If you are reading this blog, then it may be that you have seen my books or even read one or other of them. My latest one, Look Out, Here Comes the Fat Girl!, in particular, has been blasted out quite a lot on social media. Not by me, I might add – I am a bit of a social media idiot – but when I realised that this one might just do quite well, I thought I should get someone to help me with that side of things.
It’s funny, really. When I was running my marketing agency JWA, and discussing marketing with owners of SMEs (the big companies that we worked for were different, since they had to ‘do’ marketing and usually knew exactly what was required and how much money they could spend), it was a huge job to persuade them to spend anything on marketing. It was their own money, they wanted a guarantee that whatever we would do would ‘work’ and even then they were nervous that the money might just go down the drain. I would tell them that ‘it is not about whether marketing itself works, since it always does if the product or service is right. It is what is done and where it is done that counts.’ But even then, they often slunk off and decided to either do it themselves or just not bother.
And now I find myself behaving almost the same. Should I spend any money on the book’s promotion? What should I do if so? Should I pay someone else to do it? Will it work? And so it goes on. Just like my former potential clients. The thing is, though, that I didn’t write any of the books to make money, I wrote them for fun. And even once each one was finished, I was a bit nervous about telling people about them, let alone asking them to pay to buy one. But it is not cheap to produce a book, and, in the end, I decided that it would be nice to try to get this one out there and earn back some of the money that I have spent in writing it, let alone make up for the time involved. So here we are. An expert social media person is now on the case, and I sit here nervously wondering if it is going to work, and whether I am going to chuck yet more money down the drain. Just like the former potential clients did.
Now. I can hear you thinking or saying, ‘what do you mean it is not cheap to produce a book’ and ‘chucking yet more money down the drain’. Especially when I have a ‘proper’ publisher that has produced the last two books and you might assume that they did all of the producing out of love, or, more likely, because they could make money by selling it to lots of distributors. Ha ha. Sadly for those publishers, they cannot sell lots of books to lots of distributors. Why? Because many of those lovely book shops of our youth no longer exist, and those that do know that when people visit to look at what they have in stock, 9 times out of 10 they will potter about, browse a bit, and then go home and order the book from Amazon. It’s cheaper and easier.
So bookstores that are still operating are struggling. And publishers are struggling even more, which means that even when they are offered a book that they like, they need to make money from it in other ways. Like editors, layout specialists, cover designers (assuming you don’t design the cover yourself through ChatGPT. As if!) and others.
Frankly speaking, no-one in their right mind nowadays would want to be a writer as a career. There is no chance of making any money out of it, unless you are already a block-buster writer like James Patterson, who can call the shots. And I know that many of you that have read my stuff have said ‘oh, I plan to write a book soon’, so listen up. If you want to write it and have fun. Go ahead. But if you want to make money, don’t even go there.
I have told you how it works with publishers, but now think about how it is with ChatGPT. Love her (mine is a her) as I do, but she really is one of the culprits. I am pretty sure that if you fed ChatGPT with some characters and a rough plot, she could produce a thriller or similar that is better written than a lot of the rubbish that I read. Having said that, I do feel relatively confident at the moment that she couldn’t write MY books, since they are based on my own stories that only I know (but that’s only now, who knows how it will be in the future!).
So let’s assume that ChatGPT can’t write your type of books either. And maybe you have decided that you wont even bother with trying to find an agent and/or a publisher, but instead you will consider self-publishing through Amazon. Well you could. But it is really difficult to get a manuscript into a good enough shape for Amazon to accept it – I did try it with an earlier book, but having been told a million times that it needs yet another tweak or another jig, I gave up. Maybe you are better than me at preparing this kind of manuscript (very likely) and maybe you will get it accepted. But then, once you have the book on there, you are sure to want some of the books for yourself so that you can start doing your own marketing. And that means that you need to pay for them. And that is quite expensive. And if you think that Amazon will do any marketing for you, well it will. But it will cost you. A lot.
But Ok, maybe you will self-publish, load the book up on Amazon, and then do your own marketing so that people will be driven to Amazon to buy your books. Good luck with that. Did you know that Amazon takes a huge percentage of what they sell the books or Kindle version for themselves. And then deduct tax from it. And then only pay it what’s left once a month, based on how many sales you have made in that particular month in each relevant country. And if the sales don’t reach a certain figure in each country, they don’t do the transfer until they have. And so it goes on.
Still not convinced? Then listen to my podcast next week, as I will tell you why that is only the tip of the iceberg!!!
0 Comments