Rambling on About Selling

Sales.  How does one get them?  How does one keep them going?  These are questions that have plagued writers since Ogg first put burnt stick to cliff wall, I guess.  Ogg had it harder.  Someone had to walk by his cliff wall and I don't think anyone bothered to pay him.  

I know one thing for certain... marketing my own books is way harder than marketing product manufactured by someone else.  I mean, I was in sales for crying out loud and I could drive up to a business, go into a meeting, and walk out with orders.  Even better if they were already interested in one item but I ferreted out they needed a whole slew of other items.  I was in my element there.  You called me about a little plastic case, eh?  Well, how about these cordsets?  Or how about this wire?  And you'll probably need tools to put all that together, right?  Huzzah.  

Now?  Not in my element so much.  Now it's more like 'say hey do you like to read? oh, you do. great.' or 'oh, you don't? bummer'.  And even if they say they like to read, it's a matter of which genre and what specifically they like in that genre and whether anything you've written would spark their interest.  Or they don't have a Kindle and only like to read paperback, but they don't want to pay the amount I have to charge for those to not lose my ass.  :bangs head on wall:

And let's face it.  Authors aren't just selling books.  They're selling themselves.  Maybe not all of themselves... this isn't slavery (even if some people want everything for free, which would be a form of writer-slavery.)  Still, every story is hatched in our heads and breaks free onto the page, so it's kind of like a teeny-tiny piece of ourselves.  When we go to sell yourself and find rejection, that's hard to take.  Which makes even the attempt like giving yourself a mental Indian burn every time you do it and thus makes one shy away from the attempt.

Still, unless you're interested in only having a book out there that maybe people will run across from time to time, you're going to need to do something to generate sales.  This Facebook Groups thing I do works a little.  Spending a little money on advertising works better, but who's got the scratch for that these days.

I don't know the answer.  If I did, I'd be raking in the dough, but alas, no.  Freebie things tend to generate some residual sales, if you can get your ads out there somehow and get those page reads, and have other things to offer readers... i.e. additional books in the series, etc.  Whatever you do, though, you've got to keep doing it.  Weather the storms.  Suffer the slings and arrows.  :shrug:  You'll see sales.  Maybe not enough to retire on.  (I retired anyway.  It's been good for my mental health if not for my pocketbook.)  Maybe not even enough for a burger and fries and MickeyD's.  The alternative is sitting and staring at your books while no one else even bothers to glance at them.  

Good luck.  If you have the magic answer, I do wish you'd share it.  Otherwise, we can hang together and commiserate.  :hugs: