Promotion, publicity and panicking

promotion, self-promotion

Everyone knows you can’t get anywhere, as a writer, without a bit of self-promotion. There’s a whole fuckton of books aimed at indie authors, instructing them on fail-safe methods of selling more of their own books. And I keep thinking of a snarky Tweet I read a while back, along the lines of ‘ever noticed how most of the how-to-be-a-bestseller books are written by people you’ve never heard of?’promotion, self-promotion Let alone various exposes, such as this one.

Facebook has a variety of groups for book lovers, most if not all of which are open to authors wanting to share details of their own work. This is not inherently a bad thing, though a publisher friend cautioned me against expecting too much from them, describing them as ‘dump and run’ – people post a link to their book and disappear. I recently unsubscribed from one due to the sheer volume of promotion for books that held no appeal for me and probably not much for anyone else. Covers from the round-ended scissors school of design; witless titles, typos in the description and concepts that have either been done a million times or not done because no one at all gives a toss…

Of course, as well as irritation, what this stuff induces is a form of paranoia. What if my book promotion is as annoying as this? What if everyone I know is promotion, self-promotionsick of hearing about my latest release, or the upcoming one? How much promotion is too much? But if I don’t promote my books, will anyone read them at all? No wonder all authors, pretty much, are neurotic as fuck.

Yes, I have a new book coming out pretty soon, and you can check out a teaser for it any time you like. And I will probably be making a fair bit of noise about it in any way I can think of once I have finished battling with the formatting and all the techy stuff to bring it into existence.

Don’t hate me.

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