How much should you promote your work? Sure, in an ideal world, you’d be on TV and online showing everyone why they should buy what you’ve written, but in the real world, that stuff costs money, something in short supply for most of us. Further, inundating message boards with book promos is more likely to annoy people than it is to turn them on to your work.
I promoted both Akeldama and Salvation Day
pretty heavily(or at least as heavily as my meager finances would allow). I may have gotten half a dozen sales off of
it, but nothing spectacular. Schism,
on the other hand, I barely promoted at all, and it has far and away become my
biggest selling novel. Whether by word
of mouth or just the timeliness of the subject matter, people bought it better
than anything I’d yet published. So what
gives?
Real promotion, in my opinion, begins when a writer gets
promoted by word of mouth. Fans buy the
work because they liked previous works, so good will gets you further down the
road(or course, that means the produced new work must be good, or else you’ll
turn off lots of folks in a hurry).
Stephen King and JK Rowling don’t really go on book tours and buy ads in
trade publications – they’ve been published and on the best-sellers list for
years, so people trust that when they write a new novel, it will be good.
That’s got to be the ultimate goal here, to get the
audience to trust you without being urged to do so. It’s like threading the eye of a needle, but
it’s doable. The real question, assuming
you have some measure of talent, is how long it’ll take.
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