Book Promotion - Alternatives & Stigmas

No matter what side of the self-publishing, Publish-on-Demand, e-Book, Internet makes everyone an author model argument you fall on, there is one fact I find incontrovertible.  What I’m about to say is based on personal observation over more than two decades of writing professionally – you can take it for what it’s worth.  The proliferation of books by people with no business being published has hurt everyone.  Authors and editors and publishers warned that it would be so, and I’m telling you – it happened.

I was over on the Kindle Discussion boards this morning at Amazon.com.  It’s a place I have come to frequent because – frankly – it’s one of the only ways to reach Kindle readers short of forking over huge advertising dollars to Amazon, or to some other purveyor of top-level advertising.  Except, I’m not sure that the forums really are a viable way to reach readers. At least half of those there are just other authors trying to sell their own books, reviewing one another in trade for good comments on their own work that will, in turn, become new posts on the boards starting with “just got a five star review!”  – Ugh.

What has happened in this age of “everyone is an author” is that the term author has become synonymous with “Schill”.  Half the posts (maybe more than half the posts) on that forum are either by authors promoting their own books, authors cross-promoting one another’s books, or authors creating transparently disguised threads for the purpose of furthering the first two above.  Amazon doesn’t care who gets promoted.  They get their share however you slice it, and they are not likely to provide any advertising method that levels the playing field unless it in some way impacts their profit margin.  I’m not holding my breath.

Don’t get me wrong – authors have always been stuck selling themselves if they weren’t at the upper rungs of the publishing ladder.  The lion’s share of advertising and promotion goes to a very small group of privileged authors.  Most of them earned the right to be there – it’s always questionable whether being there once should buy you an extended ticket, but no one ever claimed the business was fair, and I don’t expect it ever will be.

Still, there was a time when, if you were an author, readers were thrilled with the chance to pick your brains.  They wanted to know what you thought about, what motivated you, and their desire to know wasn’t based solely on what they could learn and use to sell their own books.  Even on the Internet, there was a time when more of the time on a writer’s site was spent on his or her own work than on writing about book promotion, or publishing models.

It’s come to the point where I don’t even like to talk about my own work, because there’s a sense that doing so just rings like white noise in people’s ears. We’re bombarded by such talk day in and day out, hour after hour.  We have to try and sell our work, and our characters, but doing so is feeling oily and repugnant in ways it never did in the past.  I sometimes feel like a  yapping dog running in circles in a dog-pound filled with other dogs who are all just as frantic to get out.

I saw a commercial last night for a new job hunting site, something about ladders.  In the commercial, all the fans at a pro tennis match roared out onto the field.  They grunted and sweated, batted at balls with their brief cases, and in the center the pro stood there looking baffled.  The message was, if you let everyone onto the field, it’s impossible for the best to stand out.

And I don’t want anyone thinking I’m saying that I’m the best.  I’m just saying that I’m getting hoarse trying to find a way to be noticed in the crowd…and I am not inclined to force myself on readers, or to buy mountains of  bookmarks, or to frequent every bulletin board and website in the universe that caters to the things I write about in the hope of finding a couple of people who care.  I love visiting such places when my presence is appreciated, but the idea I’m just another guy bothering people, begging them to pay attention to me is more than I can stomach…

I’m not sure what I expect to accomplish by this, other than getting it off my chest.  I hate the way things have shifted…I hate that I don’t have a better way of getting the word out on my books.  I also hate the image of standing still while everyone else swims frantically in circles, looking for a way to the top, and being buried in the masses.

I’m looking for a better way.  Maybe I’ll find it.  The people who do buy and read my books almost invariably find them entertaining.  I could count the negative reviews on one hand – in more than twenty years, that’s not bad.  At least it gives me hope…

End Rant… – DNW