Tools For 21st Century Authors

Someone on a Yahoogroup I am on pointed out that many of the authors who complain about poor sales of their books do little or nothing to promote them.  I tend to think she is correct, but the other part of this is that people are often remarkably unresourceful.  They say self-disempowering things like "I am not computer literate" and leave it at that.  As far as I am concerned, they have no one to blame for their poor sales but themselves.

The fact is that there is a ton of help out there, one of the beauties of the Internet is just how much and how easily garnered.  I just had this book delivered wirelessly to my Kindle 3.  Thanks to its being text-to-speech enabled, the publisher's/author's choice, I will be able to read it.  And I plan to get good and useful information out of it.  If I have to be open to and ready to learn something new, then so much the better.  Maybe this is why my first novel, published independently, has sold many times the average number of self-published copies?

The book is SOCIAL MEDIA FOR AUTHORS SERIES: FACEBOOK PAGES, written by best-selling author Jon F. Merz.  It set me back a huge dollar and ninety-nine cents.  I will read and report back here, but my point in this post is that there are so many resources like this one.  Whether anyone will buy your book as a result of your Facebook page for it I don't really know, but since the essence of marketing is giving people every opportunity to hear about it, it seems like a cheap opportunity. 

There is a saying in marketing "You are always marketing."  I converted this to "You are always recrioting volunteers" when I wrote and trained on nonprofit issues, after hearing one volunteer resources manager complain that they A. couldn't get any volunteers, and B. had no time for recruiting them.  When I managed the volunteer resources of one organization, it was common to find me standing in line at the supermarket where I would strike up conversations with people, mentioning what I did.  Since the most common reason people give for not bolunteering is "Nobody asked me" I, in essence, asked, or at least presented the option in the most attrractive manner.  Yes, I got volunteers as a result.  Before I left I had trippled the size of the program.

Why would that not apply to my novels?  Why would an author not use every means to acquaint readers with their existence and do it efficiently and in the best light?  I am convinced most advertising does little more than acquaint potential customers with a product, perhaps reminding them if they already knew.  The ad people think they are tricking us into buying a new car.  maybe they are.  But it's the consumer's decision.. once they know about a product, they can decide to buy it.  That goes for books, and how can we expect people to want to buy if they have never heard of the book?

So go to Amazon, whether .com or .co.uk or elsewhere,  and look at this book, then look around on the page to see others in a similar vein.  Everyone knows my rule.. never say you can't or don't know how to do something without adding the word "yet" to the end of the statement.  I don't know how to do a Facebook page for my novel -- yet!  But this book will help me learn.