{"id":366,"date":"2013-03-04T01:23:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T01:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geraldhornsby.wordpress.com\/?p=366"},"modified":"2013-03-04T01:23:16","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T01:23:16","slug":"please-how-can-i-sell-more-of-my-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/04\/please-how-can-i-sell-more-of-my-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Please! How can I sell more of my books?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"money-bag\"<\/a>I\u2019ve been writing for over 40 years. Okay, so for many of those 40 years I was working for a living, having children (not literally), and generally being too busy, or lazy, to write, but I\u2019ve taken writing much more seriously over the past ten years. In that time, I\u2019ve written getting on for three-quarters of a million words. I\u2019ve submitted short stories and flash fiction to online publications and competitions. I\u2019ve been part of writing groups, where my writing was subject to open, honest, and sometimes harsh critique. I\u2019ve completed (\u2018won\u2019, if you will) eight NaNoWriMo\u2019s. That\u2019s 400,000-odd words right there.<\/p>\n

So, I get quite grumpy when I see questions from writers asking \u201chow can I market my book?\u201d \u201cHow can I sell more of my books?\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s the best way of using Twitter and Facebook to market my book?\u201d<\/p>\n

Quite often, these questions are from people who\u2019ve written one book. No writing CV. No other writing success. They\u2019ve written one book, and they\u2019ve read how some writers (Amanda Hocking, John Locke, J.A.Konrath, Michael J. Sullivan, Louise Voss\/Mark Edwards, Stephen Leather, Bella Andre, et al) have made a ton of money from self-publishing, and they want some. They think all they have to do is write one book, upload it to an online bookstore (Amazon, Barnes&Noble, iBooks, Smashwords), and promote the hell out of it, spamming Facebook groups, endlessly Tweeting about it, and generally getting on everyone\u2019s nerves. And then they think there\u2019s something they\u2019re not doing, some magic bullet which, once they\u2019re told about it, will rocket their book up the bestseller charts, earning tens of thousands of dollars in the process.<\/p>\n

I used to avidly follow the posts in the Writer\u2019s Caf\u00e9 section of Kindleboards (i\u2019m not going to give you a handy clicky link – if you can\u2019t be arsed to drive Google to find it, then you\u2019re not serious about this), and it was a great place for the new self-publishers. Writers shared successes, with numbers, and dollars, and what they did, and how they did it. Now, most of those fascinating self-publishers have gone away, tempted by the Big K – Kudos – that a \u2018proper\u2019 publishing contract can bring to them. And I don\u2019t blame them for that. Publishers are in business for one thing – to make money. And if they can sign up a writer with a proven record of selling huge quantities of books, then they\u2019ll come a\u2019 running, with cheque books open. But the rest have got pretty tired of the new members. \u201cI\u2019ve written a book, and uploaded it to Amazon, but sales are disappointing. How can I improve my numbers?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you in the next blog post, coming soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been writing for over 40 years. Okay, so for many of those 40 years I was working for a living, having children (not literally), and generally being too busy, or lazy, to write, but I\u2019ve taken writing much more seriously over the past ten years. In that time, I\u2019ve written getting on for three-quarters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publishing","category-thinking","category-writing-on-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5y3CH-5U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gerald-hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}