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.

Reader Magnet

So these shitheads cold called me yesterday.

The above mentioned shitheads ae Reader Magnet a self-publishing and book marketing firm. Right away it was clear we were speaking to a $10 an hour telemarketer. As the poor sop read us the sales pitch, ours was a study in cold detachment and rudeness. When we finally asked how much they wanted to display a single copy of one of our books at a book fair they replied $500. We laughed mockingly and demanded a supervisor. 

We cannot word for word  recount the tongue lashing we gave the man, but it went something like this:

Listen up, I am a highly successful author. I am very good at what I do. I've published more than a dozen novels and marketed them all myself without the likes of you. You go to Amazon right now and see how well I've done. Seriously, do you know who the fuck I am? I am an indy-publishing and book marketing expert.  Five-hundred dollars? Are you out of your fucking mind? Do people really take you up on this? No wonder those Pakistani telemarketers won't give up. Tell you what, pal. If you believe in me so much, here's a counter offer. I'll sell you one-hundred copies of The Austrian Painter, at $4.99 a pop. For $9.99 I'll autograph each. Deal?

We might cold call Reader Magnet's office today and try to sell them some books, you know, just to be a dick.

Dragnet Marketing

So last night I was binge watching Dragnet and waiting with baited breath to see if two officers shot in a botched liquor store robbery were going to live. As the pretty, young wife of one of the officers broke down and sobbed while the older wife of the other officer comforted her, the phone rang.

It was Readersmagnet, a book marketing firm.

We had a long talk.  It turns out that for $650 Readersmagnet will do some first rate marketing of my books. This includes book fairs, email blasts, deep contacts withing the world of literary and publicity agents.

Is it a scam? Not technically, though until recently Readersmagnet was in NYC and had just relocated to San Diego, suggesting that they're on the run from New York AG Erich Schneidermann.

Eager to see the end of Dragnet I said I didn't think the service was for me and hung up.

Young aspiring authors, Don't. Just don't. You don't need these services and you don't need marketing.

Right now World War 1990: Anzacs is in the top 20 in its category on three continents. You know what we've spent to market Anzacs? Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

The book is selling itself though this blog, my Gab.ai account, FB and Amazon.

By the way, the young officer lived but the older one passed. The shooter was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.