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.