Where to now?

[John Oberon]

Darn right. Everything requires effort, and often, some moolah.

[Jay Greenstein]

Jay's such a wit, ain't he?

Compared to you, who isn't?

[Rogue Mutt]

Compared to you, who isn't?

Thanks for proving my point. Hahaha

[adoni]

OK ... (settles back with cup of tea)

So far, I've got a small handful of reviews, done a few interviews, but nothing really going anywhere. Given that the best stats I can find suggest that there's one new novel being published every minute, just in the UK and US alone (and that's data which is a few years old) I'm up against some competition.

So far, the reviewers I've approached have been moderately non-plussed. I did my research, checked their reviewing terms, read a few of their posts to see whether my material was in their ball park, but not much in terms of return. But those that have reviewed have been positive (4 or 5 stars)

I've chatted with some book sellers and uncovered a historical world of politics in the realm of book selling. Basically, I had to find a local branch, dropped off copies of the books out so far and said, "If you like what you read, there's my number!"

I'm playing my part in the community, reading and reviewing books as well, so I'm not always on the take, and I seem to have won a few friends and a little respect as a person worth knowing/chatting with.

Done some giveaways, but the come back in terms of reviews has been slim.

Now ... I've been treated badly by some journalists and particularly been on the receiving end of bad TV editing which has made me shy of this (although there is one journalist who I respect and keep very roughly up to date; on very rare occasion; I don't like being a pest)

I did the rounds of agents with the film script, and I'm done with that for now.

However, I'm thinking of some things like blog tours, etc. BUT, many bloggers seem to bemoan the lack of feedback from their audience; and some are building their subscriber numbers by offering freebies (follow and re-tweet) and I'm stood here, scratching my head as to how effective they are.

I also don't flood my twitter feed; if I did that saying, "Buy my book!" all I'd do is lose audience.

So I know I'm going to have to save money and take a chance on some marketing ... but the question is ... what?

I'm also thinking to finish the next book and bury my head for another month, to see if the last batch of blue touch papers set off any small bangs anywhere.

There are a small bunch of competitions/awards that the publisher has to put me forward for (one of the bonuses of having a publisher) but I know they're working on software changes; so nothing much is going to happen there for a few weeks.

Any ideas on things I haven't thought of please?

It is 2016 so all the old things no longer work, the reason is everything is saturated.

Am azon is 150% saturated, millions of ebooks, so without a major outside push like tying a free or reduced price on Amazon to say BookBub and paying thousands to them to help you, you won't do well as an author today unless you promote and promote and promote to all the media you can find.

Local TV shows
Local News Shows
Local Radio
National Radio
Major review sites

Yeah, you have this and that story of a great success, but by the time they can write about something that worked, that idea is saturated.

Example, free days on zon, done over and absolute done. UNLESS you tie to to BookBub. So you got thousands to give Bookbub to promote you?

Now the new thing is GROWTH HACKING and a few companies can do it well, they can hack your way to the top of social media and search engines for your keywords about your work and genre and then you have a chance to build a brand on your name.

Imagine, your book is the top of say Twiitter for FICTION, if you use Twitter you know you can tweet all day about FICTION and you have zero chance of getting to the top of twitter for a fiction search.

The main results page is a hashtag type of page that 99% of twitter tweets cannot hit. So who hits these major pages? A few companies and writers do and they do it with KLOUT.

So invest your time where your posts and activity will result in benefit, where does this post go? Who will see it.

Find sites that auto tweet authors books with klout accounts to social media so you start to have your name and titles of your books show on major genre pages.

Very few authors have the KLOUT POWER needed to dominate genre pages.

So that's a new thing and only a few players can do it.

Good luck