Rennovating the Marketing Machine

It’s only a few more months until A Sliver of Shadow finally hits the shelves, which is awesome. In theory, some of the upcoming hoopla should be old hat for me. After all, I’m already getting emails for guest blog post scheduling and interviews and giveaways.  (And I’m dreadful at scheduling. I don’t have a PA, but I can totally understand why people have them. Oy.)

In some ways, it’s far easier this time around – people actually know who I am (at least some of you, anyway).  And having the start of a fanbase is awesome in its own right. But I have to gauge whatever efforts I made for the release of A Brush of Darkness and try to figure out what was successful in helping to drive up sales (if *anything* was, for that matter.)

Sure, I’ll get another round of bookmarks and stickers made up – easy to throw into envelopes, and rather no-fuss when it comes down to it. There’s going to be another set of character trading cards coming out as well – they really seemed to go over nicely. I almost never turn down a chance at participating in a blog or a website either, though I may want to take it down a notch this time around. I did a *LOT* last year – which made sense at the time – I was unknown and I had to get my name and book title out there.

But then there’s the extra stuff – the larger contest giveaways, the Facebook ads, other online spots that cost money, sponsoring some sort of gewgaws at a convention. Publicity is a funny thing because often you really *don’t* get out of it what you put into it. But it also depends on the goals – and it’s not always just about the money.

Obviously I want to sell books. I want people to discover me as an author. But I don’t want to get so caught up in the numbers that I lose sight of the actual goal – which is to write books. It’s a catch-22. If an author writes a story and nobody reads it, is it still a story? If it’s just reader awareness I want to capture, that’s a different thing altogether.

*shrugs*

I’d like to think I’m a little bit wiser this time around, but even seasoned authors will tell you that sometimes marketing is a complete fluke – we really have no way to tell if it was our efforts that drove up sales on a particular week…or if it was completely random.

Just one of those things, I guess.

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