I Confess

I was going to keep this a secret but I feel the need to offload. I’ve found a very novel (excuse the pun) way of marketing my books. Advertising is all well and good, but how many thousands of adverts are we bombarded with day in day out and 99% of the time we either take no notice, or don’t buy the stuff. What I need to do is target my audience. Book shops are utter C U Next Tuesdays and won’t stock self-published stuff, libraries are equally tight and ridiculously bad at replying to emails even when I’m offering a freebee. So I then thought about doing an abridged version of Summerset or Mad About the Boy, about 100 pages, which would then cost about £3.80 from Lulu. I could spend £50 getting a decent amount printed then distribute them around second hand shops. My reasoning being there have been countless times in my life where I’ve bought a book costing 50p from a second hand shop, thought it was so brilliant I’ve then gone on to buy every book from that author.

But, to be honest, I haven’t the foggiest idea how one goes about creating an abridged version, I’d feel as though I was compromising my novels and I couldn’t face doing it. So, me being me, I thought to myself ‘why don’t you just write a short novella and sell that in second hand shops’. I decided to write a 95-100 page novel with adverts for the other two books at the back, I’m going to print it off and distribute around said second hand shops. Hopefully people will like what they read and come back for more. I can only try. At least if someone picks up the book, reads the synopsis and buys, well they’re already interested in my kind of work. I could spend thousands on advertising and no one would bother even looking any further because it’s not of interest to them.

I also thank the Lord I chose to self-pub rather than falling into the trap of vanity publishing. With all these shenanigans that have been going on with name calling (certain friends will know what I mean) I got into looking at publishers sites and found there are still hundreds of vanity publishers in operation. I worked for one of these when I left university and every day I would leave the office feeling sick to my stomach after they’d fleeced some poor old person out of their life savings with the promise they’d publish their magnum opus and turn it into some sort of best-seller before they died. When in reality they printed a few shoddy copies of the book and just left them to rot. It was horrible. Strangely enough in the publishing world, self-pub books are looked on more favourably than vanity press, which is weird because you may have a book without editing or proof reading.

Still no word from Lorella Belli.

I’m off to see a free screening of a film tonight. Role Models is by the same people who did Knocked Up and 40 Year Old Virgin, and for some reason they’re trying it out before they release it. That makes me feel better because it’s made me realise that no matter how famous or successful you are, you’ve got to give away a few freebies to get your audience. Will let you know what I thought with my next entry.

Ciao for now x