First of all, this is not to say that all marketing tips are useless. I have read much and learned much from reading them. When I was just starting my blog, there was one tip that helped me realize my blog’s full potential. It paved the way for me to earn a living from my blog.
What I’m going to present here, are various problems that I’ve noticed about marketing self-published ebooks.
Have you read and read various tips about selling your ebook and wondered later on why you can’t make that sale?
Here are some things I’ve encountered while trying to find tips on selling my ebook:
1. They often talk about selling books about marketing
When the topic of the book is about selling books, I think I can already guess what kind of market that book caters to. It’s intended for people like me, people who wanted to know how to sell my book.
What I want to know, however, is how to sell a book from a different genre. That genre could be self-help, children’s books or fantasy books.
2. They don’t give more specific steps to follow
Marketing tips abound talking about the power of social media. They talk about using Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. However, they rarely talk about how many tweets or posts you need to make every day, or how many days you have to do it until you can see some results.
In addition to the number of posts, how many fans or followers do you need to make this work? If you’re just new to social media, how do you gain those followers? How many posts do you need to make before you can make social media work for you? Are you going to compete with those who use bots that automatically follow people? Do you need a Virtual Assistant to assign a routine you can’t possibly do?
3. They don’t mention the extra mile you need to succeed
Although marketing tips usually mention the need for perseverance, they don’t usually mention specific actions that you need to do that would give you the extra mile needed for success.
They may mention the need to request reviews from book reviewers. But how many requests do you have to make before you get a comfortable number of reviews? How was this accomplished by those who have more than 50 five star book reviews? Did they need to request from 500 reviewers before they got them?
4. They don’t mention the “luck factor” in making a bestseller
Not every book that has been promoted well succeed. Not every good book becomes a bestseller. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of “luck”. Sometimes, it’s a matter of one person fully believing in your book and spreading good reviews about it until it reaches enough momentum and your book spreads through “word of mouth”.
For the sake of all the writers out there doing the best they could, working passionately on their craft night and day, I wish there was a secret formula or template for success.
The reality, however, is that there is no assurance to success. That’s why it takes a lot of guts to follow your passion. That’s why the endeavor of being a self-published author needs someone who can believe and persevere long before they could ever see the fruits of their labor.
I guess my problem with marketing tips isn’t a problem with marketing after all. Even marketing can never assure success. It can never measure the response of others toward our book. It can never measure our tenacity and willpower to succeed!
The thing about hope is that it’s a positive force that shines the most when it’s dark. When everything’s going well, we hardly notice it’s there. But when things go against us, when our dreams fade and when we see no immediate reprieve from our troubles, that’s when hope does its best work for us.
"Where Hope Can Be Found"