I've spent the last few months learning how to market my books. For every site that says "Give away your book one day a quarter." I find one that says "Never, ever, ever give your book away." For every blog that says "Sell it everywhere. Don't be exclusive." I find another that says "Find the highest royalty and stick with it." For a noob like me, it gets confusing. Very confusing. Cover art. Creative Commons rights. Blogging. Blurbs. Social media. Calgon, take me away! In fact, it's been somewhat stressful. So much so, that I have been doing marketing research and marketing and self-promoting so much that I've been too overwhelmed to write.
Then I was chatting via G+ with that grammar Nazi I was telling you about last post. You remember Tracy, right? The one who sodomizes me with commas and quotation marks? Anyway, Tracy was schooling me on numbers. Write them out, don't write them out, substitute 'whatever the fuck percent' for .0000000002%. Yeah, her. That lady.
Anyway, in our chat, Tracy said something to the effect of "Don't worry so much about how you relate the number that it interrupts the writing process. I(she) can fix it later if need be." So I stopped fretting over numbers and devoted that extra time to fretting over marketing. The writing process was still interrupted. Crap.
So last week I expanded the scope to which I applied that advice. If my books sell, they sell. If they don't, they don't. My job is to write them, Amazon can sell them for me. Oh, I'll still remind people my books are out there, and I will still giggle like a school boy when I get a good review, but I'm happy with where things are. So what does this mean for you, the reader? Once I let go of the things I didn't know and focused on continuing to impersonate a writer, I started writing again. Ten thousand words in the last two days. Or is it 10,000 words? Or whatever-the-f...you get the idea. I write 'em. You read 'em. At least I hope you do.
So get out there and buy my daydreams, people.
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