure, I only managed to sell 46 copies of Running From Herself in eleven months, but my Kindle Unlimited page reads weren't entirely shabby: 24,523. If every reader read the whole book (yea, I know), that would come out to almost 95 readers. (A review or even a star ranking would have been nice, but still.)

And yes, I only have ten Amazon reviews/rankings (only one written review in the US store, plus nine star ratings), but my overall average is 4.7 stars. So, no pesky buzz killers to tank my superior grade.

On (gasp!) Goodreads, my average is 4.5, and as you know, those people are generally nasty. While I only have three written reviews (and one person was somehow confused by the story), my ratings look like this:

   

Thus, my problem isn't that my novel isn't good (it's, in fact, great); my problem is getting people to read it.  

Well, that's not my problem anymore. 

I suppose I only have myself to blame, but I'm not going to beat myself up over things I did wrong or didn't do at all, or did, but shouldn't have. And if I was like the majority of Reddit self-publishing posters, I could have gotten at least another ten reviews just by nagging my friends and family. But I didn't cheat. I got my whole 20 reviews the hard way.

Sure, it would have been nice if my book blogger had come through for me like she promised (and now she's not even responding to my email query), but had she included my article in her magazine, it probably wouldn't have sold more copies of my book anyway.

I could've sent out ARCs, but that's a double-edged sword, and I don't regret not doing it.

I think authors need a street team. The best (only?) way to sell books is through word of mouth. I needed a champion. Just one. One that wasn't me. I make a lousy champion. I even cringed when I wrote above that my novel is "great", even though it is. I'm a horrible salesperson. But it's impossible to even identify a champion when an author doesn't tell anyone she knows that she wrote a book. Okay, I need a champion who's a psychic.

A big plus of this blog is that I can memorialize things and re-read them when I need a lift. My two fabulous editorial reviews are somewhere on here; probably every compliment my book ever received is on this blog. Those are good things to remember.

And now I move on to...something. I don't know what, but a retrospective is always worthwhile.