D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

indie publishing

Sometimes Winning IS Everything

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I am proud to announce that Blooded (Book 3) has won this year’s IRDA YA category!

I’ve said it before, and here I’m saying it again. I suck at the marketing thing. The truth is even if you put everything on the line and promote like you’ve got the cure for the common cold, all that work can’t and doesn’t guarantee book sales, even in traditional publishing, much less in self-publishing.  Beyond that, as an author who follows (on Twitter) and likes (on Facebook) a great many other authors, I find nothing more irritating than someone who has nothing to say except “buy my book” ad nauseum. (This isn’t news to those who have read my blog before.)

So marketing—the promoting of self and self’s books—leaves me on the limited edge of what little sanity I still possess. Because here’s the truth; promoting your book mainly to other authors is a relatively futile endeavor. You need to find readers, and readers aren’t following unknown authors on social media; they’re out there reading authors they’ve heard of before. Sigh.

I knew early on that standing on a street corner with a sign pointing to where my books were on sale wasn’t for me. Instead I entered a few contests, most of which I flamed out on, but the one that has provided me consistent excellent reviews and a win last year for Tainted (Book 2 of the Lisen of Solsta trilogy) in the Young Adult category was IndieReader.com with their Indie Reader Discovery Awards (IRDA). I was thrilled beyond on thrilled when I got word of that because that I could promote.  Welcome to déjà vu all over again.

To celebrate this event, books 1 and 2 (Fractured and Tainted) are being offered free from today, May 29, 2015 through Tuesday, June 2, 2015, and Blooded, this year’s winning concoction, is on sale for the first time EVER for $0.99.

And here’s the best part.  The trilogy is complete, so you can binge on all three books and not have to wait for a sequel. Now that’s worth something.

Piecemeal or Whole Cloth?

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It appears that one of the ways to find readers and get exposure is to upload multiple chapters of your book(s) to various websites geared towards this.  I just don’t know.  I realize that many authors in ages past serialized their works—Charles Dickens, for example—but keep in mind, they got paid for doing so.  We indie writers don’t.  The reason others do this is to garner fans, but me?  Not so much.

Maybe I’m old fashioned.  Maybe I’m paranoid.  But here’s the thing.  If you share chapter after chapter, you may get read and receive critiques from what may, perhaps, be a growing audience, but what do you sacrifice in the meantime?  I like to tell my stories.  I’m bursting with the ending of Lisen of Solsta.  I can’t wait to offer it to the world.  But uploading chapter after chapter?  They say it’s a way to get the attention of agents and publishers, but how well does it really work?

And then there’s plagiarism, a devil who reared its horned head this weekend in a fellow author’s blog.  Apparently it’s rife amongst those who frequent these sharing websites.   Especially the fanfiction sites.  The raptors swoop in, carry off anything they choose, change a word, a name, a this-or-that, and then pass it off as their own.  And the actual author of the piece has no idea unless and until someone familiar with their work spots it posing as another’s creation someplace else.  Ouch.

So, much as it might help to further Lisen’s progress in the world, for now I think I will avoid such sharing.  The positive feedback could certainly prove helpful in my quest for worldwide domination, but I suspect that goal is a bit out of my and Lisen’s range.  For now I’ll keep my chapters to myself until after publication of the book.  Minds change, and mine could, but in the meantime, look for Tainted, book 2 in Lisen of Solsta, in the early fall.