I gave up on marketing Mixed Tidings as a duology. The story reads better as a single book and it was how I originally wrote it and intended it to be read. I took the cover for “Tidings of Hardship” and updated it to be the main cover for “Mixed Tidings” and have removed “Tidings of Hardship” and “Tidings of Hope” entirely.
I started this blog based on advice that having a website and blog was essential to being successful as a first time author. Maybe that’s true, but maintaining this blog has been more of a chore than anything else. I’d rather spend my time writing new books instead of writing about myself. As such, I’m only posting when I have something to share, and that may mean long stretches between updates.
I recently re-released Mixed Tidings as a duology, splitting it into two books: Tidings of Hardship and Tidings of Hope. I did this for a couple reasons.
When I first published Mixed Tidings, I thought I would be better off if I distributed it to as many retailers as possible (via Smashwords, Ingram Spark, etc). I also read several articles advising that I buy my own ISBN instead of one provided by a distributor. So I purchased 10 barcodes from Bowker and assigned one to the electronic copy of Mixed Tidings and a second to the paperback. However, because Mixed Tidings was not exclusively published on Amazon and because I was using my own barcodes, I was not eligible for Amazon’s KDP Select program. And the only way I could give my book away for free was to be in the KDP Select program. Amazon sells more books than any other retailer. And there are a lot more people who will read a book by an author they’ve never heard of before if the book is free than if it costs even a nominal amount. Mixed Tidings was at ninety-nine cents for two months and I sold all of thirty copies. I ran a three-day giveaway for Tidings of Hardship and “sold” just over a thousand copies.
The print version of Mixed Tidings is over 400 pages long and over 138,000 words. That’s a lot of words for a first-time author. By contrast, Tidings of Hardship is 47,000 words — a much easier commitment to make to an unknown author. And if a reader doesn’t enjoy the book, there’s no reason to bother looking at the next book in the series.
Marketing Mixed Tidings has been a frustrating and (at times) overwhelming experience for me. I know so little about what I am doing, and it’s almost all trial and error. I did research before I published, and most of what I read said I should market the book prior to publishing it. But I ignored that because I didn’t know when it would be ready for publication. And I didn’t want to market something if I couldn’t commit to a publication date. Then once it was ready for publication, I just published it. After I published it, several months passed without me doing anything because I was busy at work, and busy with life, and I wasn’t comfortable with most of the marketing techniques “experts” suggested. Which is me saying I make excuses.
Once I started really researching how to market a book, I quickly built up a massive todo list. There were so many different things to focus on, and all these successful authors wrote that anyone wanting to be successful needed to do X. I needed to build an email list that readers could subscribe to; I needed to create a website; I needed to start a blog; I needed to contact book bloggers; I needed to advertise with AMS; I needed to advertise with Google; I needed to advertise with Facebook; I needed to have a marketing kit; I needed to ensure my amazon keywords were optimized; I needed an appealing book cover; I needed a captivating book description; I needed a title that conveyed what my book was about; I needed book reviews (especially on Amazon).
And after reading all of that, I had a lot of doubts about what I already had done and what I should be doing. It wasn’t that I thought I had done the wrong thing. I just didn’t know if what I had done was right or wrong. And I didn’t know if what I was currently doing to market my book was actually useful or not. I have learned a lot in the past few months. And I have even more to learn. A lot more to learn.
But before I even published Mixed Tidings, I knew this was going to be a long process. It takes time and effort to let readers know you exist, and then once they know you exist, it takes more time and more effort to build up a sizeable reader base. Right now I plan to be in this for the long haul. And if I work at this for five years, or ten years, or twenty years, and still fall short year after year, at least I know I tried.
So here we are, at the base of the mountain.
Writing the book was hard. Everything that comes after has been even harder.