The last few weeks I’ve been spending many, many hours a day in study of the part of writing few authors enjoy and most dislike: marketing. I took the free Amazon Ads Course by the excellent Bryan Cohen, attended his seminar on newsletter marketing a few days ago, and I spent hours and hours fine-tuning my Amazon ads and working on my newsletter onboarding. If that sounds like less fun than dental work, you’re almost right. Bryan Cohen’s courses are fun because of the community aspects, but the work itself is misery to my ADHD brain.
These are the parts of being an author most people don’t hear about because they’re less romantic than sitting in my family cabin for a week hammering out words with a cup of tea at my elbow and the wide, wild Adirondack mountains outside the doors. It’s definitely not the part of writing that makes my heart pound with excitement. However, I was a few credits shy of an associates’ degree in business management when I changed my degree track over to history, so this isn’t entirely foreign to me. Things like ROI, cost-benefit analysis, marketing, and so on are concepts I’m comfortable with.
While I’d much rather be finishing off book three, I am deeply and intimately aware that if I don’t market book one, book three won’t matter much. So I took some time off from my writing to brush up on my marketing skills and really learn to navigate things like the Amazon Ads dashboard, which is a special hell all its own.
Another part of the less glamorous side of writing that I definitely am up against is dealing with situations where a story just isn’t working, and you have no idea how to fix it. Up until recently, I was incredibly stuck on the second book and had no idea how to add more of the “B” story to it without breaking my incredibly tight pacing. The B story only got a couple nods and didn’t get much attention at all, and given the nature of it, I didn’t want it to be just kind of forgotten in the background. It’s important, after all.
To deal with that, I bashed my head into it for a few months and then sent the book to a few alpha readers who had excellent feedback for me. While I haven’t solved the problem yet, I am far closer which means I may be able to make my Q4 2022 release date for book two. I haven’t set the date in stone yet, but that’s my hope. If I don’t make it for Q4 of 2022, it’ll be Q1 of 2023. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep, though. That said, I am doing everything I can to make sure it’s within a year of the last one because I don’t want to become one of those authors who keep readers waiting forever for the next book. (Jim Butcher, I swear, I will shake the next Aeronaut’s Windlass book out of you somehow!)
There are a lot of parts of being an author that are less romantic after first contact with the world than they are in our heads. While I long for the ability to sit in a quaint cottage in the English countryside writing fantasy novels like I imagine Anne McCaffrey did, I live in a drafty old New England farmhouse with cats, a husband, and bills. Not that I don’t love where I live, but it’s not as romantic as you might imagine. Okay, well, my husband is pretty romantic. I’ll give him that. He’s better at that than I am by far.
I’m putting all this out there because it’s stuff I feel like we should talk about more rather than hide behind the curtains. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing in the world I want to do more than what I do now. Writing and editing is everything I want in a career. But at the same time, like every career, it has good and bad parts. Arts are usually romanticized pretty heavily, but when you’re in them and really get on the inside of the industry, you start to see things that are less perfect. Touring musicians, for example, put their bodies through hell while on tour because performing that much and traveling so often is very difficult. Being “on” all the time is hard, too. Not to mention the realities of dealing with the music industry. It’s not all, “Jeremiah, tell them I want no blue M&Ms backstage or I won’t perform!” (In fact, a lot of those requirements are litmus tests to make sure the venue actually read the performer’s requirements because if they don’t have the right M&Ms who knows if they took the right precautions with the pyrotechnics.)
Part of my branding is vulnerability and being out there as the raw and authentic me, so this is part of it. Marketing is hard, and it takes a lot out of me. Also, sometimes writing is a lot of whacking my head on the desk going, “WHY DOES THIS NOT DO AS I COMMAND IT!” And a good 20% of my process is my husband slipping me a chocolate bar to prevent me from devouring him. I’m not sure how he knows when I need one, but he’ll appear at my elbow, slide one onto the desk, kiss the top of my head, and slink away again. Either that or give me hot cocoa. He somehow knows.
I married a good one.
