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MARKETING INDIE BOOKS
(Part 1 of 5)
Welcome to my first series of posts. I chose to blog about my craft - writing indie books. Not because I'm an expert, on the contrary. I want to share my doubts and experiences with you hoping someone out there may shed light on them and leave their thoughts below. I'd appreciate that!
It is hard to write a novel. It’s
time-consuming to the point we neglect family and friends. It’s so distracting
we walk around with our heads in the clouds, hearing dialogs in our heads and
seeing things that are not there. All writers know what I’m talking about here.
It’s nothing new but it’s a fact.
It is also a fact that most writers
know next to nothing about promoting their books. They – no, strike that – WE
concentrate on the creative process. We enjoy creating to the extent we don’t
have time to bother with ‘small’ details such as covers, formatting, trailers,
blog tours, you name it! The word small is
in between quotation marks in the previous sentence because these things are
HUGE for authors, more so for indie writers.
After all, let’s face it – the
relationship between authors and readers sometimes raises delicate issues. I’ll
point out one of many possible scenarios. Isn’t it frustrating to see a
complaint from a reader about the fact your book looks ‘funny’ on their
e-reader after all your hard work, the sleepless nights you had to go through to
finish writing that one book? As a writer, one may consider it unfair that
another person ignored the content to complain about the looks of a book. As a
customer yourself, can you blame that person for defending their right to a
good quality product? I know I can’t. So, I would get frustrated but agree with
the reader.
Well, if writing is something we
love doing but demands so much time and effort from us, and a day is made up of
only twenty-four hours, when will we find the time to concentrate on those
issues I mentioned earlier and keep on
writing? How can we maintain the quality of our craft and promote it with
quality at the same time?
If we don’t have the funds to employ
a team of awesome, creative people to take care of covers, formatting,
promoting and so on, we must do it on our own. If we don’t have the time and/or
skills to take on this job, the next best thing is to find professionals who
can help us.
Although, I haven’t been publishing
for a long a time – around a year and a half – I have been very lucky so far. I’ve
found great resources online to help me tackle these problems. I want to share them
with you, in case you haven’t heard of them.
Tune in again next week for the next part of this series of posts. I’ll talk about creating book covers.
Liz Gavin
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