Angry Gerald

How long is it since I posted to this blog? Oops. I’ll never be considered an authorpreneur.

Aaaaaggghhhh!

Perhaps I should explain. I don’t like the term “authorpreneur”. Yuck. Especially when it’s pronounced author prenewer. Double yuck.

To me, it starts to push our noble profession towards, and maybe even over the border of, internet marketing. How to sell more books. How to build your tribe. Use social media to drive your sales. Why you need an email list. And other marketing nonsense.

Yes, all this stuff is of some importance, but to me, writing is the number one thing here. Telling stories is what it’s about. Money will come when people like your stories enough to keep buying them and recommending and reviewing them. And if the money doesn’t come, write better (and more) stories. One of the first rules of sales is that you don’t try to convince someone to buy a product they don’t want. When you’re marketing, there is a saturation point, after which prospective readers (note I didn’t say “buyers”) get turned off by your constant BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME Tweets.

(Takes a deep breath).

Now, I’m calm again. I subscribe to a number of author newsletters, and over lunch today, I was idly clicking through my emails and came across one which related to self-publishing. It was from someone who calls themselves an *gulp* authorpreneur. And, like all good blog posts (apparently) it had a list of questions one should ask oneself. Amongst one of the questions was:

The most important things to pay for things such as cover design and editing.

I kid you not. That is a copy and paste from the website. This person offers editing and copywriting services, as do a lot of self-published authors who found that self-publishing isn’t the golden goose they were led to believe it was.

Grrr.

(Takes a deep breath again).

I shall return again soon, with a Happy Gerald post. But there is a moral here.

If you’re going to offer editing and copywriting services, make damned sure everything you put on your own website is 100% correct.

End of lecture.

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