Marketing is hard.
I’ll circle back to this point, but to start with, I want to address the upsides.
First and foremost, I’m still surprised at how much I enjoy writing. The characters – Krell, Verbena, Olgar, Kraven, Tristan, and many others – are in many ways real people that exist in my thoughts. They have wants, desires, goals, and motivations, and when I’m writing it’s extremely enjoyable to realize that there is no way Verbena would not say something in a smug tone, or that Tristan would not let the opportunity to needle Krell pass by him. In fact, several scenes were re-written specifically to remove characters because there was no way they’d NOT interject… and Futility of Defense was already on track to be 35% larger than Beginning of Arrogance!
The story itself is also fascinating to me. I know how it’s going to start, major plot developments, and how it’s going to end… but the journey there?
It’s fascinating how little I know about it until things spill from my mind and onto the page! Watching as the characters evolve, and how the story needs to change to accommodate who they are, so I remain true to their personalities, is a tremendously rewarding exercise.
That, of course, just leads to the first draft. Once I have the first draft in place, the self-editing process begins. The main things I look out for are what I call Stupid Character Syndrome™ moments. This is where any of the characters are presented with a problem and could solve it using their previously demonstrated knowledge or powers, and instead… act stupidly. There either must be a reason they couldn’t use their powers to solve the problem, or the problem needs to be rewritten to accommodate them doing so. Beginning of Arrogance had this a few times with Krell’s ability to create a dome of force to protect himself, where the first draft had him taking wounds he had no business receiving.
I also adore the professional editing process. Having someone do a comprehensive edit of my books, reading them looking for inconsistencies, plot threads, and pacing issues leads to a substantially better book. For Beginning of Arrogance, my editor came back and told me that Chapter 11 was, essentially, a confusing mess and needed to be completely reworked. I loved receiving that feedback.
What’s really happening, and why I enjoy it so much, is that the assumptions I’m making on the page are being noticed and called out for me to see. Assumptions are invisible most of the time. I knew what I thought was going on, so it was easy for me to follow… but when the editor read it, none of the knowledge locked inside my brain was actually present on the page, and it led to the book being confusing. Having that exposed means that the book is much MUCH better as a result. When I realized it was all about detecting assumptions, I wrote that into a scene in Futility of Defense, it was so impactful to me.
Shoutout to my beta readers as well. The questions you posed about why they wouldn’t just do something, or why nobody in town was reacting to events in the story, made the book come alive in ways that I would never have been able to do on my own. Authors, get some beta readers and listen to what they have to say. I included almost all of the feedback I received.
Finally, the book is ready. Time to publish.
Publishing is exhausting. I wrote the book, did more than twenty rounds of self-edits, had a professional editor go over it multiple times, did a further ten (or more!) rounds of edits, and finally it went into the queue to be published… and it’s exhausting!
More than any other part, that nebulous time period between submitting the book for publication and seeing it begin to show up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, and dozens of other places… well. It wore me out. I can’t quite understand why but looking at several other voices in the space, they all say the same thing, and I completely agree with them. I wasn’t doing ANYTHING, and it was exhausting.
Which isn’t exactly true – I was beginning to look at the outline I have for book 3, and starting to structure out specific elements of what that book would look like. To paraphrase Bugs Bunny: that first step is a doozy. It’s daunting getting started. (I’m roughly 8-10% done on the first draft of book 3 at this point!)
Then, after obsessively clicking refresh on pages over and over again, the book is available! There’s excitement and joy that comes from that. A feeling of completion, and pride in my work.
Which nobody knows about. Now we’re back to the beginning and my LEAST favorite part of the publishing process… marketing.
I look on with envy at the marketing efforts that other books have, largely clueless as to how to proceed myself. The explosive popularity of other books in the same genre is at once both thrilling – there is clearly a market for the A Paladin’s Journey series – and disheartening, since the level of visibility other books have is something I can only dream about.
Still, I do what I can while maintaining a full-time job. Blog tours, editorial reviews (which are positive for Beginning of Arrogance and – so far – are equally positive for Futility of Defense). Basically, anything I can think of and find services for. Getting reviews from readers is so important for self-published authors like me, but also so incredibly difficult. I sort of view it as crass to include a plea for reviews in the published book, and I haven’t… but I wonder if I should have.
Of all the parts of the self-publishing journey, marketing is by far the least enjoyable, most confusing part, and unfortunately, the most vital. There are any number of books that are marketed well that find large numbers of readers that are critically panned, and any number of truly spectacular books that I’ve read that have only a handful of reviews and are largely unknown. It’s so frustrating to be getting good to great editorial reviews for Beginning of Arrogance and Futility of Defense and be lost in the noise of the millions of other books that are out there.
So, I’ll end this with what feels like a crass plea, not just for myself but for any book you read. Leave a rating – or better yet, a review – on any site you can find the book, or at the very least, on Goodreads. I want every author who might read this to know they should never comment on reviews left on their books.
But for the readers: those ratings – or reviews! – are extremely helpful in this world of algorithm-generated search results. The best thing you can do for independent authors – or any author, really – is leave an honest review after reading the book. I put this ahead of even buying a copy of the book!
And hey… if you can, leave reviews for my books as well!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61405835-beginning-of-arrogance
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182651034-futility-of-defense
