I Suck at Self Promotion

To be honest, I hate self promotion. It's a seemingly necessary evil, but it always seems overly self-serving to me. It also takes far too much time for my liking. I don't say that because I'm lazy but rather the opposite -- I'm just too goddamn busy. I am a family man raising to wee ones, have a full time day job as an ESOL teacher which takes up most of my work hours, I have a second part time job tutoring business English at HONDA car company, and all this means that when I do happen to get some free time I tend to use that to write.

Otherwise nothing would ever get done.

Which means I cannot spend as much time promoting myself as I'd like.

But in the full scheme of things, it seems that blatant self promotion does little to sell books. At least as far as Indy authors go. Saying "buy my book" is less beneficial than simply platforming and creating original content.

So what can anyone do to try and sell their book? Well, self promote, of course. I know, I know, I said it doesn't seem to help much. But it helps enough to get the ball rolling -- which is necessary. So, even though it does hardly anything -- at least in terms of generating sales -- it's still necessary to spreading word for mouth -- which may (or may not) translate into downloads / sales.

I follow the successful self-published author Derek Murphy. Now, he's successful because he knows how to market himself and he is what I'd consider a master of self-promotion. 

He's published his first Young Adult (YA) myrmaid novel called Shearwater and has a play by play break down of how things went as he worked at giving it a huge release push.

Needless to say I simply don't have time to do much (let alone any) of this. But I did find his break down useful, and I took mental notes for things I might try in the future (if I can carve out the time from my solid schedule). I am sharing his article here because I think it will be useful for other Indy authors as well, especially those like me that struggle at running campaigns, promoting my own work, and platforming.

This article [CLICK HERE] was an interesting read. Highly imformative.

According to Derek Murphy, apparently pre-orders and Thunderclap campaigns do nill to nothing to help you get book sales -- even if you're actively promoting with paid promotion at the same time.

It seems that paid promotion does okay, but is a huge financial drain. Getting into top slots on Amazon.com seems to require reviews more than anything -- which means more platforming and less promoting -- i.e., spending more time creating original content than simply saying 'buy my book'. I think a lot of this is pretty straight forward, but this is a good play by play break down. 

Here's the full link to the article:

http://www.creativindie.com/why-preorders-killed-my-book-launch-and-other-lessons-i-learned-marketing-my-first-fiction/