Not All Who Wander Are Lost

We're at T-2 days until the start of summer vacation. Ah yes, summer vacation....that time of year when I can have bathroom breaks when I want them, take more than 10 minutes to eat lunch and I can drink a pot of coffee after 3pm. Glorious days. Anyway, back to the point. This summer, I decided that in order to make a little money, I'll have to spend a little money. I heard something at the RWA (Romance Writers of America) Chicagoland Spring Fling this year, "you have to give away a bunch of books before you sell a bunch of books." Huh? That refrain, have free stories, novellas even novels up on Amazon was repeated over and over again. Of course, I thought, these are those people who can crank out two hundred pages in two weeks. That's not me. I am a slow writer. A book and a novella a year, maybe with another story tossed in, is as quick as I can write. Can I? Well, this got me thinking. So, during May I set aside the full-length novel I was working on (another...

So, I'm attempting something this summer that I've never before thought I'd attempt. I'm going to try to publish a couple of smaller pieces myself instead of going through my publisher. Now, that doesn't mean that I have anything against my publisher. I don't. I love my editor and I've had nothing but a positive experience with them. However, I've been hearing over and over at the various conventions I've gone to this year that indie, what used to be called self, publishing is the way to go to really earn money. Here's a fact of life in publishing, no matter the means....you need to spend money to make money. That doesn't mean that you pay a vanity press to publish your manuscript. No, a publisher should always pay you and not the other way around. What I mean is that the publisher or the author, depending on who is putting out the book, is going to need to pony up some cash for marketing. Now, unless you're Stephen King or your publish...

So, the title of this post isn't all that surprising. I'm certain there are a lot of things that I'm missing, but I'm speaking of marketing tactics in particular. I was at Capricon last weekend, a local science fiction/fantasy and writing/gaming convention. I love it. It was a great Con. There was a wonderfully positive vibe this year. I also got to sit next to Timothy Zahn on a Star Wars panel for an hour and a half and completely geek out. So, that was good. There was a panel on marketing your book. Unfortunately, I was moderating a panel on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at 200 years old at the same time. So, I send my husband to the marketing panel armed with a pen and paper. He can back with a ton of scribbled notes. One of those notes, one of those things that everyone mentioned was BookBub. Now, I've heard of BookBub. I get emails from them all the time. I don't know why it never dawned on me to look at them from an author's perspective instead of ...