It's 2012. I'm sitting at a table in the front of the room, a microphone poised to capture my every word. At this local writing conference, I am considered a rock star. Everyone in the audience wants what I have-a three-book contract with a traditional publishing company. Their eyes are hungry, their pens poised over notebooks. We take a question from the crowd.
"How do I build a platform and make money with my blog?" a woman asks.
"Build a time machine and go back to 2005 and start your blog then, " I say.
Because it's the truth. In this oversaturated market, the only ways to build a following and profit from it are to have been around for 5-10 years already or to already be famous. The woman sits down, unhappy with my answer. But no one else on the panel has a better one. Because there is no easy answer, no secret to building a following.
Scary, right?
It scares me, too.
From the very beginning of my writing career, I've been told that publishers want a writer to have a brand, a platform, a blog, a built-in army of fans. But that was 2009, and now it's 2015, and that doesn't work anymore. Book blogs become paid services, giveaways become chum pits, conference-goers dump purses full of business cards out in the trash to make room for more free books that they won't read. It is virtually impossible to get your blog seen or your book discovered. We are glutted with information, and yet our answer to "How do I get people to buy my book?" is social media marketing, which is basically throwing more information out into the void.
Why?
It is a sad fact that if every one of my Twitter followers-which is 9, 631, as of this post- bought my next book, HIT would hit the New York Times bestseller list. BOOM. Easy. One success like that helps an author with every stage of their career, raising their advances, giving them more bargaining power, and lending them a sort of street cred that even my grouchy Luddite grandfather understands and respects. Looking at my sales numbers, my followers are not following me for the purpose of buying my next book, and that's totally okay. They're probably there for my brownie recipes and #badscarystories. But the point is that whatever a publisher sees when checking my Klout score doesn't necessarily translate into book sales. Whatever form of alchemy causes a person to click BUY IT NOW runs deeper than simply hearing the message every two hours as if the author is an insane cuckoo clock.
Back in 2007, Facebook was beautiful in its simplicity. You posted something to your personal page or your Fan/Author/Brand page, and everyone who was your Friend or Follower saw it. Since then, however, Facebook has recognized the error of allowing us to speak to our friends for free, and now, of my 1836 Fans, only 3-10% see any given post on the Author page that they have chosen to follow for the express purpose of reading my posts. If I pay $20, I could bump that number up to 30%. I would have better luck randomly mailing postcards to strangers. No matter what I say or how beautifully I say it, my message doesn't reach the people who have asked to hear it.
I got on Instagram hoping to reach people who prefer beautiful images. As an artist, I love setting up shots, tweaking the exposure, and using filters. But let's be honest. Seeing a beautiful photo of my book sitting on my orange sweater beside a Pop-Tart isn't going to make you go buy that book. Even if you judge a book by its cover, Instagram isn't how people shop for great reads. I get more
No#ABCC Troublemaker
TBerry
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