Best Bets for Marketing Books
Writing a good book is not easy. The characters have to be interesting, better yet memorable, and the plot has to go somewhere. Somewhere can be as simple as an afternoon at the beach, but it can't be boring. I write cozy mysteries, which are less gory than detective novels or police procedurals. I think of them as murder without maggots, but that's not a good marketing slogan.
Getting a book out the door
I self-publish the Jolie Gentil cozy mystery series, and spent almost five years writing the first two books. Now that I'm semi-retired, I write two books every year. After all that hard work I have the audacity to want people to buy them, and not just for a sense of self-fulfillment. I want to make some real money.
Electronic book production altered the publishing industry as much as going from typesetting by hand to desktop publishing changed getting a book from author's draft to final copy.
Writers now have many of the capabilities of a New York publisher, and sometimes make more per book than a publisher would pay. It used to be that if you wanted to put out a book yourself you either paid thousands of dollars to what was termed a vanity publisher or you found a printer and had them turn over the fifty boxes of books to you. In either case, you did most of the marketing, which meant going from bookstore to bookstore, with a few stops at libraries. And there was no room for a car in your garage.
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