Ok, I’ll say it – I suck at marketing myself. While the admission doesn’t help me any, it is merely a statement of fact. When you are an Indie Writer, it is all on you. You have to do the writing (duh), you have to find (and somehow pay for) all the graphic work you may need, you have to find an editor that can do more than cash your check, you have to work through all the publishing, and you have to do all the marketing. It’s a pain. I’m not quite sure “It’s a labor of love” factors into this, but this indie stuff is not for the faint of heart. I know, I sound a bit whiny, but when you think about spending something like a year, or possibly more, writing a book, it dawns on you…that was the easy part. Getting noticed in this world of everyone writes a book is as easy as keeping a person’s attention after someone announces ‘there’s cake in the break room’. The marketing thing is not my bag. If it were, I’d be in marketing. I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to sell myself via social media.
Try to think how awkward the conversation is when you have to talk to someone new about what you write about when what you write about is murder. Seriously. My kids tell their friends ‘my mom’s a writer’ and then there is that moment I meet said parent and tell them the premise of my book. You realize pretty quickly you’re speaking to someone who is either not a fan or thinks a world of different things about you given what you write about in your downtime. There is that joke about writer’s and their browser history. If Google doesn’t judge me, then I guess I am ok. Well there was one particular Google search that was odd, even for me. “How to kill without” was how it started and Google suggested “without feeling guilty”. Damn Google.
The whole trying to tell your story is one thing. Then you have to try and tell your story about your story without giving away your story and not sound like a nut job. There’s where you lose me. I can create a hook, but it’s the promotion that I struggle with mostly. It’s the Hey Look At Me part that is difficult. Well I’ll figure it out eventually. Hopefully.