Marketing & Promotion

Well, for those of you who follow me here, and I do appreciate you, this blog is mostly about my writing. Yes, unfortunately this blog is all about me. If you want to see things about you, you have to go to Piedmont Writer.

In the course of the last month, I've been moving. Because of where we lived, where I live now, and that my parents own both the houses, I've been lucky enough to move at my leisure. Well, the first few weeks were furious that I had a man around to help me move the big furniture. Now that he's gone, I've been struggling to get the old house into some semblance of clean so we can market it and sell it.

My mother feels that we should just leave it the way it is. Broken toilet downstairs (that has been broken since we moved in) overgrown yard, mismatched cabinets in the kitchen. Sell it for what we can get.

I, on the other hand, want to fix all the gaffs, repaint, fix the toilet downstairs and gut the bathroom upstairs to bring it to the 21st century. I want to make the house shiny new so we can sell it for a little bit more than what we paid for it. Sounds sensible to me. And if not get a little more, then sell it for what they originally bought it for so they don't lose money.

 My mother also feels she wants to sell the house For Sale By Owner. I do not. I gave her the arguments that although she'll save money by not hiring a real estate agent, she'll also have to be at the beck and call of people who want to look at the house. Not to mention, find ways to market it, etc. and all the other things real estate agents do. Pictures, MLS listings, showings, print-outs. (And that will fall to me, which I do not want to do.)

There's been a slew of discussion going on for the last few weeks, and now that she's gone on vacation, I have settled down into the routine of cleaning and moving the last of the stuff out. Next week, I'm hoping to begin painting.

And all of this brings me to the idea of what we need to do to market our books. I just released REMEMBERING YOU for the third time. New cover, new name, new edits, new chapter titles. Shiny shiny shiny.

I'm not what is known as an aggressive marketer. I prefer to do things quietly. For my Regency romances I think I only mentioned it on my blogs once, and then Tweeted once and let it go. I may have done one or two interviews, one or two guest posts.

With REMEMBERING YOU, I had nothing set up, (because quite honestly I didn't know I was going to release it, was a spur of the moment decision). I decided to offer it for free on Amazon, put a barrage of hourly Tweets up, and did a post on Monday on the Piedmont Writer blog. I guess you could say that was somewhat quiet.

I did get to the #1 rankings on the Kindle Free list, so that was nice. I didn't give away as many books as I thought I might, but enough to keep me hovering at the 1 and 2 spot for two days. But because Amazon changed their algorithms again, I've lost all my ranking. It seeems one needs reviews to keep the rankings. (Anyone out there have a review handy for me?)

Anyway, what this post all boils down to is that, with the new self-publishing model, we can make changes to our books as we see fit. We don't need to keep what is old and broken and not working anymore. We have the option to go back in and change what needs changing -- to make it shiny and new. We have the option to have an "open house" instead of trying to show one person at a time. We have the option to go all out on a marketing frenzy or just quietly promote and hope for the best.

I suppose it depends on who you are and what you want from your book.