It’s easy to publish a book today. The cost to publish on Amazon.com is free. And you can do it. And you believe in your book. You know it’s a good one. Also, you did some marketing like sharing it on Facebook groups, maybe spoke with a social media marketing manager and allocated a small budget for the promotion.
And your book is great. It should be bestseller by the end of the week.
A week later it only sold one hundred copies. 100. The comments from other readers than your friends are not coming. And you get pissed because you worked at this book for a year. You even have friends help with editing. I mean your English is great and the words flow from your fingers as soon as you sit in front of your keyboard.
A year of worth of time, effort, inspiration, and transpiration seem to lead you nowhere.
Maybe, just maybe, those books that become bestseller by the end of the week have an ingredient that yours doesn’t. People might judge a book by its cover and the free reading sample, but they buy from only if the book comes with the intrinsic guarantee of quality. When people buy books from a publishing house, they have the guarantee of a filtering process. The book they buy could be a lousy reading, but it also could be a good one because another thousand manuscripts didn’t make the cut. When people buy from a self-published author, they do it based on the trust and affection they developed for that individual.
One week bestsellers have years of work to support them. Not only in honing your writing skills, but in making yourself known as a person who is worth reading. It’s the snowball effect that you should be focused on.
Write a blog, help others, do things that worth talking about and, in the end, many people will know you and decide your book is worth buying.