So I say to myself, “Now, Cynthia. How hard can it be to get a little attention for your book? I mean Symphony of Dreams is a great story. The people who’ve read it, love it. You love it. And we’ve all been in Symphony’s position at one time or another. So . . . readers identify with it.”
I take a break from the build-up talk because the phone rings and/or I get a text message, and/or an email comes in. (and/or I want to check my sales status in every place I have a status.)
“Well,” I say to myself (because, at that moment, no one else is listening). “When people start to read Symphony of Dreams, they’ll tell their friends, and those friends will talk, and sooner or later -Cynthia Rogan- all kinds of people wil
l be reading your book. Now stop worrying about it and go finish making dinner.”
But, at this point, all I really want to do is grab a big ole spoon and that half gallon of triple chocolate ice cream out of the freezer.
Should I?
Rum and raisin!
It’s amazing how blithely unaware everyone around you (as in me, you, us) is to just how hard it is to get a book out there. YES, great book, great cover, great reviews. So … why isn’t it selling? Because only a few dozen people have bothered to take a look. Only a percentage of them will write and review or mention it to others, and so on and so forth. It requires a mammoth effort, EVERY day to promote and market a GOOD book.
And when you’re finally on the edge of nervous breakdown at all the effort and the books are moving a little, then those agents who said NO early on come back wanting a piece of the pie you baked on your own.
It’s a crap shoot. It just takes one person in the right place to mention even a BAD book and it goes viral. ANd the reader is the worse off for it because they read a piece of badly written trash. At some point a lot of us wont be able to tell the difference any more.
So we struggle on writing the best books we can, plugging away, hoping, marketing, schmarketing … sheesh.