Publishing and Marketing Background
I’ve been a very profitable niche publisher for more than four years. At the time, it was just a test of some simple marketing skills, which I learned because I was a manager at a failing store. I thought my ideas were sound, but I wanted to prove them to myself.
So I did.
Since I was a decent writer, I wrote some how-to hobby ebooks. Then, I used some “workhorse” techniques, as one of my teachers called them, and was almost immediately, though modestly profitable ($20,000 per year.)
This is, of course, the short and dramatic version. The long version is full of tedium — research, forum reading, drafts and revisions, mediocre graphic design attempts, website building, etc.
Years passed, and I became a marketer specializing in audience profiling and copywriting.
As I got into the fiction-critiquing world, thinking of becoming an editor or agent (decided against, industry too retarded), I met a lot of frustrated writers who were forced to make the best of a bad situation. Even the published writers were forced to market themselves, and the people who were aspiring to be published knew that would have to do it, too.
As a reader, I believe that the best output will come when writers are free to just be writers, not writers/marketers/publicists/booksellers. The publisher’s job is to refine, market, and sell content… but my opinion doesn’t change the reality. Most publishers aren’t pulling their weight, so the writers are stuck with double duty and are ill-equipped to do it.
Added to the cocktail is the number of businesses who claim to help writers market or self publish their writing. For the most part, these services don’t do much except to make the writers feel important with a pretty-looking manuscript and cover. There is very little practical business advice included in any of their “packages,” such as how to actually make sales.
That’s why I wrote my tutorials. I can’t change the need for self-marketing, but I can give you real, low-cost techniques that work for any business, including yours.
My tutorials are free. I realize is dangerous, since I run the risk of having them undervalued. But they way I see it, authors spend a lot of money on techniques that don’t work very well, and I just don’t want to add to that. It’s irritating, and since my interest is in seeing authors spend less time on their marketing so that they can spend more time on their writing, my “returns” come in better quality books to read.
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