how to market your book right -5 Reasons why my first book-tanked!!
5 reasons why my first book tanked
It has been over seven years since I started writing but it took me 6 years to publish my poems.
After writing daily and refining my way of delivery of words and emotions I had gathered enough courage and confidence that I could indeed call myself a writer of versatile genres.
I quit Facebook and dropped out of all groups on Whatsapp, became a vairagi :-p
I managed to squeeze in one hour of free time everyday for three months and finally I had a draft version ready. I got it reviewed by my colleagues and friends who had a flair for editing, a hawk eye for collating grammar edits and they did it for free.
I googled “how to publish a book” and put it out there and I was on cloud nine!!
Untitled Verses was a book of poems, I knew it was difficult to start off with poems but if I could pull it off, then I was in a place where I could definitely write more books and sell more books.
But my first venture into the world of publishing failed miserably, here is a list of things I realized after that.
1) For me this book meant the world but for others it was just a book
I had a really stable base of around 700 readers to all my poems that I sent to them almost on a daily basis via Whatsapp. I used to get a good feedback, “Nice one”, “well done”, “this one connected to me “,” when are you publishing a book?”
Naturally I assumed that all these comments would in turn result in the book being sold.
But the same people sent me a “Congratulations 😊 “and closed the conversation but there were some who did buy, just because it was me (their friend) who was writing it.
My best friends from college did not even say they would buy it. That was one of the biggest lessons that I learnt.
Be prepared to accept the fact that all of them may not buy your book.
2) Why should people buy your book?
There was this friend of mine who had convinced me that a good book, like a pot of gold buried in the desert would be finally found, it does not need any marketing.
But I asked him the question: “Have you bought my book?” — he asked me this very same question “Why should I buy your book?”
So, from a collection of poems that could connect to readers about life and all its eccentricities, it became a product that I had to market, paint, sell and rejoice. It had to have an USP (Unique selling point). Sadly, my book did not have 3 Gb RAM, Selfie Camera or any of those product specifications that mattered.
Ask yourself, why would someone buy your book?
3) I did not have a target audience
I did not really have a customer base, I sent a message/mail to all the people I knew, not necessarily the ones interested to buy.
Know your customers, build a portfolio around you, start a niche writing style that is original to you. I did all of that, started to write on Instagram, Mirakee. I saw that cliché posts were doing great, my posts could not even crawl to more than 10 likes. But then I started sticking to my guns, started my own prompt series, I met writers online, told them I had a book.
They directly became readers to my next book, I was getting real time feedback from fellow writers.
Build a target audience
4) I did not have a multiplier effect with sales
You can ask your friends to buy, their friends to buy and then their friends also to buy the same but this is all your circle and the extended circle of people that you may know. This has to reach people that you have never met and interacted. For this you need a multiplier effect to take shape and people who believe in you as a writer need to stand up and start promoting the same as their own. I had no one to take it up like this, so I was the one-man army, spamming people to buy this book.
Build a team of people who believe in your book as much as you do.
5) I believed that the first book of mine is going to be an overnight best seller
It had taken over 6 years, 40 poems that were amazing, I had this notion that I would reach 100 downloads in a day, 500 in a month and 1000 in two and by one year I would be counting dollars in the Bahamas.
Poof went that plan, I had five in the first day, twenty in the week, 80 in the first month and 100 in hundred days and over a year 500. It was a slow grind, telling people about the book, making them buy it, and giving so many books for free.
Rome was not built in a day and every writer takes time to reach the hearts of people, it is but a never-ending journey.
So what next?
With this completed I knew enough to work out the plans and iron the chinks in the armour over the next one year and write my second book.
A book of short stories — named “13”
Available at this link https://www.amazon.in/dp/B07C3TW3VX on Amazon all over the world.
And in India, Singapore, Malaysia — https://notionpress.com/read/13-1321050 via NotionPress publishers.
If you are interested please do visit these links and get reading and remember to make new mistakes.
I hope you don’t make the same ones I made.
