Book Marketing for Dummies

So tell me, how is my book launch going? How many of you have hit the pre-order link for Cinderella By Any Other Name? Come on, hit me up in the comments, so I can gauge how well this marketing plan is going.

Well...marketing plan might be overstating things.
More like shooting my shot and hoping it hits something. See my plan for this story was quite different. I had submitted it to an African magazine for publication and that was it, I had moved on. But then after about a month or more, they get back to me and say, "Your story is not consistent with the theme of our magazine (speculative fiction) and so if you have another one yada yada."
Which kind of had me going like "Dammit!"
I didn't want to do another book launch for a while. I was saving it for Marcus Devereux.
So I thought okay, what do I do? Submit it to another magazine or publish?
I decided to do both; submit and publish and see which one yielded fruit first.
Hence, my lack of an actual book launch plan. However, I think I've been doing okay so far, yeah? Blogging daily, having a countdown, mentioning the book in any context I find myself in...
Hoping it all works...

I mean don't get me wrong. I have read up on everything, I have consulted all relevant facebook groups...I've done my research people. And what all the 'wisdom' out there amounts to is, "copy what the bestsellers are doing."
But...yesterday I went on to the kindle store just to see if I could find a book to download. The way I shop for book is that I wait for something to catch my eye. To stand out from the rest. This time I said to myself after scrolling through page one and seeing nothing but white people on the cover of what was essentially the same book, over and over and over.
So I said to myself, "First book with black people, I'm buying."
The first book with black people on it was essentially same as the white people except the black people were church people. I loathe church people - such a hypocritical bunch of self-righteous sheeple. Like I cannot stand them. They do not speak in real sentences. Sorry.

So I scrolled on by and five pages in, I admitted defeat. When you try to find something interesting to read on Kindle it really helps you to understand why it's such a challenge making a sale. They show you the bestsellers, the books like Becoming which are already selling millions. And then they use whatever algorithms it is and whoever has the biggest advertising budget to essentially show you the same book a million times over. Unless you've heard of the author or the book before you get on amazon, you're not likely to find it.
That's why it boggles my mind when I see fellow authors complaining about having to have social media while simultaneously complaining that their books are not selling. People really think, in 2019, that you can just put your book out there, sit on your hands and expect it to sell. It's super dumb.
People are so super dumb these days.

I wish that there was a way to wade through the detritus and find interesting reads like you can do in a brick and mortar shop. There is so much regulation online even on just what you are enabled to see, and the censorship gets worse and worse every day, that it's almost impossible to exist outside this tiny sphere of puritanism and policing that we are continuously sucked into.
That's how you know the apocalypse is here.
However, here we still in the out lands, in the free lands, in the badlands.
Here you can still think for yourself.
Now do as I say and buy my book.

This Isn't Bragging; It's Updating

I recently moved my books that are not priced free to a new publishing platform in addition to smashwords. It handles distribution to Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. I'm finding that people prefer to shop at Amazon than anywhere else because that was the fastest turnaround I've seen in publishing to first sale since I started self publishing. Well...at least for my paid books.

For the free ones, I'm happy to say that The Swamp is Full of Mystery was in the top ten highest downloaded books on free ebooks.net within a week of my posting it. Which is great. I love it. The more exposure the better. And the fact that people are choosing to download my book, among the however many thousands there are on the site?...Awesome.

There is another book of mine that is doing really exceptionally well on all sites it's on. It's a real puzzle to me because first of all, the story is like...eight pages. I wrote it in about half an hour for a competition (I haven't heard back from them and I can't remember the results date or even the site); and I decided to post it because why not? And now it's been on free ebooks like for five minutes and a hundred people have downloaded it. I am truly stymied. There is just no predicting this shit.

I'm thinking maybe I should expand it to a full fledged novel. Just go to pacemaker and make out a six month plan for writing and editing. I don't know. Do I have more story? Of course I have. It's like, a given at this point. The question is, do I want to write it? I'm in the middle of Child of Destiny - Marcus Deveraux which I've kind of put aside to concentrate on work and promoting the other books first; kind of get the momentum going....

But.
Yeah.
So hit me up if you've read it and let me know what you think I should do.
The story is called Cinderella By Any Other Name.

Keeping It Real

A close friend told me about a mutual acquaintance's new husband who is apparently having a hard time with the fact that he has a new family which he has to provide for. He keeps saying stuff about how he can't believe this is his life and he never dreamed that his life would turn out this way. He says it aloud as well, in the hearing of his wife...what. an. asshole.

Anyway so when I heard about that, I wondered what would be the best remedy to get him to slap out of it. I mean what kind of jerk says such a thing. But then when you really think about it, the average guy does tend to be a rather selfish bastard unless there is something in it for them. And I guess having a baby and a wife doesn't count in this guy's case.

Which brings me to the stories we as womenz tell ourselves in order to reconcile our perfect 'Mills and Boon Man' with the actual reality out there. I mean, the movie 'He's Just Not That Into You' was made to disabuse womenz of that very premise. That we should stop telling ourselves these stories that we make up to account for the fact that your man is a grade A bastard with no redeeming qualities.

It's a dichotomy I struggled with when writing. On the one hand, the whole point of reading books is to escape from reality. That's why Harry Potter, The Man in Black, Jamie Fraser, Father Emilio Sandoz, Sam and Dean Winchester and alla dem, are all larger than life.They're what we wish and hope and dream of to find in real life. However, they don't really exist in real life; do they?

This is Leo to the life

So when I was writing Leo into existence I wanted him to be so real that he could maybe actually exist in real life. I wanted him to have typical male imperfections; I wanted him to be as selfish and self-absorbed as the average teen, as unhappy and all about himself as any lonely neglected teenager would be...and yet, something special about him that would allow us all to fall in love with him, not in spite of his faults but because of them. Its a delicate line to maneuver. I don't know if I nailed it. You'll have to tell me when the book goes live.