Relentlessly Helping People Who Would Enjoy *A Perfect Blindness* Find It
There is a lot of advice for new authors. Books. Blogs. Newsletters. All overflowing with advice. A riot of tips, strategies, and essential to-dos. One of the most common is to blog. To be relentlessly helpful. To offer tips, strategies, and best practice to-dos for the potential audience for your book. To give it away […]
The lastest review of A Perfect Blindness (1/16/18)
Sometimes your eyes see what they want and there is a veil of darkness covering them as both Scott and Jon hear what they want but often get blindsided by their own fears and the need to not be alone.
Self-Publishing Part 11: the Book Hunt/a Quick Note
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness A quick note to everyone who has been following Going it Mostly Alone; owing to a couple of coinciding health issues, neither serious on their own, but seriously unpleasant together, I’ve spent much of the past 5 days in bed, recovering, occasionally pushing my fingers over to […]
Self-Publishing Part 12: the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers: from a Tournament to a Marathon
With marathons: as long as you cross the line, you win, no matter how long it takes.
Self-Publishing Part 12: How the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers, a Real Time Break
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
So far, this path to publication has relied mostly on an extended flashback, with occasional forays into general truths. Today will be a break into present time, with a quick step back a couple of weeks to prepare for what is happening now. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 12: the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers or A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Speaking of marathons, A Perfect Blindness has been out for about 6 months.
Sales?
Not nearly what I wanted, hoped, nor planned for. I’m creaking along with about half of what I need for the first milestone (with an asterisk explained later).
Likely owing to that I’ve avoided doing what’s important. By which I mean the hard parts. Been busy as hell. But not getting what I need to get done: outreach. The letting people know the book exists part. The scary part. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: Amazon Lists, Best of This, That, or the Other Thing
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Amazon lists appear at first flush to be the Holy Grail of big-data sales accuracy. Amazon knows what was sold, when, by whom, to whom, and for some Kindle versions, even how many pages have been read: Finally, the El Dorado of sales accuracy.
Except it’s not. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: Bestseller, best of and Other lists. Who makes them matters.
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
The last member of the list making quadrangle are the list makers themselves. No one does this as a public service. They are trying to attract people to their publication/business, be that a newspaper, periodical, blog, bookseller or what-have-you. Now, if all the list maker did was get raw numbers, rank the top X titles and publish it, all the bestseller lists would be essentially the same, differing—if at all—only by how the numbers were grouped: broadly as fiction vs. nonfiction or more narrowly into genres like mysteries, or subgenres like drawing-room whodunits. But if this were all a list maker did, it wouldn’t matter much if a reader went to the NYT or WSJ, or this blog, or that column: Same number of books sold. Same titles. Same ranking, same old same old.
How would that attract readership? Why buy XYZ newspaper if I can find the same thing in that one, or some other one or free in a blog? Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: Bestsellers, Best-Ofs, and Other lists. Who cares?
each of which is further broken down into “Bestsellers,” “Most gifted,” “Hot new releases,” “Most wished for” and “Top rated”