As I press onwards telling myself, “I think I can, I think I can” and wearing a Mike Rowe ear-to-ear grin as a show of confidence against the really intense urge to vomit, I continue to research the “How” as in, “How the <bleep> do I get published?”
The endless flow of advice is mind boggling. First up? Don’t try to sell the book. Sell yourself instead, and the book will naturally follow. My initial reaction to this idea was, “you’ve got to be kidding, right?” but within moments it actually made a lot of sense especially in the larger scheme of things. But “How” do you sell yourself to begin with?
Well, if I had a million friends it might not be too difficult. However, out of my whopping 89 Facebook friends, barely over 1/3 of them responded to my request to help me out, and that number has remained fixed ever since. Obviously I needed to try something else.
The internet had a lot of answers, but as I went through them I discovered they weren’t really answering “how” but adding to the what. For example, “Use Twitter” is a what to do, not a how. When pressed on how, the answer is, “become popular by Tweeting tips and such.” Well, that’s more “what to do”. Where do these tips come from? “You rip them off of other people and tweet them as your own.” LOL, but sadly, that’s exactly how some of it’s done.
There are so many other suggestions – Facebook, Linkedin, a blog, etc. but they all are useful for growing an already established fan base rather than creating one.
As for promoting yourself instead of the book, this does make sense unless you only plan to write one book. I have another complete book written and several more in the planning/outline stages. Promoting me will get people familiar with my name, so when my science fiction/space opera The Peacemakers comes out, people will already know me and be eager for my work. As for the rest of the advice, well as they say, talk is cheap.
