An Uphill Climb

I’m aiming to have my Seattle post up tomorrow or Thursday, depending on how busy my schedule is Wednesday with orientation, but I wanted to make a quick post about the book and e-publishing.

The last few weeks have been very enlightening to me, especially regarding the amount of work it takes to get anywhere in the field of writing.  I’m not talking about writing the book itself, which is in many ways a Herculean effort alone.  I’m talking about the marketing and getting the word out about it.  Just three weeks ago, I was selling 50 books a day on Amazon and climbing.  Now I’ve dropped to around 30.  It’s extremely troubling, as you might imagine.  I’m still ahead by almost 30% in terms of sales over my first month, but at this rate, I definitely won’t have a better month in September!

I can’t be sure if I’ve saturated the people I know, the random e-reader crowd, or what.  I’m not sure what impact the two negative reviews for The Phoenix Fallacy have had on sales.  I’ve got many questions, and few answers.

So, because I try to be scientifically-minded, I’m going to start taking some data.  My goal is to track reviews and sales every day – probably using sometime in the morning as my daily data point.  I want to get a better idea of what days are best for sales, relative to the time of month, and also see what impact different reviews have on it.  This won’t be 100% scientific, as I’m still going to be pushing my book to every reader I can, but it will give me a jumping off point.

I’ll post the results in about a month, and let you know what I find, good or bad.  I’m hoping there is a spike next week, as I’m attending a huge game conference this weekend called PAX.  As much as I would like to simply focus on the conference itself, I’m going to be making an effort to market myself there and build some more fans.  We’ll see what happens, and I’ll have an update on the expo itself next week.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few questions for you, readers:

1) How do you use reviews when looking at products or media?

2) What drives you to spread the word on something?  Is it usually only in situations where it is directly applicable to the conversation?  What products have you felt compelled to talk to people about, and why?

3) Do you read random e-published books?  What is your opinion on self-publishing in general?

Part of the reason I ask the third question is that I’ve become involved with more than a few online reading type groups (like Goodreads), in an effort to build a community and promote my work.  There is quite a bit of pushback within that community towards e-publishing, and I’ve spoken to other authors about it.  The question we keep asking ourselves is “How do I overcome the inherent bias against an e-book?”

Personally, I won’t claim I’m not guilty of it.  I definitely have reservations towards self-published works, although my opinions have changed dramatically as I’ve become more involved in the process.  Not to say that all of my reservations have disappeared, or that I’m not wary of the problems, but more that I’ve come to appreciate the many advantages over traditionally published works this new format provides, for both reader and author.

I’m open to more ideas for questions, and if you feel like responding, feel free to either leave a comment below, or e-mail me.  Even if you don’t respond, I think they are interesting questions to ponder, and good things for any author to ask themselves.

In the meantime, for those of you who loved the book, I will continue to ask you to share it with others.  If you haven’t shared it, please do, with at least one other person, if you can!

As a parting piece of advice to all of you:  Never write a book.  You will be driven insane.  : )