I’ve spent what free time I’ve had in the last week plus trying to come up with a marketing plan for the Kethem Novels. A few things are clear to me, the biggest one of which is that it’s a bootstrapping kind of thing. The general approach is to reduce the cost of your book, then get one of a number of services to tell a lot of people about it (by paying them). If only it were that simple, because the ones that everyone suggests requires you to have a lot of reviews, and is chock full of established authors, making it difficult to get a slot.
So you can try to use the smaller guys … which really doesn’t work particularly well, as far as I can tell, but I’m going with it. I’ve tried one such service (which has a variable cost, so I’m not sure how much it’s going to be) which ended up with a grand total of 9 sales. ENT has a great rep, and when you submit your book for consideration, there’s a “companion” service that will reach 120k+ more readers. But ENT rejected me and the companion service didn’t. That has as yet to kick in, but I’m thinking it was a bit of bait and switch; now, I’m just trying to get a ENT signup.
There are other options for advertising, that more or less are “give the book away” kind of promotions. I’m happy to do that … if you want readers, you need to get a bunch hooked somehow. But it’s moderately expensive. You can do a giveaway on Goodreads that’s going to cost you about $1 per book, you can do a free book off your author website for about $1 per book, you can sign up for a service that lets people download your book for free … at $2 per book. If you give away 1000 books, you’re spending $1,000-$2,000, which is a hefty sum, and you better believe in yourself because it’s going to take a thousand sales to break even.
Which leads to the question, do I believe the Kethem novels are that compelling? And the answer is I do. I think I’m reasonably objective about the entire thing. They aren’t great prose like Daniel Abraham’s The Long Price Quartet, but they are as good as any number of other books I’ve read.
We will see how it all turns out. I’ll post more when I see the results of the requests I’ve put out there.