Indie Book Marketing

I’ve read tons of stuff about what indie authors should do to promote their books, and it all boils down to these two contrasting views (yes, I’m good at synthesizing concepts):

  1. spend your life on social networks (defined broadly) trying to build a marketing platform to engage with readers (build a conversation)
  2. keep writing and publishing more books, because your new works will automatically promote the older.

I tend to be quite inconstant with this kind of stuff. In a way, my entrepreneurial spirit is skewed toward doing what I like, pretending to forget about all the rest, so that’s not really what you’d expect to find in an entrepreneur. That makes me better at pursuing option 2, which I reckon is the easiest if you really feel like a writer. I believe it’s natural to want to write rather than engage with other amusing activities such as, you know, talking to people on the web.

That said, I came to the conclusion that option 2 just doesn’t work. Like most entrepreneurs in the IT field know too well, the “built it and they’ll come” mantra doesn’t work at all. You need some kind of marketing, some level of exposure to the world. “Write it and they’ll read it” doesn’t apply to us no-ones. For bestseller authors, yes. For us newbies, of course not.

Now, I hope you’ll excuse me as I have to jot down the idea for a new story.

Oh, wait…


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