The Soul Conductor is just £0.99 until midnight GMT tonight, so grab Quinn while you can at this price, which is around 75% off! (that’s around $1.52 for our friends in the US). Put in a search for the title on Amazon and check the reviews 🙂
I’m quite the hermit, really. I don’t go out socialising – even when I don’t have my 8-year-old at home to look after. Even if I had the money to spare, it’s just not the sort of thing I’m keen on doing much of (the reason why is a whole other story and not terribly relevant here).
I also live in the middle of nowhere, with an unreliable car and a lack of childcare options should I suddenly find myself flush with cash and feeling adventurous.
So, when it comes to marketing, I’m rather limited. I self-published, which means I don’t have an agent to drag me out to author appearances and book-signings, or a publisher who expects me to give talks or read extracts in a local bookstore. I have no media interest in me or my book, apart from the local newspaper in my home town doing a little feature on me over the Christmas period. If I were to try to set these things up myself, I doubt anyone would turn up (‘Who? Never heard of her. Hollyoaks is on…and it’s cold out there…’). All that would achieve is a kick in the nether regions of my confidence and a vow to become even more hermit-like.
This may all change, some day. I still have hope that a traditional publisher will snap Quinn up for a huge print run, and then the fun will begin! But in the meantime, I’m restricted to blogging about how much I hate marketing, while wondering what on earth to share with the online community to entice them towards my book. This is why I have been asking the readers I do have to submit a review on Amazon or Goodreads for me – they are hugely important when I’m so limited in marketing options. I’m not the sort of person who will Tweet over and over about my book day after day and get on everyone’s nerves. I could never DM someone and beg them to read it – which I’ve had other authors do to me. I’m also wary of talking about it too much on Facebook in case I bore people so badly I start losing ‘likers’.
It’s a tough world in publishing in the traditional sense. When you’re an indie e-book author, it’s even harder. So when you see a tentative Tweet or Facebook post asking you to spread the word or do a few lines of a review for me, bear in mind that I’m trying my very hardest not to get in your faces over it – I really am limited to repeating myself.
Should I stop being as much of a hermit and/or move back into civilisation? Nah. That would take away part of who I am, and this me is who made Quinn. A new car would be nice, though…
…or so my son told me this morning, proudly quoting the motto from his Aesop’s Fables book. It’s just popped back into my head as I worry over only managing 500-odd words this morning (exact figure anyone’s guess, Ywriter isn’t playing nicely). I thought about it, and I seem to remember having times like this when writing TSC – there were even weeks when I got absolutely nothing at all done.
It’s not that I have writer’s block or any such well-known but widely-debated phenomenon. I know where my plot is going (albeit a rather skeletal-looking plot at the moment). It’s more like a kind of stage-fright. I’m about to write some very important parts of the storyline, and I’m sitting with fingers poised over the keyboard thinking, I’m really not sure I can do this. It needs to be done properly. It needs to be feasible. There must not be any holes in said plot. The characters need to act in a way that makes the reader either love them or hate them, or at least sit on the fence and think about them.
It’s a big responsibility, even more so now I’m writing the sequel to a book that, so far, has received some very good reviews. I have people who expect the sequel to bring them just as much enjoyment as TSC, and rightly so. There’s nothing like a bit of added pressure to make you sweat as you sit at the desk with a blank screen in front of you!
But as old Aesop pointed out, slow and steady can get you to the finish line. I’m not racing against anyone except my own expectations. It doesn’t matter how many slow days I have. Or even off days. As long as it gets done, and is of the quality people expect, then all is well in my little writing world.
Marketing.
I hate it. It’s a necessary evil that sucks all the joy out of being a published author. I don’t like tweeting my book over and over, knowing I’m just overlooked, or that I’m just annoying people. I can’t always think of a blog post that is both relevant and will reach out in the ‘right’ way. And I’ve seen how some people shamelessly thrust their work onto the pages of Facebook friends and I think to myself, ‘how could you?’.
But maybe all those things work. Maybe being bold, brash, even downright rude – maybe that’s what I need to be if I’m to sell a decent number of books. Whether I can actually do that or not is another matter.
So what’s the alternative? Pay someone to promote my book for me? How does that work, when as a struggling writer I would end up spending all my royalties to date just on one promotion company, unsure of whether they are even any good at what they do. It seems like a horrid waste of my success so far.
So I’m in a kind of ‘Catch-22’ situation, as they say.
