I know, I know; I didn’t publish anything last Thursday, the 30th (what would have been my mother’s 81st birthday. Yes, I am estranged from my immediate family, but I keep track of the dates). What can I say? I flaked. And I didn’t hear any complaints from out there, so…
Book Obsessed Babes in Jacksonville, FL is ON this Saturday, April 8. Tickets still available (the freebies I had have gone). Here’s the link:
Tickets for Book Obsessed Babes 2017
Come on out. Sheer Bliss Events and the Omni put on a great event last year. Serioyusly, worth the price of admission. And there are usually great raffle baskets.
I have been working on other projects, writing projects that I can’t really talk about here. Yeah, I’m delving into writing erotica, I’m using a pen name for it, and I need to properly launch it. So…maybe later.
You would think the toughest part of creating a book is writing it. Wrong-O. Marketing is a cast-iron bitch from the darkest depths of Hell who wants you to die of embarrassment just because. And it’s not easy on a shoestring. With a day job. My day job.
I can attest to the difficulty mostly because of how blessedly ignorant I am. I figured “Write book. Get cover. Upload to Amazon. People find book. Sales go through the roof. Done.”
Not so much. You need a campaign. You need to launch it like the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta spacecraft to land the Philae probe on a comet 10 years (10 YEARS!) and 6.4 billion kilometers after it was launched. They started planning it in 1986. Rosetta was launched in 2004. Philae landed (wrong) in 2014. That’s 28 years.
This comet was probed by aliens.
I’m not that patient.
Confession: (and yes, another reference) I think highly of my writing skills. In “Amadeus,” Salieri looks over an assortment of Mozart’s sheet music and sees that there are no corrections to it. “As if he was taking dictation from God.”
I don’t actually work like this but…
Truthfully, I’m probably closer to Salieri.
I figure (wrongly, perhaps, but I have trouble admitting it) that I got it write the first time and additional drafts are for chickenshits. When I am done, I am DONE and don’t wish to get stuck in the after phases of writing. I could rationalize this by copping out, “I’m an artist,” but the truth is, I’d rather have someone else do that part. Publishers aren’t lining up, so guess who has to tote the load? Yup. Annoyed sigh.
So, here I am, having to go back over steps because my impatience caused an error, waiting on a reply to get a book launch party on Facebook, needing to get ISBN, ASIN, the alphabet soup of needed things to sell a book in the Information Age. It’s annoying as hell. But, I’m doing it.
I will try not to flake on the Thursday post. Next Monday, I’ll give you the wrap up from BOBASE
