The Writer’s Journey: Balancing Creativity and Promotion

It never stops. A writer writes, always. My days are filled with more writing right after the book writing has finished. Today’s literary world is as much about promoting writing as building new narratives with new words.

I’ve always said I’d give SEETHINGS the proper attention to promote it before moving on to the next novel. My non-book writing days are now filled with promotional writing.

I’ve met many writers who abandon their promotional and marketing responsibilities as soon as they start. They want to go back to writing because promoting is boring. They end up with armfuls of new stories but few sales to show for all the hours they spent creating them.

To the reader, authors are mysterious souls. They are aware of a dreamer, perhaps a tortured soul, cramped inside a dusty space full of bits of paper and a messy pile of recently despised, cried-over manuscripts.

They are lovely images, but author cliches won’t get a book to the market. Another writing process must take place to get a book in front of readers’ eyes. For an author, it’s a less glamorous job than writing stories and developing characters.

My day starts by reviewing the overnight sales and visitor statistics. As a Smashwords author, Smashwords handles product sales and delivery, but it’s my job to understand the stats and adjust my promotion and marketing tactics accordingly.

I also get a feed of other stats from my site https://michaelformanwriting.com/ and through Google Analytics. I evaluate what’s working, what’s not, and what could be tested and measured next. I write new blog posts and find online readers as I go.

However, there are many unexpected roadblocks to clear along the way, and authors must also wrangle these kinds of problems. Yesterday, a blog post appeared on a feed, and I felt compelled to contribute to the comments section.

An angry book reviewer commented about Amazon’s book review policy. She recently read a book and wanted to place a favourable online review in the appropriate Amazon channel. What a great thing to do… but Amazon said they wouldn’t publish it. The reason: The reviewer and the author were related.

I get it. Amazon wants accurate reviews, not false ones from friends, family, and colleagues. (It’s bad enough that authors get awful reviews from competitors, protestors and the like!)

Amazon investigated her background through social links and assessed her as a colleague or close friend of the book’s author. She was ineligible to comment, and that author lost a good review.

Here’s the problem with link assessing. Fans of authors will follow and, eventually, establish a series of links with similar authors. A reader may start looking like friends, family, or colleagues (and professional reviewers) without being any of them.

I recently had to address a bad review on Goodreads. The plus-sized woman didn’t like the plus-sized character I wrote into chapter one of my book. The reviewer had read and had had enough of the first five pages. She also found several grammatical mistakes.

Not only is it inaccurate and somewhat fraudulent to provide a book review on reading less than 1% of the book, but my American reader wasn’t aware that spelling and grammar are different in Australia. Her cultural intolerance and haste to act sooner rather than later caused an unnecessary downgrade in my review averages.

So you see, a novelist’s day can be filled with many things connected to the book-writing process, but not with constructing new narratives. This is a sign of the self-publishing times.

–Michael Forman (Author of Dark Fiction) Novel downloadable and free for a limited time.

Avail: Kindle Unlimited, Kindle, Paperback

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‘Forman’s writing style is artful, with the protagonist Mitchell’s warped thought processes masterfully exposed. The author has a powerful and vivid command of language and his word pictures are stark and disturbingly real.’

Linda J Bettenay, author of ‘Secrets Mothers Keep’ and ‘Wishes For Starlight’