On Marketing

In my Dec 17 post, I mentioned that I started doing other "author-y" stuff, mainly related to marketing my books. I've continued to do that ever since, sometimes to the detriment of my writing (because there are only so many hours in a day and any time spent marketing is less time spent writing). What has all the marketing netted so far? A nice feature on Books 2 Heart, some Twitter followers, maybe a little name recognition, but NO NEW SALES! And in the end, isn't the goal of marketing supposed to be increased sales? I don't know about other authors, but I'd rather sell a million copies in anonymity than to be a household name without any sales.

Just when I started to doubt my efforts, along comes Joe Konrath with a blog post about publicity. Basically, Joe said that, despite selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of books each month, he found that publicity hasn't resulted in more sales. He attributes his success to writing good books and experimenting with the Amazon platform. Reading the post made a light bulb go off in my head. I need to stop spending so much time on marketing and more time writing! Or as a Joe said, "Less tweeting, more writing."

Time to go back to writing now!