The Dreaded Task Of
Self-Promotion

Aug 2015

I find myself in a dilemma. My debut novel, Learning To Speak American, is being published three months from now on 5th November, and the question of how best to promote it seems to be occupying far too much of my time. But it’s a fiercely competitive market and an author who doesn’t work hard to get their book noticed is going to have disappointing, if not negligible sales.

An article in the Guardian reported that UK publishers released more than 20 new titles every hour over the course of 2014, meaning that the UK published more books per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world. This equates to around 185,000 books published in the UK in 2013. I’m not sure how many books will be published in 2015, but it’s exciting to think that mine will be one of them.

An optimist by nature, I’m inclined to look at the explosion in the number of books published as a positive. We are a nation of readers, (and writers, it would seem), and readers want books. However, when the Huffington Post points out that the average person reads between one and five books a year, it will come as no surprise to hear that book industry sales have been in decline since 2007. An even more worrying revelation is that a book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore. There simply isn’t enough space.

For those publishing e-books, the picture isn’t quite so grim. They don’t need shelf space for a start, and according to the Huffington Post’s figures for the American market, while print sales are declining, e-book sales are ‘skyrocketing.’ This is good news for my publisher, Twenty7Books, which operates a ‘digital first’ strategy, bringing out e-books six month prior to the corresponding paperback. The idea is to get titles to market quickly and in the most cost effective manner, and then employ a robust promotional strategy to generate a social media buzz and hopefully, sales. This proven sales record should make bookstores more amenable to giving the paperback version of their titles valuable shelf space.

Well, that’s the theory. In practice, most book promotion today is done by authors rather than publishers. Competing in such a challenging marketplace means they have had to shift more marketing responsibility to authors in order to cut costs. The Huffington Post article states that ‘Publishers still fulfill important roles in helping craft books to succeed and making books available in sales channels, but whether the books move in those channels depends primarily on the authors.’

The thing about writers is that they want to write and time spent promoting themselves and their books is a distraction from that. Still, needs must.

Google seemed a good place to start, but typing ‘book marketing’ brought up a dizzying array of options. As I scrolled down one thing become abundantly clear (the only thing, actually) – I didn’t know enough to make informed decisions.

Plan B: I found a Guardian Masterclass one day course entitled ‘Marketing For Authors’ and booked myself a place. It was interesting and informative but made me painfully aware of the scale of the task ahead, and how ill-equipped I was to tackle it.

Creating a strong social media presence seemed to be key, so I set up a Twitter account, an author Facebook page and an author website. That was a few months ago and while all three elements are strangely addictive, they are also hugely time consuming and divert my attention away from my work in progress (my third novel, Writing For Prizes).

Also, I’m obviously not doing things quite right. Take Twitter for example. I quickly accrued around 165 followers, but that number has remained more or less static. Some of the people that follow me (the majority in or related to publishing), have tens of thousands of people who follow them. How is that possible? I can understand it in terms of celebrities or public figures, but how can a ‘Christian stay-at-home mom’ from Wisconsin who has self-published a series about zombies, have upwards of twenty-five thousand followers?

And it’s not just Twitter – my website isn’t doing much to raise my author profile either. It looks nice and has lots of information about me and my books, but it isn’t optimized which means it is more or less invisible. I could learn all about search engine optimization, about meta-tags and analytics and algorithms, but – and I can’t stress this enough – I don’t want to.

Instead, I have decided to seek professional help – outsource what can safely be outsourced, and for the rest, find someone who can show me how to be more effective online. I have also decided to give my debut the best possible chance of success by supplementing the work of the in-house team at Twenty7Books and enlisting the services of an external PR agency. And in the meanwhile, I’m looking forward to getting down to some serious writing.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/uk-publishes-more-books-per-capita-million-report

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bj-gallagher/book-publishing_b_1394159.html

https://twenty7books.wordpress.com