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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

On Marketing Books: The Powers That Be Part II: By the Boards

The biggest shock comes when you get your first real media hit. You have been a one man band doing everything you can and then finally something breaks. You long ago gave up any idea of a publicist, they are expensive and they aren't that good a lot of times. The really good ones are extremely expensive. So you take it all on. You do the calling and the sending and the searching and you do it every day. And now you aren't even writing anymore. You have become this monk of a marketer who busts ass every day and you make nothing,

But a break. For me it was People Magazine. My book had come out with a press so small it only had one book. But there it was in People. Game over. I remember walking down a beach thinking it had not been such a hard climb after all. Just ten years of blood sweat and tears. But not so fast. That blip of demand is enough to push you onto the Bestseller List for a week. But then just as quickly you fall back down and the demand goes back to a trickle.

So you go back to it. And things are changing again. The bookstores that never even carried your books are dying. The internet is taking over. The ebooks are pushing up. You hear of people who sell a million books without a single review. A girl in Peoria uploads her fantasy novel and wham. A bestseller. She gets a check for a million dollars and buys her parents a home. This makes it almost worse. Could it be that everything you have been doing for publicity and reviews doesn't matter anymore?

Has the brave new world of Eat What You Kill just bypassed traditional publishing in a way that turns selling books into a lottery upload? Should you just be pumping out books the way someone pumps dimes into a slot machine?

Next On Marketing Books: Eat What You Kill Publishing

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The Pitcher --Sometimes a Dream is all you have

Books by William Hazelgrove