One way to promote your writing - Steven Pressfield

[Orpheus]

Make a whole video series discussing your book(s) or writing. Though I think it was meant to be educational, a corollary effect is that it exposes your work to a wider audience.

The Warrior Archetype https://tinyurl.com/yaefvy98

[sirmichaelot]

Pressfield can do this, because his work is already well known, and he already has a platform. The War of Art is a fantastic book and most artists/writers should read it, provided it doesn't become gospel for them.

For the emerging writer, this video series strategy is just more time away from writing.

Typically, as cliché as it sounds, the best way to promote your writing is to "write a damn good book" in the first place. I've worked with authors for over a decade. Most don't make it. Those that do focus on their writing. From the amateurs (and those deemed professional amateurs) there is this tendency to believe marketing or promotion is what they need. The reality is Marketing:

1) can sink you faster if your work is not up to snuff.
2) can lead you to believe in various nonsensical mantras, like, "Your network demonstrates your net worth." Where you then spend more time in promotion and networking than writing.
3) Ultimately, it can foster an incestuous and unsustainable path of follow for follow, read for read, promote for promote, buy for buy. "We rise together," bullshit. The sooner an author becomes comfortable with the lonely path that writing actually is, the sooner they embrace the freedom to write unabashedly.

For #3, there is also reality that the economics are against you and tribal mentality of "assured loyalty" backfires. All this incestuous friend marketing means you buy 10 books at $9.99. So basically $100 spent. These same 10 people buy your books but you only made (and they only made) $15. So you're out $85. It's a recipe for poverty and seeing new potential readers not as people, but as potential relief from financial stress.

So, best way to promote your book? Write a damn good one in the first place. Then it can promote itself.

[kewms]

Non-fiction marketing is also completely different from fiction marketing.

You can effectively market non-fiction books by establishing yourself as an expert on whatever the subject of the book is and being visible in communities that care about that topic. And, as an expert, lectures, consulting services, magazine articles, and so on both help build your brand and are potential revenue streams in themselves.

Fiction is a totally different, uh, story.

Katherine

[sirmichaelot]

Non-fiction marketing is also completely different from fiction marketing.

Yes, very true.

Though for non-fiction establishing oneself as an expert is very different from actually being one. Sure, the number of books can suggest more expertise, but what I've personally seen is far too many try to establish themselves as an expert, adopt a "fake it to you make it" approach (even those in fiction, when claiming to be experts on the craft or some other topic). Neither work longterm, because once the BS meters are engaged, it's incredibly hard to recover with an audience.

[kewms]

Though for non-fiction establishing oneself as an expert is very different from actually being one. Sure, the number of books can suggest more expertise, but what I've personally seen is far too many try to establish themselves as an expert, adopt a "fake it to you make it" approach (even those in fiction, when claiming to be experts on the craft or some other topic). Neither work longterm, because once the BS meters are engaged, it's incredibly hard to recover with an audience.

Yes. The correlation between ability to sound knowledgeable on the internet and actual knowledge is not particularly strong. Especially in fields where the true experts are paid lots of money to *be* experts, and therefore don't have much time to spend arguing with PhDs from Google University. We've seen a lot of that in connection with the pandemic, to give just one example.

Katherine