Forums for Writers: Friend or Foe?

- October 05, 2015

I'm after what we're all after, which is to make a decent living writing. Yes, I've read/heard and even lived the statistics. It's tough work, very tough work, and you may have to adjust your definition of "decent living" to accommodate. But hope springs eternal and all of that...

I've been in marketing and sales for years, and I know some of the tips and techniques. Promotion for Kindle ebooks and Kindle Unlimited is sometimes a different beast. I won't lament the level of shite on the electronic bookshelves, hell, I've even read some of it and enjoyed.

But no F#cking wonder it's so hard for any writer to get noticed.

Which is why you should find someone, like JA KONRATH, and study what they do, then use their business model and career as your business model.

I made a little money in Sept: and Oct is starting off with the same trend. But as I mentioned before I want to be like you and make a decent living as an indie author-preneur.

So I took someone's advice from a handy little 10 Things you can do to Promote checklist and I checked out Forums. If I were a teenage girl, this is where I would say OMG.

I spent hours combing through post after post searching for little nuggets of wisdom. They are had to find. I did find ton's of help though, for other authors. One person posted their link and blurb, then asked why she wasn't selling. 87 posts later, her work should have been edited and polished and a best seller if she had only followed the advice. I clicked on the link, and the book wasn't there.

Huh?!

All of the work, effort and comments of a crowdsourced edit was wasted.

Which seems to be the theme of a lot of forums. It's just a time suck.

What can you do to promote your book? Write the next one. Then the next one. Then the next one.

One book will not a million dollars make in a month. Yes, I said that in my Yoda voice.

Think of your book like little investments that are going to keep paying over time, if you keep them up. In business, it's called the Lifetime Value. Your book may not earn you $10K in month 1 (and if it does, I need you to email me at lowrychris@gmail.com to tell me what you did!) but it can earn 10K in a lifetime.

I'm using 10K just as easy reference, because if you keep writing, and keep building your bookshelf and your catalog grows larger, you have the potential to earn a LIFETIME VALUE that's way more.

I'm not a pie in the sky guy, though I do believe in the power of Amazon as a billion dollar company and the fact that indie publishing puts more royalties in your pocket while giving you all control over your intellectual property is an amazing opportunity.

If you can promote it right. And if you can get discovered.

I don't know if you can be discovered in a Forum. And I'm not sure that the time you spend digging for intel in a Forum couldn't be better spent with a doc open and working on your next story to build your catalog.

Then talk about it on your FB page. And Twit the log line to see who might be interested. And then post the tweet into a forum and move on to your next project.

Keep writing. Don't stop. Keep plugging away.

How to LifeHack KDP