With eight years as a publisher behind me, I’ve been mulling over my roles as an author and as a publisher. What has changed over the years? And what hasn’t? What have I learned? And what, in light of those answers, do I want to change going forward.
One of the minor changes I'm implementing is to make this blog my main presence on the internet. I really hate doing any sort of self-promotion, and while this blog serves that purpose, it also serves to make myself available – and to some extent, real – to my readers. I see it as a two way street between my readers and myself.
I also have a gallery on DeviantArt where I post my artwork, including some of the covers I create for my books, On it I also mention my books. While this gallery does get viewers, I doubt it contributes much to sales. That is not the purpose of its, so I'll continue to post my art on it and respond to any comments as usual. Note: I do also have an art blog, but it is inactive, as I am not painting at the time, so I will not likely see any comments posted there.
Beyond these two sites, my culling of my social media footprint does not involve a great deal of change. I set out publishing my work with the expectation that price alone would drive my sales, It has. Thus, I have made only a minimum effort in (free) promotions over my years as a publisher.
While not aimed at promoting my work – the readers are all writers themselves – I have, over the last several years written some pieces about writing on a blog aimed at writers. However, I find that I have exhausted my wisdom when it comes to writing and publishing, and can think of nothing more to write about. So I will likely draw a curtain on that project.
While not for self-promotion purposes, I have posted comments on blogs and YouTube videos. And since some of the blog post comments have links back to this blog, these posts could be construed as sort of advertising. However, I often feel that my comments end up being out of step with the other comments. This makes me uneasy, and given my unease, I’ve decided to give up commenting, no matter how tempted I am. While I’ve never gotten into the practice of “liking” posts and comments as a rule, I think I will begin to do this instead of commenting to support the blogs and videos I appreciate.
For the last two years I have entered a book in the Self Published Science Fiction Contest, with the idea of promoting my books. It was free, after all. It hasn’t worked. All I’ve gotten from them is one review, and no appreciable spike in sales. I think the only people who pay attention to it are the authors in the contest. I’m not going to do that again. However, this year I did enter a book in the Fantasy version of the contest, as it draws a lot more attention. Realistically, there is no chance my book will advance to the final 10 books, and being my only fantasy book, this year will be the first and last time I do that.
Last summer I signed up for the service known as Discord, and joined a number of Discord channels that were set up by science fiction booktubers for their viewers, with the idea talking about books and perhaps mentioning my books, since they all have sections for users to post their work. I also joined a Discord channel set up by a traditionally published author designed as a place for writers and aspiring writers to discuss their work, get critiques and such.
I discovered that Discord is basically a chat room, something that has been around for a long as the internet has been around, but something I’ve never dealt with before. I found the nature of chat, short statements often separated by replies to previous statements, too disjointed for this old man to enjoyable engage in. Moreover, most of the people in the booktuber Discord channels were a lot younger than me and were talking about books that I hadn’t read, and had no interest in reading. As a result, I had nothing relevant to say. They probably weren’t my target market for my books anyway, so there was no point in being a member of them, so I dropped out.
As for the writing Discord channel, while there were a few substantial discussions, they were still chats, often broken up between cross postings and separated by time lags making the discussion disjointed and hard to engage in. Moreover, I noted just how easy it is for the written word, especially in casual chats, to be misinterpretation. I had to be very careful how I phrased every comment, so as not to offend anyone. And well, there was the same age problem, plus the fact that I am an author/publisher, and most of the other authors were either traditional published or aspiring to be traditional published and so they were writing stories in the contemporary style that I had no experience in. I felt that I did not have enough in common with them, nor much relevant advice to offer, so I dropped out of that group as well, as I was paying to be in that group.
Looking back on all these efforts – as minimal as they were – I don’t see any positive results as far as sales go. As they say, you have to pay to play, and I don't care to pay. Low price is what drives my sales, and given the minimal effort I put into publishing, I can’t complain about the results.
So at the end of the day, I think that this blog and my DeviantArt gallery are my two places in the social media of the internet. I do, however, enjoy in hearing from and engaging my readers and on line friends, either by email at cmlitka@gmail.com, or in a comment on this blog or my art gallery. And like every good blogger, I respond to every comment or email. I want to hear from you!
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