.

I’m about to start on a new venture. Something I’ve thought about for months, but – as always – that I’ve procrastinated about actually starting.

Book sales throughout this year have been astonishingly good. I published The God’s Eye, last in the steampunk Lancaster’s Luck series, in late January, and just about the time I expected sales to ease off, lots of people started living through an enforced period of sitting-about-at-home and sales got an unexpected shot in the arm.

This is the thing for most authors, you see. You have a few weeks when your book is fresh and new, and sales are great; then you’ve used up your immediate audience (so to speak), new sparkly books are out every day, readers move on, reviews dry up,  and your sales drop back to their usual trundling-along state. If you’re an author who can write quickly, and who publishes 3 or 4 times a year, then you give yourself that shot in the arm I mentioned, and you keep feeding the machine. But if you’re like me, and take ages to get out one book, there are loooooog gaps where you trundle along with that hungry machine snapping at your dilatory ankles.

Makes me laugh, sometimes, when people think that all authors do is write a book and there you are: job done. Oh, how I wish that was true. How I wish that being a writer didn’t really mean spending some time writing, but more time than many of us are comfortable with doing ‘marketing’. That’s everything from blogging to Facebook, to Instagram, to virtual book tours. Anything that builds an ‘authorial brand’, makes us recognisable and (hopefully!) makes people want to buy our books. We have no choice. Books don’t sell themselves, you know. And so we aren’t just writers of books—we’re purveyors of commodities.

So, since I don’t have a new commodity ready to be published and won’t have one this year, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to stop farting about on the marketing stakes, and give Amazon ads a try. Yeah, yeah. I know everyone hates Amazon. But since 99.99% of sales are through Amazon kindle books, there’s no point in advertising in Kobo, now is there? So it’s bite on the bullet time, and be prepared to give Jeff Bezos even more of my money than I do already.

Apparently anyone can do Amazon advertising. While the various blogs I’ve read don’t quite claim that a three-month-old infant could manage an ad campaign before breakfast with their eyes shut, the pundits do say it’s relatively easy. It seems you don’t need to spend days devising a campaign, or invest a great deal of money, or be so techy you put Spock to shame or such a marketing guru that Mad Men beg you for tips. You just need to be clear-headed and methodical.

Ha. If only it was that simple. And damn it, I used to do ruddy communications for a living. It should be a doddle.

To be honest, it is, really. It’s just that after several years away from the job, I’ve got rusty and forgotten half that I knew. Still, I’ve been doing an online course geared just to Amazon advertising, and I’ve invested in a nifty programme that generates keywords for me – that is, the words readers type into Amazon when they’re looking for books of the kind I’m writing and which I’ll use to target the advertising. Compiling those keywords is a data-amassing task of the same magnitude as writing… oh I don’t know… something enormous and repetitive. Wheel of Time, perhaps. Only with slightly less bloodshed. Even my spreadsheets have spreadsheets. In fact, this bit reminds me of work, and that mass of data collection and research that underpinned everything we did. Familiar territory.

Another week or so, and I’ll hit the button. Which you can see gives the lie to that first assertion that you don’t need to spend days on this, but whatever. I’ll get there, and I’ll let you all know if this is an authorial venture worth the doing.

Or whether I should just work on producing more than one book a year. Or take up breeding penguins…

And in the meantime, does anyone have a three-month-old infant to spare to run this advertising campaign for me?

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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