Sunday, May 22, 2011

There's writing and there's marketing

Amy Rose Davis http://modicumoftalent.com/ has been blogging about how writing can take over life, and she has me thinkng.  I am a writer.  I always have and always will be writing one thing or another.  Letters to friends, poems to my beloved, stories that demand to be let out of my head, . . . I love to find the good word and the accurate description.  I will always write and it will make me happy. And it always fits into a balanced, healthy life.  It's the damn marketing that rips my guts out.  Marketing evidently is a full-time job.  If you're going to market successfully, you have to do it constantly.  You have to blog, Twitter, facebook, and sell, sell, sell even if  you alienate your friends like an Am-way distributer.

 I have three books that were in print with vanity press, and the fourth and final one in the series in re-write.  Then I went with Puddletown Publishing Inc. and the first of the books is now available as an e-book (          )  I am getting requests for the sequels, but the publishers, reasonably enough, want to sell a few more copies of book one before they launch book two. (and book three and book four) It does, after all, cost them time and money to get these things up and running.  Puddletown is not a vanity press.  It's not a case of throwing more money at them to get them to spit out more books.  They want to turn out quality books and still run at a profit.  So if I want to bring out the rest of the series, I have to start selling what I have.

Problem:  I'm a writer, not a marketer.  The whole process of spamming the world to get my name out there appalls me.  I can not bring myself to twitter.   I don't want to read those pushy, Am-way tweets I see hourly on the twitter screen.  And I CERTAINLY don't want to read their damn books! Tell you what - you buy a copy of my book, and I'll come over to your house and clean the hair clogs out of your bath-tub drain, OK? Or I'll review your book if you'll review mine.  The Sanna Chronicles are funny, light-hearted, swords, sorcery and knitting books with horse races, dancing girls, brawls, and evil mad-boy villains.  Try it, you'll like it!   $.99 on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Sanna-Sorceress-Apprentice-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B004UCHQ3I/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

 

3 comments:

  1. Oh, cool, I bought a copy. When are you gonna come clean my drain? ;)

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  2. Oh, isn't it an interesting new world? The good news is that you don't have to depend on NYC anymore--we can find our own audiences. And you already know that that's the bad news as well.

    I think I don't like Twitter because I'm using it the wrong way. I mean, like you, I climbed onboard as a way to sell my book. It's a very different experience for those sincerely interested in building a community--finding like-minded people or those who challenge & expand their minds. If we had built a Twitter group like that, people who we had a real connection with would naturally be interested to hear we'd written a book. I'm wondering if I can (have time to) approach Twitter a different way.

    But I think Sanna is perfect for several book bloggers to have a look at...

    Hey, thanks for leaving a haiku on my site! I'd thought you might be the first!

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  3. I love that you write outside the box!

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