nastyjman's road to self-pubbing

Congrats on your new release! No Heroes sounds like an interesting title. It's cool that you want to start a newsletter. The sky's the limit of content you can offer to your readers. Good luck with your writing projects. Instead of doing one or the other, do you think you could set a writing schedule weekly where you rotate your focus on your short stories and your novel?

I'm looking forward to reading your self-publishing journey.

Good luck, and a Happy New Year to you, too.

nastyjman said:

Been focused on writing, which means marketing is getting ignored. I need to strike a balance between the two.

At least now, my "marketing hat" has become loaded with more tasks. Before my novel, my marketing activities were limited to sending out short stories to eMags. Now I can add blogging and community outreach to my tasks.

I'm thinking of doing 1.5 hours of writing (or editing) and 1 hour of marketing per day, weekends would be double for both. That would be my schedule for the coming 2018. Let's see how it goes, and if it doesn't work out, well, I'll find a way to sneak in some marketing time.

Early Happy New Year to everyone!

Click to expand...

I've found that marketing is the toughest part for me. I try to combine my marketing efforts with things I already enjoy doing. For example, I enjoy posting on forums and being a part of writing, reading, and fantasy-related communities. So I contribute in these communities, and from time to time, someone gives my book a chance.

Also, if you know your genre well, you can improve the way you target your Amazon ads. It might seem a bit weird at first, but putting authors and titles of similar books in your Amazon keywords can really help with this.

Good luck! I always find marketing myself/my work difficult.

I really need to do a better job keeping up with my blog. Blogs are generally one of the best tools for attracting readers, but I have a lot of trouble coming up with things to post about.

Hey there,

Concerning the balance between marketing and writing--and for me that turns into trying to balance drafting, editing, art for covers, social media, blog, and free promotion sites--is that I can manage three, maybe four of the above on a good week. Finding the balance there is tough. I keep trying to rotate it around.

On writing craft posts for your blog--absolutely. My best recurring evergreen content includes: 34 writing terms for serious writers, commas and introductory words, commas and introductory phrases, and ten ways to use hyphens with numbers. I have more arty posts about things like story structure, too, and they bring in a steady trickle, but it's the basic stuff that gets read over and over again.

The other thing you can do to build an audience rapidly is to become a review site. At least that way you know someone will deeply care about the post you're writing. And it surprised me, how many people I added to my blog readership when I started blogging more reviews, especially other reviewers. Also, it comes in very handy when you release a book of your own. Now you've got all these grateful writer friends, many with blogs, and some of them will review your book(s).

ETA: If you want real people following you on Twitter, don't follow the bots. I ignore bots and I block porn accounts. Hardly any of them follow me anymore.

I don't post negative reviews--a scruple I offer for your consideration. If I leave a negative review, I can be accused of trying to undercut the competition, and nobody needs that in their life.

I used to differentiate between four and five stars on my blog (using the Amazon scale, which is way suckier than goodreads, but Amazon is the one that matters most), but I don't anymore since it might leave some people feeling wistful, and I read (and review everything I can genuinely say anything nice about) books from my blogging friends first. I always include the Amazon link in my blog post, so if they're curious about stars, it's easy enough to check.

I think writers need a little different posture than a reviewer who only reads. The latter can be as hard-nosed as they like and grade on a scale of ten unicorns if they want. But I'm no hard-hitting journalist. I'm a writer who wants to support my blogging friends since they support me, not just blogging and reviewing, but spreading my posts around on both Facebook and Twitter. It's all about putting out consistent niceness, and some of it really does come back your way.

The other thing I've done, often in context with a book launch, is offer author interviews. Those are reasonably popular, too, and interviews usually get the author's base (if they have one, and it's interesting how you'll get to be able to evaluate platforms) to visit your blog. Some of them will stick around if you're interesting enough.

What I will advise is not to take that whole scheduling consistency thing too much to heart. I tried to be super-consistent with author interviews every Friday at first, but I ran low on interviewees, and nobody seemed to care. I posted daily for almost two months, but I had a lot of things saved up to say about writing itself, both mechanics and content. I'm down to 4-5 posts a month now, and I'm still seeing steady blog growth.

OTOH, even when my life is completely in the toilet, I still post at least once a month. The main thing is not just to post for the sake of posting. Have something to say worth sharing. You don't (IMO) want to get people into the habit of thinking you just talk for no reason. We're writers. When we post it should be informative and/or interesting. Preferably both.

nastyjman said:

I think I'll give myself two weeks. If there's no activity in my draft2digital account, then I'll pull my title from there and go KU.

Click to expand...

It takes a long time to build a platform on the other retail channels; for my main pen name, it took almost a year. If you haven't done any marketing, don't expect sales. Two weeks is far too short a time to judge the success (or failure) of going wide.

So, it looks like you have $0 for spending on getting word out on your book. So, here's a list of places you can get your book listed for free. I don't know how up to date it is: http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/15-places-to-promote-your-book-for-free/77298