Who said strike-three and you're out? Here's how I beat the odds of going from a POD published author to a Multi-Award Winning Author with good sales, successful book signings, and a high internet profile.
|
|
I've been writing ever since I can remember; but my real enjoyment for it came to me when I was in college. Later, during the "career" years of my life, I wrote proposals for the US Government. After many years of being told what and how to write, I was so tired of writing, that I said "when I retire, I am going to throw away my 'red' pen and NEVER WRITE AGAIN"! Well, that lasted about 10 years. Then one day when my husband and I were living in a small beach town in the middle of Baja Mexico, I got the itch to start writing again. I said to myself, "now I can write what I love to write about and not what I'm told to write about." That sounded like so much fun. Little did I know that it would be the beginning of a brand new career in not only writing, but in Marketing!
After I finished my first book, I struggled to find a publisher, especially while living in a foreign country that had not yet heard of computers or the internet. After spending a few years of sending copies of the manuscript via "snail-mail", I did manage to get it published and that is as far as it ever got ... published.
However, by the time 2006 rolled around, the small town I was living in finally got connected to cyberspace, and vualla 16 years later the outside world was now at my fingertips, my fourth book was now finished and I was actually able to go on-line to look for a publisher! But, because I was still living in a foreign country, my new challenge was "how in the world was I supposed to get the book marketed"? That was the beginning of my dependence on Google, and the birth of my on-line book-marketing. At first, I was completely lost and had no idea even where to begin.
I had already been duly warned against POD-publishing. You can't get reviews, you can't get shelf space, and you can't get respect. Being naïve, I decided to completely ignore those warnings and just looked straight ahead. I signed up for book reading clubs, book marketing sites, and every single newsletter that pertained to books, authors, writing or anything that remotely looked like it was for authors or about books. From the information given on those newsletters, I was able to find several book reviewers that I could email and asked if they would like to review my book.
Leave a comment