Marketing 2023

Kitten Update

Nothing to report. I haven't even seen an email from the shelter in a week.

Marketing 2023

If you want to be a professional author, writing the book is just the start. Granted, it's a rate-limiting step, in that you can't publish a book if you haven't written it yet, but it's only the first part in the long chain that is publishing. Depending on how masochistic you feel, you may then go the traditional publishing route — which means you probably won't see the book ever published and even if you do, it will take at least three years — or self-publish.

If you decide to do it all yourself, you have to do it all yourself. That seems really obvious, but there's a pretty steep learning curve. Eventually you figure it out and move on to the next step: letting people know your book exists.

Gone are the days when you could just upload a book to Amazon and it would magically be offered to people who read similar books. The next time you go to the site, take a look at how many ads are placed in front of you on every page. At this point, they don't need to sell books — they're selling ad space.

So what do you do? Options include running ads on Amazon, Facebook, or other such places. There are paid newsletters, which send email to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are looking for book recommendations. There's your own author newsletter, which hopefully consists of people who might buy your books. And then there's a bunch of other random ideas which generally waste a lot of time and money and don't sell any books.

Anyhow, right now I'm trying a trickle feed using Bookbub CPM at $1/day. (CPM ads just mean you pay for the number of times they show your ad to people. The other option is cost-per-click (CPC) ads where you only pay when someone clicks.) Bookbub sends out email to subscribers with recommended books and new releases,

and some of those emails will have the following image (and a link).

Am I just lighting money on fire? We shall see. At least it's not like Facebook where all the experts suggest running ads at $5/day for at least a week before changing anything. That gets expensive very quickly.

Pet Picture of the Day

Former fosters Sabrett and Oscar Mayer, the reluctant weaners.

Accomplishments of the Day

• Added 1220 words to the urban fantasy WIP
• Created an image and set up the Bookbub ad
• Had a meeting with my mastermind group
• Yesterday's step count: 29,225. That's a lot. I'll probably only hit about half that today.
• Still to-do today: add 500 words to the WIP