On Comming to Terms

I've been running about New York, partying after the end of the four week blog book tour. It's been a bit grueling to someone who has his hands full of marketing and writing. I've resumed working on my radio show about independent publishing. I started it on www.blogtalkradio.com several weeks ago and did at least three weeks of shows, which had over 3,000 downloads. I had built up this following as if by magic, they just appeared. Then I had to go to see my mother in North Carolina for a month. She needed a great deal of attention so I found it hard to beg off and do a 45 minute radio show every Friday. So, my listener base fell from 3,000 to nil in four weeks. I'm talking absolutely nil.

A skyrocketing rise to a meteoric fall. So now I'm trying to regain lost traction. I'm working hard on building that listener base by putting more value in my radio show. The show, I thought, could dwell on my book a little, but put the greater emphasis on self-publishing which could make the difference. It would attract listeners who were interested in self-publishing and yet give them a small dose of my book. So this was on my plate while I was doing the blog tour, plus a score of other marketing projects. So the book blog tour was not easy to do because it wasn't the only thing that I was juggling.

Therefore I took a week to party at my success in making a failure. Of losing 3,000 listeners, but of gaining scores of likes and followers from the book blog tour. Starting this week though, I'm back to work and no play. I'm having a problem bringing my seventh book to completion, so I want to get on that. My plan: I'm going to lean on the manuscript until I squeeze out the rest of my creative juices and finish the thing.

Further, I would like to find a good marketing plan that will get my book out to a larger portion of the masses. I see my marketing efforts as a growing stain across the nation, building and spreading, a dark growth creeping across the states. But I also do believe that each effort causes it to expand but it shortly cools and stops. You have to move on to another method and start the expansion once more, the slow creeping somewhere else, or somewhat within the stain, and hope that there is an even saturation.

Like rainfall that soaks the earth and causes grass and fauna to grow, your marketing efforts have to have the same effect. It needs to be consistent and varied. So I feel. That's why I try to do different things. While I'm working on the one hand to continue my series of novels, and on the other hand I work to get the first book promoted to everyone. To fan the fires, which takes some doing. Especially when you don't know what you are doing. I'm just feeling my way, like a man in a dark room. I haven't stumbled yet, and all of my efforts have been nominal. Hopefully I'll be able to grow more eyes on the book.

I would like to know my fans. I would like to know what it is that they like and didn't like about the book so that I can make a better one. I've gotten some reviews, and I value them. I've found a lot of fans on Facebook and Twitter and I'm trying to reach out to them, to interact with them. Because ultimately, that's what writing is about. It's about making the human connection, it's not just about making fans, but understanding them. It's about the human interaction that we all value.

Gregory