Marketing your book.

You have written your book, rewritten it, redrafted it, and edited it. You have sweated over the cover notes and strained your brain over designing the front cover.

You now hold the finished product in your hand. It looks good. It reads well. It sounds interesting. You are filled with a great satisfaction. All those hours have resulted in this. You created it. It is your baby. You conjured it out of thin air.

It isn’t over.

Having your book, and being delighted with the product of all those hundreds of hours of work, is the easy bit. Now you have to market it. If you do not market it then it will be unread. Nobody will even know your book exists.

Marketing is all about presenting it to your audience. You have to promote it and make people want to read it.

You have to sell it.

Marketing is a merry-go-round. It involves press releases, social media, book signings, blogs, interviews, calling cards and endless promotion.

You can work harder on marketing than you did on writing.

This is where I go wrong. I have written over sixty books. I enjoy writing. I don’t enjoy marketing! I don’t have the time, energy or inclination.

Writing – Marketing my books – the difficulties and tribulation, dilemmas and aggravations.

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I am a writer – not a marketer.

I write in many forms and have accumulated a large catalogue of books in different styles and different genres.

I have written nearly fifty and published about half. There is the dilemma.

I enjoy writing. I do not enjoy marketing. I do not have the time. At present I have eight projects on the go. I’m juggling and loving it. It is the writing that I enjoy.

There does not seem much point in writing if you don’t have an audience. You do not get an audience if you do not market. My only marketing is this blog. Yet I am aware that there is a balance. People who like my blog do not want to be bombarded with sales talk.

I am not seeking wealth or fame. I want to write and I want to influence things that I care about. I am a serious writer. I do want to have an audience and I do need feedback about my writing.

I believe in myself, the quality of my work and the content I put in. I have had sufficient glowing feedback to know that others enjoy it and it is marketable.

So do I take time off from what I love doing to spend weeks marketing? Or do I put my energies into getting a publisher so that they handle all that? Or do I continue along and have the books dribbling along.

Is writing valid if the audience is severely limited?

I am torn.

In the meantime – please leave reviews so that others can see that you have enjoyed the books and send through the feedback. I feed off it.

Thank you to all of you who have left the ‘likes’, encouragement, support and bought my books. You give me hope.