So I’ll plod on, polite little old me, asking people nicely to share/review my book, ask me questions, interact in some way or other.
And then I’ll sit and wait for what seems like an absolute age before anyone takes any notice. It doesn’t always pay to be considerate, apparently!
…that sales figures don’t matter. Of course they matter. If they didn’t, I would just email everyone who wanted my story a copy of the pdf and be done with selling the ebook. They do matter. I write to make a living and whether they admit it or not, most authors really want their works to take off in a big way. Those quotes you see on social media from famous writers who urge you to write for the sake of writing slightly annoy me at times – they’re famous, of course they are going to say that, and probably believe it wholeheartedly. What about the rest of us? Is it a sin to want to make a decent amount of money from something that has taken several years of hard work, stress and even tears to create and send out into the world?
But I don’t write solely to make a living, and that’s not even my top priority when I’m writing. Far from it. I don’t spend hundreds of hours at my desk crafting characters I hope people will love and throwing them into situations that ask of them the very best they can give, all the while thinking, ‘this scene will earn me a fiver…’
I have a story to tell. I’ve cultivated an idea that I think explores an aspect of humanity, or how one kind of person might behave in a certain circumstance compared to how someone else would behave in the same circumstance, or I just have a damn good fight scene I’m itching to write.
But the other day, I realised what it really was that I wrote for. I was told by a friend that a friend of hers had read The Soul Conductor and it had resonated with her as it was very similar to her views – i.e. she believes there are beings like Soul Conductors, and she’s even used that name for them. I was at a loss for words at the time – I mean I’m sure that famous authors get told by their fans all the time how their book(s) have affected them in some way. But me? With my very first novel? That is something I will always be very proud of, no matter how many copies I sell.
p.s. Go buy my book 😉
Excellent blog post that mental health ‘professionals’ need to take very seriously indeed.
Well, I did it. I am a published author. Now, I don’t care if it was me who pressed that button or someone in a traditional publishing house who said, ‘Hey, let’s give this a go!’ – published is published. I’m not in it to get rich quick (I may be many things, delusional is not one of them), all I care about is that my book is out there hopefully giving people enjoyment on long winter evenings as they curl up by the fire with their cat. So I did it myself.
It was a very tough weekend. I had the ‘launch party’ all set for 9am Friday, trusting Kindle Direct Publishing to deliver within the 12 hours it states that it takes from upload to going ‘live’. That was my first mistake. It took 24. But never mind, it’s out now and next time I shall just upload the files a day early!
The party was brilliant – over 100 people ‘attended’ and we had a lot of laughs, random quizzes, music videos and lots of posts wishing me every success with Quinn. I ended up extending it to a second day to allow for the delay in the book being available, but everyone was patient and supportive and I’m grateful to all who came along. I was extremely stressed all day Friday, along with having flu, and I even missed the moment it went live because I’d had to go and lie down before I fell down. Luckily my unofficial manager Annie was keeping an eye out and spread the news for me! It’s drawing to a close this morning and I shall be sad to lose the page and all the fun we had on it.
Now comes the hangover. I haven’t done what whatsherface on YouTube did and sold 78,000 copies in next to no time, nor did I ever expect to. I know not everyone will like the book and that’s ok too. I’ve always said what a boring world it would be if we all liked the same things. But of course I have ambitions, dreams even, and would love for it to do spectacularly well. But even minor success takes hard work. Hard marketing work. Something I have no experience of whatsoever. I’ve even joked about feeling as if I’m prostituting myself, particularly on Twitter, which I’m not fond of at the best of times. But it has to be done, and do it I shall. It feels like a bit of a lonely old business, and that’s where traditional publishers/agents give their authors a huge advantage. However, I do have great friends who are helping me to spread the word, too…so I’m not totally alone.
I chose this path for myself and I will get on with it. I will learn a LOT along the way. And I’ll share what I learn with other new writers in the hope they don’t make the same mistakes I inevitably will!
All that’s left for me to say is, ‘Go get ’em, Quinn!’
Shannon is the artist behind the cover (below) of The Soul Conductor. She worked very hard on it for me and has been wonderfully enthusiastic about the book. (There was also assistance from someone who shall remain nameless, but may henceforth become known to his neighbours as ‘that bloke who swears in Viking’).
I am very proud of what Shannon has done for me and the book and chuffed to bits for her that the artwork has received a massive, positive response on Facebook. Well done, Shannon – take a bow!
© 2014 Shannon Milsom
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