Step 2: Selling the book

A 

So you wrote a book without investing anything but time. It is sitting in the Amazon Kindle store and nobody discovers it, even though you wrote in a lot of the most searched for keywords on the web. And you even have a lot of interesting stuff that should be useful to other people. That is the dirty secret of selt-publishing: you are not only the author, you are the publisher, too. And suddenly you now discover that publishers used to do a lot of boring stuff. Selling books, much like selling anything, is a long and hard slog. And you do not even have the benefit of a list of books you are going to sell. 

So how do you sell books? If I could tell you, I would be a multi-millionaire by now. After all, I have written 17 and self-published two. Which have not sold at all. The 15 books did sell, some even well, thanks to the publisher. I did not have to do anything whatsoever, not even engage socially with the audience. 

One of the things that has changed in the last few years is that as an author, you are now assumed to engage your social media following as missionaries and salesmen, if not customers. And you are supposed to have them before you start selling the books. 

I hate that and I will not do it. I have several friends who are authors and who try to tout their books at every occasion you meet them. Virtually as well as physically. The books may be ever so good but the assumption that you should not separate your work persona and social persona irritates me. What happens if you decide to do something different? What happens if you sell the publishing activities and decide to do something different, like write apps? Other people can think what they like, I will keep work and social life separate. After all, I have two jobs. Yes, I count the writing and selling books as a job. It is going to become a business at some point down down the road. My friends, some of whom I have known for more than 40 years, do not necessarily share an interest in this. Nor do they have to. And I do not see why they should be forced to. If it impacts my life, sure, then I will tell them about it. But if they are interested in the operations of the business, they can follow the business. Which will only be me for a while, if it does work out as a business - like any other business, it should outgrow the founder. But it should not have to change its voice. The editorial voice. This is much more important when it comes to publishing than when it comes to companies who do physical products, because in one way a company who sells products do not have to communicate with the users other than when they buy new products. Yes, they communicate with their users every time the product is used, but it is a different type of communication. 

So you have this book now, not a company, not a lot of other stuff. And you know it is there, and Amazon. You do not want to use your existing social network to sell it (the conversion rates are lousy anyway). So what do you do? 

One thing I should have done, in hindsight, is start to get followers in social media who would be interested in what I was writing about already at the time when I started writing. Not using my own name, obviously, but a pen name. In essence, a dedicated social following for the book. That may not sell much, but it would provide a direct feedback loop to potential target group members. Which is useful. You have to be careful about them however, they are people, not nodes in a social graph. 

Finding your target group is the trickiest part of marketing, however. If you have not done a huge survey - and that is way to expensive if you are starting from zero - you have no idea what people think, nor if there is anyone thinking about it. 

So how do you figure out how to reach your potential customers, who are also your readers? With an ebook, there is a special consideration: there is only one place to get it, and that is from the people who sell the reader devices. 

So there are two potential avenues: you can use the web, but ironically, that might mean making a physical book to market the ebook. Or you can try to use whatever methods Amazon puts at your  disposal to sell more books. I guess that is what I should be doing next.