by Chris Harris
The book was finally published on Thursday. You might imagine that was a euphoric moment. It wasn’t. More than anything, I just felt relieved. After all the editing, formatting, proof copies, corrections and assorted teething problems, it was simply good to know that the bloody thing was finally out there.
Twenty-four hours after publication, I had sold one copy. Don’t worry, it did pick up! That was the moment when the reality of what comes next properly dawned on me. I have never expected to start selling large numbers of books immediately. I’ve always assumed I will need to spend the next twelve to eighteen months promoting them, gradually building an audience and discovering what works. If, down the line, I start to get genuine traction, I may bring in a professional promotional company to take things further.
I have always been aware you will sell some copies initially after which it is a very long haul to find an audience. Think of the scale of the task in terms of the size of a supermarket, not just the floor area, but the height too. It is vast. That is the retail book world. I am but a grain of rice. Over the next eighteen months I need to try and grow to being a bag of rice within that vast supermarket, and only sheer determination, a little luck and learning how to market and develop the book and own the process will bring any semblance of success.
Until then, it is down to me, and what an extraordinary amount of work there is to do. But oddly enough, I am looking forward to it. I am naturally curious and, when I look at what is available to an independent author now, the number of potential ways of finding readers is enormous. The aim is not merely to just sell this book. I have another two books in the pipeline, so what I am really trying to do is build an audience that might eventually be interested in all three and who will buy into my actual style of writing and interests.
I have run businesses all my working life and, over the years, I have made numerous attempts to use social media to help them. Most of those attempts, if I am honest, have failed.
There have been exceptions. For several years I had a reasonably successful YouTube channel and even managed to acquire a couple of surprisingly famous followers. I also have a niche football blog which has built up a highly respectable readership, to the extent that the Daily Telegraph, When Saturday Comes, and 11 Freunde, the largest football magazine in the world, interviewed me.
Neither became enormous, but both taught me something important. They grew because I kept producing content. There was no magic moment, I simply kept creating content over a long period of time. That, I suspect, is going to be the key to selling books as well.
One of the recurring themes when you read about self-publishing is how many authors give up very quickly. A book appears, a few social-media posts are made, very little happens and enthusiasm disappears. I have seen figures quoted suggesting that the overwhelming majority of self-published books sell very few copies. The principle seems fairly obvious: persistent promotion doesn’t guarantee success, but without it, a book has very little chance at all. When I researched this process, the results were interesting. 95% of self-published authors just give up. You can see why. Spend three months promoting your book and get no traction, it must be easy to simply throw in the towel.
So, can I really keep doing this for twelve or eighteen months? I think I can. I have already spent about fifteen months writing three books, two are vaguely drawing to a conclusion, albeit while continuing to run my business. I am now trying gradually to reduce my involvement in that business, but it remains my full-time occupation. It would be slightly ridiculous to spend fifteen months creating something I am genuinely proud of, and then decide that promoting it is all rather too much effort. So, I have spent months mentally preparing myself for this stage. I know it will involve an enormous amount of work, and I have decided to see it through.
One thing I intend to do along the way is write regular updates about the marketing campaign itself. Partly because those articles are another source of content and another opportunity to mention the books, but also because I think the process could become quite interesting in its own right. I have spent my life in business and have become accustomed to things sometimes going extremely well and sometimes going spectacularly badly. You enjoy the good periods, shrug your shoulders during the bad ones and get on with whatever needs doing next. But they are always interesting to read about, and let’s face it, writing about things that go wrong always makes the reader feel better about themselves!
The scale of the task became obvious when I spent about ten minutes firing questions into ChatGPT about everything an independent author should be doing. The resulting list was phenomenal. The main thing is that I understood almost everything on it and could immediately see why most of it mattered.
Mailing lists. Additional sales platforms. Author profiles. Directories. Reviews. Social media. Video. Blogging. Podcasts. Newsletters. Search engines. Reader groups. Giveaways. Advertising. Cross-promotion. Backlinks. Bookshops. Libraries.
And that was merely scratching the surface.
The consolation is that perhaps half of those jobs are things you only have to establish once. Get the book onto another platform, create the profile, join the directory, set up the mailing list, build the website properly and, once the foundations are there, they remain there.
Even so, I reckon I could easily spend twenty hours a week doing this for the next eighteen months. That is an enormous commitment. But I increasingly think that selling the books is only part of what interests me. This has become another project in itself: understanding how an unknown writer with a tiny audience can use all of these extraordinary modern tools to try to create one. Perhaps, eighteen months from now, I will have sold thousands of books. Perhaps I won’t.
But even if the whole thing proves to be a commercial failure, I will at least know that I gave the books every possible chance. I will also have learnt an enormous amount about publishing, marketing, social media and audience building along the way. If nothing they will be skills I can utilise for my online vintage business!
