One would think that because I don't have to query anymore, I'd be past that whole rejection thing. Umm, right. I still have to submit my books, but not to get them published anymore. Now I have to submit them to get them noticed.
I'm talking about advertising. You don't just get to send these people money and they'll put your books in their marketing whatevers (newsletters, FB posts, tweets, websites, etc.) Nope, you submit your book and then wait for them to tell you whether your book is good enough to appear under their logo.
So, sitting here over the weekend, thinking about the sale I'll be having on the Dennis Haggarty books, I went through the list of advertising venues I have. This one already rejected Accidental Death twice. So did that one. That one would probably accept AD, but they're really expensive for free books. This one might accept AD, but they wouldn't accept NC because NC has too few reviews. That one might accept both, but previous ads with them have been lackluster. And then there are the ones who make you pay up front and then reject you - returning your money afterwards, of course, but that's always a pain in the buns.
I ended up not making the jump to advertising with any of them. I ran away. I'm rejection averse. I'm also averse to spending money that doesn't give me an equal or better return. Without ads, though, sales are non-existent.
Anyway, I pretty much did the same things when I was querying. I'd send out a bunch of queries, get rejected across the board, and then not want to query anymore. Then, when I finally got the courage up again, I'd avoided certain agents who were particularly reject-y-ful. Run away, run away.
:shrug:
Damned if I do, damned if I don't. I'm not sure what the answer is. I'll probably blitz the FB groups, tweet a bit, and hope for the best. At least I won't be spending money that way.
Although I'm very ad-adverse, I think I may explore Amazon ads this year. Not looking forward to it, though. I had studying all the metrics. :( Wasn't a business major...
ReplyDeleteI pretty much gave up on advertising. Or getting reviews. Or getting people to sign up for my newsletter. What seems to work for other people doesn't work for me. *shrug* I'm going to give my big sale another week and if I don't get a big boost, I'm raising my prices again. I'm not selling enough to make up for the loss in royalty. And if my KU reads don't go up substantially, I'll be taking all my books out of KU and going wide. Except those sales are sucking too. Yeah, I'm in *that* headspace today.
ReplyDeleteI have editing to do. Let me know when you start blitz and I'll repost/tweet.
FYI, it's the Monday after DST, I'm tired, braindead and cranky.