The Joy (or lack thereof) of Marketing
By far, the most difficult aspect of my self-publishing adventure has been the sales/marketing side. In comparison, writing the books has been a piece of cake.
Not just cake; compared to selling the books, writing them has been an endless procession of wonderful, sugary, delicious desserts, one coming after the next.
Selling the books has been like going to the dentist, day after day, paying to have painful, unpleasant things done to you over and over, without Novocaine and with no end ever in sight.
I sort of knew this going in, but knowing it and experiencing it are two very different things. I’ve read books about selling ebooks, and tried to follow various plans, and advertised in dozens of different places with varying (but mainly in their degree of failure) results, tried to learn how to promote myself on Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads, not to mention trying to figure out what one even does with/on Pintrest, Triberr and Google+. Let’s not even talk about the other, newer social media sites that are springing up that us self-publishers need to learn about.
I’m not saying all this to while (OK, maybe a little), but just to talk about it. I’m realizing more and more that my personality and my best skills are totally unsuited towards the task of “selling myself” and selling books. Some people are natural self-promoters, and the various tasks on the sales side of self-publishing come more easily to them. I’m not one of them. It takes SO much more energy for me to engage in the business side of self-publishing than it does to write.
I’m going to put modesty aside just for a minute here: I AM a good writer. I’m very proud of the books I’ve written, and I will stack them up, without embarrassment, against anybody else’s work. But I am also a crummy self-publisher, and I think the best I can hope for is, with a LOT of work and much beating my head against a wall, to move up to being a mediocre self-publisher.
Anyway, that’s my confession/public therapy moment for the day!
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