I met a local author at her book signing a couple of weeks ago. Then we met for dinner a few days later and discovered we had a lot in common. We were talking about being authors and how hard it is to get noticed. There are millions of books out there and more being produced every week. How do best sellers become monster hits? You think of series like Clan of the Cave Bear, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight Series, etc., and you wonder, how did they become so popular?
I'm an avid reader and also an author of 3 published (and one unpublished) books. It's a full-time job to constantly promote on social media, time that I don't actually have because I work a full-time job to pay the bills. Elizabeth and I discussed this over dinner and eventually came to the conclusion that it's luck.
You can have press releases go out to thousands. You can do give aways that result in 1200 kindle downloads. You can bombard social media with slick book trailers and even offer to write people their own wish fulfillment stories for FREE with no strings attached and still...crickets.
You can have great reviews and still you feel like you're hitting your head against a brick wall. Word of mouth is really the only tried and true way that best sellers are made but how does that even happen? A celebrity endorsement or a gossip campaign? Pure luck or (hopefully in my case) a sovereign move of God? I'm often tempted to just give up.
I wrote The Victor out of my love for Jesus because I want to share that love with others. I wrote Make a Wish to bless others who were hurting. I wrote In Plain Sight with no plot in mind and it turned out to be wildly entertaining story with a special plot twist at the end. In the end, who really cares?
In the new year I'm going to finally get the fourth book published. It's the most personal to date. The idea came from this thought: What would I do if I lost my husband? It's a terrifying thought. I get an idea about once every ten years and this one is called Second Chance Inn (Beauty for Ashes). We'll see what happens, but I don't have my hopes up.