It's been a few months since I've signed my book contract — yet I still feel the buzz of excitement, anxiety, hope and doubt that I'm sure washes over all debut authors. I've been told the novel releases in the summer of 2024, and that my book is in line to be edited, but I haven't heard any updates regarding the edits.
Hopefully, it's swift and painless! (Knocks on all nearby sources of wood.)
A Discovery from Deep Within the Amazon
I learned fairly recently that you can track the sales performance of a book from its Amazon page. Each book listing has a Product Details section, which includes its Best Sellers Rank. On its own, this number isn't entirely useful. But with the help of some online calculators, you can get a rough estimate of how many copies of a book sell daily and monthly.
The calculators I found were from TCK Publishing and Book Bird. If you toy around with them like I have (in a not at all obsessive way...), you'll see each calculation provides different results. So are they accurate? Who knows. Are they better than my method of throwing dice made of chicken bones against the wall while screaming at my ancestral spirits who have long forsaken my name? Probably.
A Warm Welcome to the World of Marketing
This week, I caved and created an Author Page on Facebook (which I'll link twice so you click it and follow me, please, before I start screaming at ghosts again to will my follower count higher).
The purpose of starting my author page? You guessed it, I plan on using the power of Meta to market the holy hell out of my book. I'm sure that in and of itself will warrant future blog posts. Here's what I can share now.
First, yes, I plan on marketing my book. I understand that a publisher is publishing my book and will do a lot of groundwork to get it into the world. I also know the publisher has books with Best Sellers Ranks within the 1,000s which, as TCK, Book Bird and bloody dice will tell you, is a lot of books sold. But my wild dream here isn't to make huge bucks, but to gain exposure, which means I don't mind dipping into my royalties to build a stronger platform for myself. Many folks will scream from mountain tops that I'm a crazy cave person who doesn't value the hard-earned money one is entitled to through their art. To that, I say, Ha-Ha yeah probably, help?
As of today, I have a few Facebook audiences I intend to market to. They're likely no good because the audience list contains mostly wild cats trapped in a bag screaming for freedom. That is, my list is probably too random to be effective. So, if you'd like to help me market, please follow my Instagram or Facebook, or subscribe to my newsletter.
Did I sell myself enough? Is that the devil in the corner of the room twirling his mustache, thinking of pending deals involving souls and email lists? Is anyone still there, testing, testing?
I guess I'll find out this summer. And if you have any marketing ideas, I'm all ears.
Comments