Marketing My Novel, Step 4

As part of marketing my first book, I need to start the next novel.

Statistics show that, on average, authors don’t start selling books until they have a minimum of four books on the market. I wonder what it is about human nature that makes readers decide to buy a new author’s work when there are four books out. Not two. Not three. Four is the magic number.

Seriously, I have to start my next novel now, as I am wrapping up my first one, even before it hits the presses.

I have considered cheating–writing a couple of short stories that fall in length between an in-depth magazine article and a novella–to try getting works in print on the market. I don’t know if it will piss off readers or tease them into waiting for the next full-length feature.

Already I have readied a short story called “Strange” (8,000 words) that will release at the same time as the novel. It is set in a fictional town in Pennsylvania. The short story can be packaged with the novel as a promotion, a special value, to tempt someone to buy my book because the reader will get two reads for the price of one. It’s a tactic I want to try. Will it work?

I don’t know. We’ll find out together, won’t we.

 

Everyone Thinks It’s So Easy

Perhaps to a select few, authoring a good book is easy–or at least that select few make it seem effortless.

For the rest of us, it is agony. First, we anguish over getting the manuscript on paper. Then we slave over editing. Next comes marketing, which, for the first novelist, means telling everyone we know, back to the boy who pulled our braids in sixth grade, that we have a book out. Trying to appear professional,  we plan to avoid begging, but we beg anyway for someone to buy our book. Finally we sit with angst waiting on the first book sale, then the next, and next. We give ourselves ulcers.

And if the book doesn’t sell, we are crestfallen. Aunt Linda said the book should be on the best seller list. Cousin James said he would buy a copy, then didn’t. Our best friends are avoiding our calls. We line up a book signing–and no one shows up.

Somehow, this doesn’t feel  easy.

Writer Karen Gadient on Twitter and Marketing

Karen Gadient, who is both an author and graphic designer, has been a Twitter user for five years. She has watched the evolution of Twitter into a marketing madhouse and shares a thought on how to make your Twitter presence more meaningful to your readers. She says:

 Too many people just push their work. True marketing is about YOU more than what you do. When people like a person, they begin to like their work. By the ocean of BUY MY BOOK spam out there in the Twitterverse, I wonder if others even see Twitter like I do.