Self-promotion. A chore without reward?

Afternoon folks,

Did everyone have a lovely jubilee? If nothing else having four days off work has been a delight. Mind you, the wife has worked every day but she gets paid lots so fair play to her.

Anyway, self-promo. I'm not a fan simply because I work full time and what little free time I do have I like to use to write books. If I spend an hour in an evening touting myslf around the internet it leaves nothing left for crafting the novel. Of course, logic suggests that if I don't do some promotion then nobody will buy my books as they won't know they exist.

This, I suppose, is true. To an extent. If you're a best selling author shifting thousands of copies then surely self-promo is pointless as the sales and word of mouth will feed into each other. I sell in dozens rather than thousands (so far) but I've found that no matter what promo I do my sales are pretty consistent month on month.

For example last month I did a couple of days promo and then only because my debut book, Playground Cool, was lauched in paperback. But I was busy at work and also decorating bits of my house, so that didn't leave any time to promote. Yet at the end of the month I'd sold near enough the same amount as the month before.

Anyway, since I did have time today I've posted on several Amazon.com discussion threads, also on Kindleoards and Book Blogs. I will post on Amazon.co.uk later and on Goodreads, as well as this blog post obviously. This will automatically appear on Facebook (hi facebook) and that will be about it. Will it lead to sales? Probably a couple. But then I reckon I might have had those anyway, sooner or later.

If you work it out in terms of a job, then self-promo for an author selling the amount I do is expensive i.e. an hour a day of promo for 2 sales? That's about £1 in royalties. Who on earth does anything for a pound an hour? Of course, if one of my books starts to take off and an hour of promo equalled a hundred sales, a thousand? Then all of a sudden that's a great return. But making that leap is proving hard, not just for me but for thousands of other writers in this position. We all know the game and the rules, promo, lots of it, on all the right websites. But it's so time-consuming!!!

So what to do?  I will do some promo, as much as I can be bothered to do, and hope something sparks and takes off. But it's not the be all and end all. I'd rather spend the time writing books than promoting them.