I would make a lousy salesperson. I doubt that successful sales people begin their marketing pitches with "I'm sorry". "I'm sorry to bother you, but..." I'm the type of person who'll try every possible solution before I ask someone for help. Because you just know you're bothering them. People have their own lives, their own problems. I understand that a marketer needs to show that their widget will make the customer's life easier, but how exactly does that work with a book? Unless it's some kind of self-help manual? By begging for readers, I'm actually asking strangers to do me a favor. That's all well and good when you're opening the door for a little old lady, but sitting down and slogging through somebody's book "just to be nice" is a big ask.
I suppose that's why paid reviews work. At least the reader gets something out of it. But I'm not going to pay for someone to lie about me. I'm in the writing business, not the grifting business.
The thought of begging is holding me back from contacting book bloggers. That, and the fact that it's an exhausting enterprise. I contacted about ten of them a while back and while I got two positive responses, I went through a lot of work for a twenty per cent return. Many want a synopsis plus a sample, plus a.....on and on and on. Then there's the issue of having to first establish whether a particular blogger will even review a novella. Many won't. Novellas are "low class". Anyone can write one. (Really?? Most people can barely manage to write a complete sentence.) Or they're not hefty enough. Well, after just re-editing my first full-length novel I can attest that my novellas are WAY heftier, despite their compact size.
I commend indie authors who can spend day after day marketing their books, but it begs the question, when exactly do they find time to write? Maybe there are two types of people ~ those who sell and those who create ~ and it's rare to find someone who possesses both competencies. Selling is outward; writing is inward. I posit that most writers are introverts. Being a social gadfly doesn't lend itself to introspection. You've got too many hands to shake, too many witty quips to share. Introverts don't make good salespeople. They grow psychically exhausted by the effort. That's why we need to hire someone to do that for us. Trade-published authors have the advantage, and they don't even have to pay for it.
I would gladly pay a reasonable sum to have a proven marketer push my books so I wouldn't have to. But there's that word "reasonable" again. What's reasonable to me is far different from most people's definition of the word.
On a related note, I connected with an indie writer on LinkedIn who writes in some kind of obscure genre, a sub-sub-sub genre, if you will. She was initially friendly, asking if I'd like to talk about writing. It didn't take long before she began pushing her "publicist" on me. I finally realized that she's made a deal with him ~ bring in more customers and she gets a discount on his services. I checked out her books on Amazon and they're not eye-catching. So, mutual back-scratching is the only way she can afford a publicist. (So weird, my non-committal responses to her seemed to have ended our "friendship".) And the guy is in Africa, which is neither here nor there, but I prefer to do business with someone whose first language is English. I hired a Fiverr graphic artist once who didn't even know what a diner was. I had to send him sample images I pulled off Google to demonstrate the concept to him.
I did put myself out there on Goodreads and Facebook (ick) to troll for readers, but I so regret doing that. Today I'm logging onto Facebook to either delete my posts or, barring that, updating them to apologize for wasting people's time. My Facebook author page (because I cloned it off my personal account) doesn't allow me to send or receive messages, and now people think I'm some kind of scam artist. No wonder I'm psychically exhausted.
I keep saying it, and I'll probably keep saying it until it finally pounds itself into my skull: no more marketing. It's simply not for me. It's unnatural.
There's no freaking magic bullet.
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