Well, for starters, author marketing feels counterintuitive to me.
I write books that I would have loved to read as a teenager.
Does it really have to get more complicated than that?
I’m in the process of establishing control of (i.e. claiming) my goodreads author page. This means that I’ve also been poking around goodreads’ site. Some of it’s useful to me, and some of it’s not. But I did find this post:
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/1233-the-business-of-being-a-writer-turning-attention-into-sales
It’s about author marketing. Something I certainly have been trying to improve. It presents an equation I’ve seen at least a dozen times (the right message + the right words+ the right audience = success). Then the writer goes into some details for the formula.
The first starting point?
It starts with this sentence:
“Come up with at least two or three established writers who produce work similar to your own.”
My first thought?
I don’t know of any other writers like me.
I’m sure there are some out there. I just don’t know of any off the top of my head. After some googling, I would either find at least one, or become even more disillusioned. An openly non-binary writer who pens mostly science fiction? Yeah, right.
That looks depressing when I type it out, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m just feeling disillusioned right now. I’m trying to improve my book sales, and I am trying to build an audience, but I feel like I’m back staring at some dead writer’s poetry in tenth grade English. Like there’s some magic key everyone else has that I just haven’t gotten yet. Back in tenth grade, that magic key was how to read poetry. Now it’s how to successfully do author marketing and grow my sales.
On the bright side, I did eventually figure out how to read poetry. But not in the way Mrs. I’m-going-to-leave-her-name-out-of-this intended. I think studying Socrates actually helped. (Want to know what I’m talking about? Click [here]. It’s dense but the points that resonated with me are in there.) But I’m not sure if that viewpoint really helps me with marketing.
Maybe I’ll figure it out better with time.
