Will Sells Books and Sells Out

Facebook bombards us with 'How to market your book' adverts. We ignore them, but the following caught our eye:

- Write a book.
- Figure out how to publish it.
- Spend a month planning your launch.
- Sell 3 copies… then nothing.
- Beg all your friends to buy it.
- Click “refresh” on your sales dashboard 1,627,562 times.
- Still no sales.
- Freak out.
- Spend the weekend crying and eating Ben & Jerry’s.
- Read the entire internet and sort through all the conflicting publishing advice.
- Decide to follow the “Top 837 Ways to Market your Book.”
- Hustle your brains out.
- Sell five more copies.
- Despair.

The above describes perfectly our launch of A Line Through the Desert in 2009. We had book reviewers lined up, print and digital advertising ready to go, bloggers to contact for a review and plug and....nothing. We sold like 19 copies the first month. Then six, four, and eight. Yes we remember the numbers. What a disaster.  Actually in the last few years ALTD has sold like a backlist book, finally. Quite gratifying to see our teenage years and lost-live (yes, she knows) immortalized. 

We learned a long time ago it wasn't us, it was the nature of the beast. 

We sell books now. The secret is writing what readers want to read. Also, over time we've built a name for ourselves and when somebody searches Amazon for say, Chris Nutall or Tom Clancy, we come up. Sometimes we even beat Clancy in the rankings. The mysterious Amazon algorithm does most of the work now. We haven't run an advertising campaign since early 2017.

We are very good at what we do.