by Chris Harris
Business is booming, which is wonderful, except it’s leaving precious little time to promote my book. Seven weeks into my publishing adventure, I’m juggling writing, blogging, Substack, Medium and social media. The statistics are modest, the workload enormous, but the foundations are taking shape. Most importantly, I’m enjoying myself.
Cowardice of Pragmatism. The Sales Reality.
I’ve run the same business since I was 18, retailing vintage furniture and effects, originally from shops and now online. There have been good times and bad times. The worst saw me working gruelling 70 to 80-hour weeks for over a year, earning absolutely nothing and, even worse, losing a load of money. But that’s how it goes.
The last three or four months have been the most successful in my decades of trading. This is largely down to reorganising the business, which I now run with my wife, with the intention of spending less time on furniture and more time on writing and promoting my book. It’s working out wonderfully, amazing with out flatlined economy, except I hadn’t banked on it going quite this well.
This means the business is still taking 40 to 50 hours a week, leaving considerably less time for marketing the book than I’d anticipated. More importantly, the quality of that time isn’t always particularly good. I generally manage a couple of three-hour stretches each week when I can really concentrate. Otherwise, I’m snatching half an hour here, an hour there. Not ideal, but it chips away I suppose.
Much of my content creation is consequently done on the hoof. When we’re travelling to markets and auctions, my wife drives while I edit. I walk for an hour most days, and that’s when I dictate my stories and blogs.
I’m currently dictating this at twenty minutes past to two in the morning walking around the peripheral pathways around Lewes and Kingston, I love the peace. With so much work, much of it physically and mentally taxing, I occasionally find myself falling asleep at eight in the evening so getting five hours sleep suffices for me. My wife doesn’t mind either. We both knew that once the book was published, life would become fairly full-on and once all of the platforms social and publishing, I am working on and developing is done, things should return to normal.
I had counselling for a few years to help control my urge to do a million things at once, learning to compartmentalise my time and approach things in a more chilled-out manner. I also have a reflexologist visit the house every fortnight. So although I’m sometimes tired, I’m never overwhelmed. I feel completely in control of everything.
The furniture business runs smoothly. I buy what I need to buy, sell what I need to sell, and everything gets processed. As for the writing and marketing, I’ve adopted a simple philosophy: what will be will be. I’ll do what I can do. Somehow, over the first month or so, I’ve managed to pull together what I think is a pretty good start.
The most important thing is I have enjoyed the work. This is supposed to be a hobby after all.
Meagre Rather Than Dismal
Last week, I finally got Substack properly organised. I now have a presentable, navigable site, and the statistics, unlike my previous attempts, have been meagre rather than dismal. I’m quite pleased with that. After all, it’s only been going for a couple of weeks, and there’s still very little content. I’ve got the podcast linked to it and the episodes are showing in the feeds, it looks great.
I’m now redeveloping Medium, which is considerably easier because it offers far fewer presentation options. The statistics there are dismal rather than meagre, but maintaining it is ridiculously simple. I paste in a WordPress URL, and Medium generates the article. Five to ten minutes a week, tops.
I’ll keep developing Substack, but Medium is simply a place to put my writing and see what happens. If it hasn’t gained traction in three to six months, I’ll close it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
By the end of this week, all four of my publishing platforms, the two WordPress blogs, Substack, and Medium, should finally look presentable and navigable. It’s been soul-destroying at times, not least the running battles with ChatGPT, but we generally get there in the end.
Fruitful Endeavours.
My content creation itself has been erratic, disorganised, but remarkably fruitful. I’ve written eight short stories in the past fortnight, alongside my regular blogs. I’ve started a series about motorcars from the mid-century period through to the 1980s, and another called Tricks of the Vintage Trade, both subjects that have already proved successful in attracting readers.
I’m currently producing eight to ten blogs a week, and I believe they’re all good quality. Individual articles might take anything from a week to six months to gain traction, but that’s the beauty of blogging. They don’t simply disappear after a day or two, as so much social media content does. They remain available to be discovered. My main blogs best read blog last month was one I wrote two years ago.
I hope that, in six months to a year, this growing archive will bring in plenty of readers and, with them, opportunities to promote my books.
Importantly, there’s another consideration. Even if I don’t sell many books, I already have a relatively successful WordPress blog and another, exclusively for my books, gaining traction. Eventually, I could amalgamate the two sites into one substantial publishing platform, with a large archive of articles and stories attracting readers in their own right.
So the work certainly won’t have been wasted, as if the books fail, I already have a publishing arm that is growing at a sustained pace.
The Social Media Conundrum
I don’t have much faith in social media as a way to attract readers to my writing. Looking at my WordPress statistics, the number of visitors arriving through links on my social media accounts is dismal. However, dismal is also a fair description of my understanding of how these platforms work.
So I’m not throwing in the towel just yet. Instagram and Bluesky seem to be gathering a little traction, albeit on a very small scale, and I intend to spend the period between my next short break, and Christmas improving the appearance of my four social media accounts and, more importantly, learning how to use them properly. It’s something I approach with a degree of trepidation, but also enthusiasm relishing another challenge to conquer.
One thing keeps cropping up in my research: Instagram and Facebook, in particular, can be useful ways of advertising books. When I eventually start spending money advertising my writing, I hope to have four or five books available, I want potential readers to discover those books, but also to visit my blogs and Substack, where they’ll find a substantial body of work. Which means those publishing platforms need to be looking absolutely tip-top before I start paying to attract visitors or it’s a waste of advertising revenue.
Building a Body of Work
Whilst the Denham stories remain my darling, I’ve begun writing much shorter, unrelated stories. These Quick Reads are intended to introduce people to my writing, but they’re also something I can submit to specialist short-story publishers. This week, I’ll be sending my first story off to some of them. Next year, I intend to make that a regular part of the campaign, spreading my net further and hopefully finding readers beyond my own platforms.
Meanwhile, I have several books planned: Part Two of Something About England, the Denham football club novel, a collection of vintage stories and yarns, another collection of general short stories, and a project I’m particularly excited about, reinventing the first Clash album through thirteen short stories inspired by its songs.
There’s certainly no shortage of material I’m working on and oodles of content to turn into potential interest and sales.
I’m going away for a few days in a couple of weeks, so I’ve set myself two immediate objectives. This week, finish Medium. Next week, create a spreadsheet to ensure that everything I’m writing is being published across the appropriate platforms. At the moment I’m creating lots of content on my blogs but not sharing it properly still.
That way, when I go away, I can relax knowing the infrastructure is in place and the content is going out regularly.
It will be seven weeks into promoting the book, but definitely a very good foundation to be completed.
