Dear Amritsar,
I have written Soft and Squishy, a roman a clay of forbidden love set against the backdrop of the pre-Korean War Moosejaw Ukrainian theatre community. I released the ebook three weeks ago.
Why am I not rich and famous yet?
Danni Steele
Hey, Babe,
When it comes to self-publishing, there are three numbers that you should keep in mind: 250,000 (the number of books published last year), 3.141 (the number of books the average person reads per year) and 27 (the lucky number on a fortune cookie I got at dinner last night). The first number indicates the amount of competition your book has. The second number gives a good idea of why most books find few readers. The third number is mine, not yours, so get your own damn fortune cookie!
If your book isn’t selling as well as you would like, perhaps you should consider a different genre. Books about teenage vampires who engage in kinky sex while at magic school where they have to kill each other for the amusement of a vast television audience were all the rage five minutes ago; you should consider writing a novel along these lines on the off chance you may finish it before popular taste has moved on.
If you are committed to the book you have already written (writers are like that), you will need to do whatever you can to publicize it. You might want to consider killing other self-published writers, for instance. Not only would this gain you a great deal of publicity, but it would decrease the competition for your book! Okay, you probably couldn’t kill all 250,000 of your competitors before being caught, but even a small number would be a start and, in any case, writing a book about it would capture the zeitgeist (a good thing considering how the teen market is exploding).
Too extreme? (Writers are like that, too.) There are less…dramatic things you can do to increase the likelihood of finding readers for your novel. You could, for instance, make a deal with 127 close personal friends that if they review your self-published book on Amazon, you will review their self-published books on Amazon. (If you’re slow to respond to emails over the following few months, at least now you have an excuse. In fact, this would give you a great reason to miss family holiday gatherings; no more having to listen to Uncle Berffle’s story about how he could have bought Microsquish stock when nobody had even heard of the company, but he bought a double bacon cheeseburger instead. Talk about win-win!)
Of course, it goes without saying
If you are interested in writing articles such as “37 Verbs to Flargle,” “I Wouldn’t Say I’m The Next Hemingway, But You Can if You Are so Inclined” and “Harsh Words: Strategies for Introducing Profanity Into Children’s Books” you could engage in a blog tour-de-force. Writing for other people’s blogs may be over the counterintuitive (at least you won’t need a prescription), but the more widely your name is legitimately distributed, the less likely it is that you will need to kill other writers (unless you really want to – it’s good to have a hobby).
It would also help to send out at least 27 tweets a day telling your followers that your book is available. Research shows that it takes at least nine mentions of a product before somebody will remember it and seriously consider buying it, 15 mentions of a product to get them squirming in their seats, 21 mentions to get them pounding their heads and shouting for somebody to please, god, make it stop and 26 mentions to highly motivate them to buy the thing just to shut you the hell up. True, repetition of your sales message may motivate some of your followers to unfollow you, but, considering how much the people who do buy your book will enjoy it, that is a small price to pay.
Some writers find that the more time they spend on social media campaigns, the less time they spend on, you know, writing. Don’t be such a snob! Tweets are the illuminated manuscripts of the 21st century! Blogs are the new telegraph poles! Amazon is…just Amazon, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its uses. Besides, if more writers concentrated on social media, there would be fewer books; that would make everybody a winner!
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service’s sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: when somebody calls you a “friend without benefits,” they’re not giving you any special treatment. Do the relationship math: In the equation friend (with benefits)(without benefits) the benefits terms cancel each other out, leaving you just a friend.