I’ve not blogged for a bit and for some of you this will have been welcome relief from the July and August onslaught of posts.
I’ve also sacked my American publicist, so everything that I now post will be self-generated, and my social media presence will revert to a trickle instead than the flood that it had become.
Americans do things very differently (no shit Sherlock?) and US consumers of Internet rubbish have a much greater tolerance to constant streams of self-promotion.
I’ve got to be honest here, and tell you that some of my publicist-generated posts I didn’t even bother to read.
Of course I scanned them all, because I wouldn’t want to have my name attached to anything immoral, indecent or illegal … would I?
But did working with a publicist actually achieve anything?
Yes, in terms of “building my brand”, but in terms of sales … probably not.
That’s not to say that Losing The Plot isn’t selling well; it is.
However, whether it would be selling as well without her input is open to debate.
You see – and this was the point made by my publicist – “building a brand” has very little to do with actually selling books; it has everything to do with social media.
Twitter works like this: you-follow-me-and-I’ll-follow-you. I still don’t understand Twitter, but to me it serves very little purpose, unless, of course you are an already established “name” or at least halfway to being some sort of celebrity.
I now have around twelve hundred followers on Twitter, but I doubt if more than fifty of them actually bought a copy.
But as far as Twitter goes, I was lucky enough to have made the acquaintance of the mother of Kurtis Stacey. Kurtis is an established “name”, with over one hundred and fifty thousand followers, and when he published a tweet on my behalf, this did generate sales.
So what else worked?
My most popular post featured the piece that appeared in the Sidmouth Herald, and caused a ruffling of feathers amongst the good ladies who populate the Valley of the river Sid.
And the Western News press release also generated a significant numbers of what my publicist calls “engagements”.
But overall it was an interesting learning experience and one I am going to bore the members of the Wroclaw Creative Writing Group with shortly.
However, for my next novel Saving Dave I will probably go down the traditional publishing route because I have already had considerable interest in this project.
And for this – although, to be fair, it is a pretty unique plot line – I probably have the efforts of my publicist to thank.
Finally, if you have read Losing The Plot, do please log onto Amazon and/or Goodreads and leave a review. Five stars only please!
Okay, that’s enough of that.
The reason I’ve not blogged for ages is because I got married last Friday.
Yes, read that again … I got married last Friday.
But you’re going to have to wait for my next blog to find out what can go right and what can go wrong at a Polish wedding!
Hasta pronto, chic@s!