Hustle Your Own Books

Breathtaking stupidity from one of your 'traditionally published' authors. In several bullet points, Ros Barber says why she won't Indy publish and why you shouldn't either. I'd like to take one of those points head on:

You have to forget writing for a living
If you self-publish your book, you are not going to be writing for a living. You are going to be marketing for a living. Self-published authors should expect to spend only 10% of their time writing and 90% of their time marketing. The self-published author who came to my blog to preach the virtues of his path, claiming to make five figures a month from Kindle sales of his 11 novels, puts his writing time percentage in single figures. If that sounds like fun to you, be my guest. But if your passion is creating worlds and characters, telling great stories, and/or revelling in language, you might want to aim for traditional publication.

Listen, sweetheart, your trad publisher isn't going to do any leg work for your book, not unless your Tom frekin Clancy or some such.

Meanwhile you can hustle for yourself all you like.

This is why my best book has 158 reviews and yours has 28.

I do all my own marketing and advertising and it takes  a fraction of my time, most of the rest of  which is spent writing.

Look folks, for aspiring authors out there, here's the skinny, the 411 on advertising.

I do at least one thing a day to hustle for my books. This post fills that requirement. I'll also do some light tweeting (gabbing?)on Gab or maybe post something on FB. You're all welcome to look me up on either of those platforms.

Other than that I buy print and digital ads, I'm experimenting on Goodreads right now. Still my most important platform is magazines, history and/or military history. After much mixing and matching I think a small ad is the most cost effective. I was just experimenting with full pagers but I don't think it makes enough difference to make the extra cost worthwhile. So a battery of 1/3 or 1/4 adds in three or four mags, say Military Heritage, Vietnam and WWIIQ, is the most effective way to go.

If you're wondering, I can't divulge prices, but it really isn't all that much. You can get a 1/3 or 1/4 for well under a thousand.

So basically here's my mag ad strategy. Go with a solid corps, in my case its the Sovereign Group and History-net group, run about three ads with each.

I also run ads in a couple of magazine empires in Britain. Per-capita I'm more popular with Her Majesties' subjects than I am with American citizens.

Last year I also took out a series of ads in European military history magazines, German, French, Spanish, etc. For a while I thought these were a bust, but over time the sales added up and we are well in the black now. I've done ads in Australia too. Same thing.

In this way I've gained thousands of fans and followers.

Ros Barber cannot say the same.