Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
I haven't read every post in this thread, but I have an answer to the original post:
I've been a major SF fan for over thirty years: I've read every issue of Astounding(Analog), Galaxy, and Worlds of If published in the fifties. Ive been to conventions, I've even shown up in costume.
Before I joined MR, I had never heard of Steve Jordan. That's a much bigger problem than piracy. No one is going to buy a book if they don't know it exists. Once that's solved, then we can worry about piracy.
|
OMG, give this guy a Nobel or something. Steve, I understand your frustration, but I think Lemurion is right. Your issue isn't how good your stuff is, or piracy, or anything even remotely like that. Your problem is lack of exposure. Yes, I realize that you're doing the digital only thing. That's fine, as I'm doing digital marketing as well. However, you need to get out to these big cons and show yourself off, including your books, your skills, get to know your fans, meet people and make new fans, etc.
I've actually found that my popularity has exploded since starting to do cons vs when I was doing digital only. Yes, everything helps, and digital marketing is no exception. But there's also a LOT of people, and I do mean a LOT, who want a hands on, tactile author to interact with. In some cases the only way you're going to reach certain groups of people is if you sit down and do physical signings and physical books and get them into the hands of people.
Yes, again, I know you're an all digital guy, but ~70% of the book buying public is still into dead tree novels. Why do you think I invest so much energy into printing and distributing them? Because they sell, and they sell in considerable numbers. Right now I'd say that my print book sales outnumber my digital sales 100 to 1, and not because I haven't been doing digital marketing and stuff. It's because only about 1 in every 100 people I encounter actually want digital copies. The rest want physical paperbacks.
Now once I get a slightly better market penetration on ebooks that number might change, but I don't see it changing *that* much. Especially since the book market is something like 70% dead tree books vs 30% digital, and I'm likely being generous on the digital books, since I've seen the figures as high as 95%-5% paper to digital. So expand your horizons, try other avenues, explore paper books, and go to conventions and signings for crying out loud. You may not like it, but by golly it's one of the most awesome ways I've actually found to market books. If you need help getting a good list of shows to go to, just pm me and I'll give you a list of the ones I've already lined up.