So I suspect you're over-simplifying it, Gregg. But if you want to give it a try then why not? Just be sure to keep us informed of the results.
To put my posts/comments in relevant context ...
In the past two years (since publishing my first book), I've never gotten beyond invisibility - so my advice/opinions on marketing could well be taken as "if he says it's wrong, it's probably the right thing to do"
. I don't have a Facebook page, I don't twitter, I'm not linked-in, I don't have a video on youtube, and I'm not even sure what Google Plus is (never bothered to look). Have I missed any? Probably. I do have a blog, and after an early post about crickets singing in the silence, I have found myself being visited by thousands every month ... almost all of them spam!
I also sell ^&%%#$-all books.
Do I care? Yes, I suppose I do. I'd like people to read my books, I'd even like to make a bit of money out of it. But I'm not holding my breath, and it's not important enough to make me change my hermit lifestyle and get out to try and push them. I write because I have the bug, so my lack of sales is not anyone else's fault but mine.
Visibility is something an aspiring author needs if they want sales. How to get that visibility is the <hundred|thousand|million|pick-your-ambition-level> dollar question. As jandrew warned, it is possible to put some people off with the wrong sort of visibility. (Like jandrew, I'd probably turn away from any author that I found selling a mix of fiction and self-help - but I don't know whether our examples are any indication of what happens in the more general case).
I believe that Vydorscope's example and advice - giving away at least one of your books for free* - is probably some of the best advice there is for self-publishing. Permanently free books are available from Smashwords without registering. When I tried a give-away of my first book recently I was surprised at how few downloads there were, and I suspect this is partly because temporarily free books still require a person to register with Smashwords so they can then "purchase" with the coupon. (In my case the reduced downloads may also have been because I uploaded only an epub, so no preview was available on Smashwords - yes, they could have gone to Amazon for the preview, but a few more mouse clicks would have been required.)
* Which book to give away is open to question. I have tried some authors for free and never gone back. Might their later work have been worth it? I'll never know, because I've been put off by what they chose to make free.
There is some other advice out there that I think stands out as very important: you need a reasonable backlist of books in order to be taken seriously. People look at a self-published author with two or three titles to their name and think it's probably just another wannabe, not someone that's serious about the craft.
So I'm in no rush. I'll keep writing (I'm not fast, so none of this is going to happen quickly for me), and keep publishing whatever seems worth that extra effort. I have plans to try making some short stories freely available, in the hope of attracting people to what I write, but shorts don't come to me often and I have trouble justifying the time to consider editing, cover and blurb for a story that's only a few thousand words long. So I'm not sure when I'll get to that (my paying job has to take priority).
From this, I hope you can see that the idea of writing and publishing anything that isn't what I
want to write seems like a pretty big waste of effort -
to me.
ETA: Sorry about rambing, I probably should have answered before my evening whiskey.
