The mystery of marketing and publicity

All writers these days need to be involved with marketing and publicity. As well as being a publisher I happen also to be a published author and one of my publishers is this week promoting my book along with two others.

This will actually involve me in quite a bit of activity. I shall in fact:

·         Add a few posts to my web site / blog about the book.

·         Tell people about some of the research involved.

·         Post some excerpts.

·         Post some quotes from reviews.

·         Schedule some of these as technically I’m actually on holiday this week and on one of the days I’ll be travelling. (Ah! When you work for yourself you never actually stop working - good job we love what we do, but then that is why we’ve chosen this.)

So, we all do things like this. Then odd things then begin to happen. A less frequently  visited page about a work suddenly gets a lot of likes. Sales go up bizarrely. You suddenly get a lot of activity around author visits. At least you can check out the latter but the mystery remains: each of the six schools came across you another way.

A writer I know who self-publishes and who has given up the day job reckons to work seven days a week and spends 50% of his time writing and 50% on online promotion. He’s very shrewd about his search engine optimization. Is this an artistic compromise? He’s deliberately including words that he knows will attract hits.

We all need to think about these matters. In the end, the books must sell so that both author and publisher can earn a living.