My Week in Marketing

It may not seem like it, even to me, but I have "accomplished" some book marketing tasks this week. Why am I restarting my marketing efforts after all this time? After all, my novel Running From Herself was published over 15 months ago. A few reasons: I made quite a few initial mistakes, including promoting a book with a bad cover, refusing to categorize the novel as women's fiction due to the universal misconception that women's fiction = romance. Also, my blurb should have been stronger and I perhaps should have been more open to a temporary price reduction. Although I'm not convinced of the latter; $2.99 is pretty cheap, after all. Book promotion sites disagree.

I only purchased a decent cover after I'd already promoted the hell out of my book, all for naught. As you know, I kept fiddling with the blurb, never finding one that satisfied me; and my initial keywords were lackluster. As an author who's done this before, I should have known better, but to be honest, my prior six books were novellas, and I knew in my heart they wouldn't sell, so I approached marketing Running From Herself with the same defeatist mindset.  

So, what have I done this week? 

I once again researched book bloggers. 

This happened by accident. I was Googling something else and ran across a 2026 list of the "best" book bloggers. The vast majority of them were losers. Either they wanted too much money or they weren't currently accepting books or they hadn't posted a review in years. 

But I dashed off queries to the few that seemed like a fit. One responded with a price list for various options, which turned me off. As a Poor, I need to weigh the cost/benefit ratio. Even popular book bloggers do little for an author's bottom line, but if a review is free, I see no harm in asking for one.

I've only heard back from one other person, and this is a blogger I found intriguing, solely because of his bluntness in describing his review philosophy. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment. His response, however, only stated:

This is to acknowledge receipt of your book submission to (name redacted) for review consideration. As a reminder, there will be no notification if reviewed. Books not selected for review within one year of the submission date will automatically drop from the review queue. 

He does, by the way, absolutely post one-star reviews on his site. 

I asked AI what was wrong with my book (why it's not selling). 

I'm as anti-AI for writing as one can be, but marketing is a completely different animal. I know all AI models draw from multiple resources, but I only use Google's AI because it's free. If I truly wanted to "check" its advice, I could click on the articles it references, so I appreciate the transparency. One does need to weigh whether a particular piece of advice is a good fit for them, so no, I'm not going to do everything it told me to do. (I've detailed most of it here.) But I will do some of it.

I've pulled back from mostly useless social media sites.

In addition to being big time wasters, sites like Reddit and especially LinkedIn are useless for my purposes. Someone once touted LinkedIn as a good place for book marketing, but all I got for my trouble was endless connection requests, which I'm now ignoring. I don't want to connect with anyone there, most of whom are foreign scam artists anyway.    

Threads is far less spammy, although I was disappointed to be contacted by someone wanting to sell me character art. I quit Instagram partially due to all the unsolicited pleas for money (for reviews, reels, book trailers, etc.), which was the only interactions I ever had there. That said, my Threads timeline is 99% other writers, which is refreshing. But conversing with fellow writers does nothing for my bottom line, and I'm just not a very social person.

I crossed Substack off my list of sites a while ago, although I'm still faced with tons of emails from accounts I subscribed to. 

I have a Storygraph giveaway starting on June 19.

This'll run for a month. I have no hopes of it succeeding. I've mentioned that I ran a LibraryThing giveaway when the novel was first published and only received 6 entries (out of 50 copies I opted to reward). I would update my blurb on Storygraph, but I'd have to go through Support for that, and I don't want to get bogged down in endless emailing.

But I guess this counts as doing "something".

My novel has now been translated into five languages.

Again, the old cost/benefit ratio. My cost was $0.00, so why not? There's a guy from Germany I've been following on X (loving all the FIFA visitors' impressions of the US) who really loves country music, so my book's German translation could potentially interest somebody.  

 

My next step will be putting AI's advice into action*. At some point, potential buyers will start to wonder why I keep pushing an old book, but you know, fifty-year-old books are still selling, so my novel might look new and shiny to someone.

*as long as it's cost-free

Nope, I'm not ready to let this book die.