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- #181
Great thread Held for Ransom and congrats on your success. You mentioned having an author website to have more credibility and building a list. Have it helped increase your sales? Do you think building a list makes any difference when it comes to publishing fiction on Amazon?
Uhhhm, not really. I did it early on. It was easy to setup and it's automated at this stage. Every time I publish something new, I'm sure a certain percentage of readers buy from the list. I would probably still do it if I was starting over from scratch. There's nothing wrong with looking professional but it's not gonna matter a whole lot to the bottom line IMO.
You haven't wrote a lot about marketing - do you really just hit "publish" and let Amazon work for you? No contacting blogs, submitting book promotions to websites etc?
Yeah, I just hit "publish". Except I also hit it at Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Smashwords, Kobo, etc. Never say never but at this point, that's all I've done. I decided early on to follow JA Konrath's advice in this regard...
Get Over Yourself
I have turned off Google Alerts, and don't Google my name or my pen names.
I don't go on message boards.
I don't read my book reviews.
I don't care what people are saying about me, good or bad, in blogs or on Twitter or in the media.
There will always be people who don't like you, and don't like your books.
Ignore them.
Trust me, it is liberating to be free of the opinions of strangers. We all need to focus on our writing. Because the millions of readers out there don't care about your blog. They aren't searching for you on Twitter and avoiding your books based on the comments of others. They aren't taking one star reviews seriously.
It's very easy to obsess in this business. But I haven't seen a single shred of evidence that obsession helps careers.
The thing that I have seen, over and over, is people finding success by writing good books.
I really think it is possible to make a very nice living by writing and not worrying about anything else.
We all want to believe we're doing something good for our careers, so we abuse social media, buy ads, rigorously defend our good name, cultivate media contacts, make appearances, and celebrate our own very minor celebrity.
Let it all go. Spend your time working on your books. That's the only thing that really matters, and the only thing you have control over.
PS. May I have a look at your tool too?
PM sent.
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