In case you didn’t see my social media teases leading up to Saturday afternoon, I was on an online radio/podcast show Saturday afternoon called “Tag Team 2*4*5,” in conjunction with the Rave Reviews Book Club. The numbers refer to two hosts, four authors, and five minutes each, just to solve that baffling mystery for you.
It’s the first time I’ve been interviewed on a broadcast medium about my authoring exploits, and it went reasonably well. I was the third author they interviewed, and it was fairly straightforward stuff. Click the link above if you’d like to listen to the whole thing. Even if you think I suck, maybe you’ll like one of the other three authors who were interviewed. We’re all indie authors trying to get the word out, so support Lisa Mackay, Charles W. Jones and Eleanor Lawrie if you think their stuff sounds like something you’d enjoy.
I try to take advantage of these opportunities when they present themselves because, well, ya never know. To be honest, I have no idea how many people listen to this show, and I haven’t seen any sort of uptick in sales afterward, so you could probably make a case the time wasn’t worth it. But you don’t know who might be out there. Maybe the right person hears it, and is intrigued. Maybe Stephen King is bored out of his mind and staggers in while you’re talking, and wants to co-author something with you. Hey, it could happen. Stop laughing!
So, yeah. The Decatur Book Festival. The “A Novel Idea” event in Canton. Book clubs. Social junk. Occasional online ad buys. Just got to get the right set of people to discover my books, and not think they suck. The more books I write, the better the odds get that those people will stumble across the stuff I’m producing. Radio most definitely will not kill the book star, though it probably won’t make the book star either.
Another tactic I used recently … On Sunday, my wife and I took one of the paperback copies of “Killing the Immortals” to the local “Books Half Off” store to see if they’d buy it from us. We did the same thing at McKay’s in Knoxville, but they didn’t buy it. We figured it’d be the same here. Incidentally, we had Jamie be the, um, “owner” of the books. Didn’t want them having a Eureka moment when the guy checked my ID and then saw my name on the book.
Anyway, they bought it — along with everything else I brought. Now, I probably only got 50 cents or something for it. So, from a straight dollars-and-cents perspective, it’s a shit deal. But look at it this way: that book probably would have sat at the house for at least a few more months — maybe much longer — until I get the chance to make a personal one-on-one sale. And I have several more. Instead, I got paid some small amount of money for it, and now it gets exposed to a new audience. Maybe somebody sees the spine on the shelf and is intrigued by the title. Maybe they decide to promote it by putting a “Local Author” sign over it, and that gains someone’s attention enough to take it home because they like supporting local. And maybe they pass it on to a friend, who has an influential book blog. Who knows?
The point is that, whether it’s radio, social media, newspapers, festivals, book stores or whatever, you’ve gotta jump through some hoops as a no-name independent author, just trying to get some traction in this world of millions and millions of people just like you. I’m well past the first big hurdle of getting a novel written and published. I’ll finish another one in the near future. But the huge hurdle — the one hardly anyone clears — is the one where this can become your livelihood. That’s so far off over the horizon I can’t even hardly fathom it at this point. These little opportunities are the small incremental steps toward that really, really far-off future, though.
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