Social Media. Platform. Marketing. Those are what rest on the shoulders of published authors and yet-to-be-published writers these days. It isn't just about about getting published, we have to worry about selling our books. So these publishers tell us that we need to build a platform, find our readers, use the social media to market our books.
But does that really work? I'm not sure. Although I agree that publishers shouldn't be the only ones "advertising" our books. But most of the time, writers follow each other's blogs and websites. It seems like writers, publishers and the agents are the only ones reading our books. The pool we have created is just for ourselves.
Sure there are real readers out there that have nothing to with our world, but how many times does that happen? I don't want to be a pessimist, but there's a little part of me that makes wonder. That is all.
P.S. I'm doing a guest blog post here tomorrow on Auto-correctors. Don't worry; it's not as depressing as this one.
http://haleywhitehall.wordpress.com/
And here's my editor website. Thanks for visiting~
There is an old tv ad whose basic pitch is "tell 2 people, and they tell 2 people and so on." If you can just get to those first 2 people and they pass it on you can be successful. That being said, getting to those 2, them being readers, and then those 2 readers tell 2 readers and so on is the hard part. I agree with you, social media tends to market to just friends and fellow bloggers. How do we get to people we don't know? That's the rub. The key is, don't get discouraged and keep pluggin away at it.
ReplyDeleteThere's another way to look at this. Sure, we're all writers, and we're all reading each other's blogs. But the other side of that is that we're all readers too. Voracious readers, most likely. If I build a network of people who like to write AND read, some of these people are probably going to be interested in my books and purchase them. And I've already found that I'm interested in what they've written and purchased several books already. So we may have created this pool ourselves, but it's a deep pool, and it's a pool of people who love good stories. I really can't think of a better pool to be in! :)
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