In the last year and a half, I’ve e-published
nine novels. I should feel gratified and excited, right?
And I do, except for one nagging, discouraging thought: Now I have to promote them. The authors who’ve been really successful at
selling ebooks are either already successful or are whizzes at promotion, while
I, quite frankly, suck at it. When I was published in print, I wasn’t good at
promotion either, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I’d known a number of
authors who spent lots of money and time on promotion who weren’t cracking the
bestseller lists either. My observation was that most people who made those
lists mostly did so because they wrote the right book at the right time. (Or “God
smiled,” as one editor I know explains it.)
But for ebook publishing, that
doesn’t seem to be the case. The success stories are mostly authors who are as skilled
at promotion as they are at writing. I decided to analyze exactly why I’m so
bad at promotion. Not that this will help, but it will allow me to
procrastinate a little longer rather than forcing myself to actually do some
promotion.
1.
I don’t have time. With a 32-hour a week paid job and
doing basic secretarial and bookkeeping for my husband’s business, I’m left
with about twenty-five hours a week when I’m capable of intellectually
demanding tasks. If I spend that discretionary
time writing, or doing self-publishing tasks, that leaves me no time for
promotion.
2.
I’m an introvert. It’s awkward for me to “put myself
out there”. Really awkward. That’s partly why I’m a writer. I’m more
comfortable and happy in my inner imaginary world than I will ever be in the real
one.
3.
I was raised in a culture (female, small-town) where it
was considered bad form to boast, or even to admit to having any sort of
special talents or accomplishments. Extreme self-deprecation was the norm. I
can’t get over the feeling that in doing self-promotion I’m being arrogant, or
even downright rude.
4.
I’m a digital immigrant and I haven’t assimilated very
well. When I grew up, there were no
computers, no internet, no Facebook or Twitter. I’ve kept up with
technology, barely, because I’ve been forced to by my job. But it doesn’t come
naturally. I just got my first “smart” phone. We’ve had a “stupid” phone for
several years, but I’d never texted or taken pictures or used it as other than
a phone. My new phone sat in the box on the counter for a week until my son
came to visit and could help me learn to use it. Even though I use computers
all day and already had an Ipad, I was scared of this tiny, fabulously complex
entity, with its apps and glowing touch-screen and myriad mysterious buttons.
5.
I’m basically shy, and when I socialize, I do best on a
one-to-one basis, or at least in a small group. With electronic media, you’re
putting yourself out there to the whole world.
6.
I’m a word person, and electronic media is very
graphically-oriented, with photos and YouTube clips, etc. When I’m reading news
online and there’s a link to a video, I always scroll down to see if there’s an
actual article below. I don’t want learn something from a 30-second video.
I’d rather read a few paragraphs of text. But promotion nowadays is very
oriented toward visuals.
7.
I’m verbose. To me, electronic media seem to provide
such superficial information. I want more. More than the 130-characters Twitter
allows you. All these little bits of
information floating around just frustrate and overwhelm me, and I don’t know
how to communicate that way. I write 100,000-plus word books. I’m really not
good at writing short.
8.
What makes me good at writing fiction doesn’t work for promotion.
Fiction is about becoming your character, feeling what they feel, thinking what
they think. In promotion, I’m stuck with myself. I have to be me, or at least
an author version of myself. And I’m not really good at that.
9.
Promoting books seems trivial. We’re destroying our
planet and wiping out our fellow species. If I’m going to invest a lot of time
and energy trying to affect something in the larger world, shouldn’t I be
crusading for environmental causes rather than promoting some stupid book I
wrote? Maybe if I really believed it would work and I would make tons of money
that I could invest in environmental causes, I would be more motivated. I guess
I should try to cultivate that mindset.
10.
I hate having to plan and organize. The idea of setting
up a business plan for something writing-related just makes me crazy. Writing
is my sacred thing, where I get to be who I am. I don’t write from outlines. I
don’t plot. I write “into the mist”. I
wish promotion was more like that.
I tried to think of some way that I
could approach promotion on a free-form, intuitive level. I finally came up
with the idea that I would tell myself I had to do one promotion-related activity a day. Maybe it would be researching a website that promotes ebooks, or
putting a post on Facebook. Or writing a blog on promotion. I need to make
myself do just that one thing that day.
Sounds manageable and doable, right?
I’ll let you know how it worked in a few
months.