Pre-publish Marketing

My proofreader/copy editor is out of town this whole week, visiting Disneyworld with her family. Because of this gross dereliction of duty, I’ve decided to fine her. Don’t feel too much pity for her. Since she works for free, my docking her pay is the equivalent of dividing by zero.

While she enjoys a much-needed vacation with her family, I’m slogging through the editing process. My goal is to have a second pass of editing done and ready for her final approval by Monday, January 29th. Unfortunately, I’m fighting a horrible case of “unmotivated” combined with a nasty sore throat. The only book-related tasks I’ve completed this week have been in the marketing field.

I decided over a year ago that I was going to e-publish this book. The reasons for and implications of that decision are fodder for another post. One salient thing you need to know about self-publishing, whether it be “traditional” or “e-publish” : you are on your own when it comes to marketing your book. There isn’t a legion of marketing professionals ready to hit the pavement and sell-the-hell out of your book. You are on your own writing press releases, making contacts, networking with other authors and potential customers, and finding sale venues.

Thankfully, the internet is the best thing to happen to product marketing since the invention of paper. Facebook allows you, for free, to create a page just for your book, a page for you as an author, and any other type page you might like to have. You can then employ guile or plain old begging to draw fans to your page. If they like it, maybe their other friends will like it too. This same process works with the other networking giant of our times: Twitter. The more followers you have, and the more those followers “re-Tweet” your posts, the greater your range of exposure.

This marketing “game” is very much like writing the introductory paragraph to a book. You need to hook your customer and make them want to read the rest of the book. Amazon’s “Look Inside” program is wonderful for this. By posting a sample section or chapter, you can wet the reader’s appetite and, hopefully, convince them that your work is worth the asking price. For unknown, new, authors, this is essential. People buy Tom Clancy, George R.R. Martin, and Nora Roberts books because of who wrote them. People don’t know who Cassandra Davis is. I have to convince them that their money is well spent.

So, this week I’ve established an “author page” on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cassandra-Davis/178785988890023 ; a Twitter page, https://twitter.com/#!/aCassandraDavis ; published a handful of posts to this blog; joined www.Goodreads.com ; and purchased two domain names for future use. I am beginning to realize that the selling of this book will be just as time consuming as the writing of it. I can only hope that you, the fans, tweeters, and readers, will find Dremiks worthy of the effort.

Dremiks Progression

I finished the first draft* over the Christmas holidays. I had a lot of time on my hands and a self-enforced deadline to meet. With the help of my loving, and patient, husband, I managed to slog through the climax and wrap everything up.

But, as the afore-mentioned husband loves to point out, that was just the beginning of the work load. I mailed off copies to four people whose opinions I trust and value. Then I had to wait. I’m not good at waiting. To be more precise, I SUCK at waiting. All of those four people, though, have jobs and families to attend to. I could hardly harass them about being slow when they were editing for free!

The last of the four editors has finally finished. Now I have to fix the plot points that weren’t clear enough, tighten up some dialog, change a name that REALLY irritated one of the editors, and re-write the first chapter.

Again.

*While it might be the first complete draft, this certainly isn’t the first version of this story. I’ve been working on it on-and-off since 1987. Granted, it spent almost 10 of those years in a drawer being ignored, but, still, there’s a lot of writing and re-writing that goes into a work over twenty-five years.

A perfect example is that first chapter. It doesn’t set the hook quite as deeply as I want. The tone and pacing are great (in my opinion), but there’s not enough to snag a reader ( again, in my opinion). So, I’m slicing and dicing and trying not to wince as I do so. The unedited first draft was over 150,000 words. That’s on the high side for space opera. People like descriptions and fleshed out characters, but people (read: potential readers) also don’t have hours to devote to reading a book. The exception to that statement being an epic work like the final Harry Potter novels or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. However, those books really are the exception and those authors already had well established fan bases before the first word hit an editor’s desk.

So that’s where things stand right now. Later this week I’ll update you on the marketing strategies and the (surprising) headaches of e-publishing.