Hi. Yeah, just the other day, just yesterday actually, I did a book signing event with several other authors at a local bookstore, The Last Word Bookstore at Savage Mill. Anyway, not only did I not market it, I failed to tell anybody on any of my lists. I didn’t put anything on social media. The only thing I did was talk to some people that I happened to be with that weekend and at some other times, and that was all I did. And I thought, my goodness, what has happened to my marketing skills that I’m not doing anything.
And a lot of it is because I’m taking up time with screenwriting and trying to figure out how to get the work out there and be seen. So having said that, it was really interesting to go to this book signing because it’s always nice to be around other authors and to do it in a bookstore, in a beautiful bookstore at that, it’s just a nice place.
And so I get a little bewildered sometimes at how even though self-publishing just has taken off, there are so many people who don’t really understand all of it, or they understand it halfway, or they don’t understand it at all. One person I spoke to actually was surprised when I told him that you could buy books, novels, whole novels for $2.99 or $3.99. He thought that was astonishing. Apparently I should have surmised from that, that he does not read ebooks, obviously. So perhaps doing signings at a bookstore helps connect you better with print readers. That’s one way to look at it right there.
Another thing I was thinking was so many people who are edging into this area or who have been doing this for, say in the last 10 years, started doing this, don’t have a full understanding of what they’re doing and how many tools are out there that are alternatives to Amazon’s KDP. It was interesting to hear people when they asked me, “Are you on KDP?” I’m self-published. Where else would I be? No, actually, the truth of the matter is I’m no longer on KDP, technically speaking. Yeah, I’m no longer on KDP. That’s the God’s honest truth because of my disagreement over being unable to simply switch to Draft2Digital and distribute to Amazon that way. Totally unfair, totally unreasonable, potentially illegal? I don’t know, maybe, but I’m not going to fight that battle. Some things you just need to let go. And at the moment, I’m letting that go. At the moment, she says.
Anyway, the main thing I wanted to say was maybe there really is a need for somebody to give a course or make a series of videos to explain what self-publishing is, what you should be paying for, what you shouldn’t be paying for, and how much conflicting advice is out there, and how much do you really need to do? And I think there’s a crying need for that course because I just recently did a podcast on sustainability, and I’m talking about, when I think of the word sustainability, I think of how do you sustain a life? How do you make a living in this day and age of online everything, and the technology changing so quickly that people feel like they can’t keep up. Or there are so many social media to choose from. Which one should I go to? And this person swears by this one and somebody else swears by another.
And then you have headlines about TikTok, and it’s like, should I be on TikTok? I don’t know. So I think there’s a crying need for just a kind of a course on how to self-publish and how to not care too much about whether you make the bestseller list. Because what’s most important is to put out a good product. And the marketing after that is also important, but the product comes first. That’s all there is to it, because otherwise what are you doing? And the other thing I want to say is somebody was talking about how somebody had said that they were writing a novel for the past six years, and she was laughing about that. And I was like, yeah, I know. I mean, it’s like at some point you have to just kind of just write the darn thing, just finish it. And it reminds me of what I used to tell myself the first time I wrote a novel. The first time I attempted it, I kept telling myself, it’s not War and Peace, because it took, I think it was seven years for Tolstoy to write War and Peace. It took me two or three months to read it, and it’s a good book. And anyway, so it’s not War and Peace. I’m just trying to tell a good story. So on that note, I will just say maybe I’ll make more of these videos. We’ll see. Take care. Talk to you later.
