Friday, January 3, 2014

Too much? Not enough? Let's dance!

Let's do the marketing dance, that is.

One of the nice parts of being traditionally published, or so I've been led to believe, is that once you get someone to buy your book and work through the edits, you can, in theory, leave the book alone from then on. A good publisher will do the marketing for you. They might do an ad in a magazine or on websites. They might make a book trailer. They might book you on a promotional book signing tour. They might enter you in important contests or submit your book for awards.

All things that you, the author, don't have to do.

They can definitely get your book into brick-and-mortar bookstores and possibly libraries. Again, all without much, if any, input from the person writing the words. Which means, again in theory, that the author gets to go back to writing until it's time to start the whole process again.

If you're going indie, and you don't have the budget to hire someone to market for you, that stuff all falls on you. Or me. :)

The question that always nags at me is, how much promotion is too much? How much is too little? How many repeats of 'Hey, I have this book...' does it take to annoy my friends and family into ignoring me?

The answer, I guess, is everyone's favorite: It depends.

A publisher with a marketing team may not be constantly shoving the book in the average consumer's, or reader's, face, but they are putting it out there to the distributors. They're sending copies to professional reviewers and magazines. They're doing a version of stumping for the book that most of us don't ever see.
Do the reviewers get tired of having books waved at them all day? I don't know, but I hope not. We kind of need them to read. :)

For my part, I'm doing my best to balance out being the marketer with being me. You know me. The gal on the other side of the screen or the page. The person who just wants people to like the story she wrote. I figure if I can manage to stay me and still sell a couple of books, I'll be all right and no one will end up wanting to gag me.

But if you ever get the urge to holler "Enough already!", or you sprain something rolling your eyes because my name's on the screen again, let me know, will you? I'll try to listen.

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