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What's Your Biggest Challenge with Your Book?

I'd be interested to learn what authors/publishers on this network think their biggest challenges are with their book. I wonder if there's any common, pervasive challenge we all face.

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There are actually well over a billion bloggers. That's both good and bad.

Having a blog only helps if you connect with other bloggers and websites. That means writing articles for article websites, doing a blog tour (but not a humdrum blog tour), creating relationships with high-traffic websites targeted to your topic or audience, etc.

John Kremer, SuperStar Blog Tours: http://www.blogtourpalooza.com

I hear you but I imagine that is extremely time consuming leaving little time to actually write! But I guess in the world of 2012 writers it is something that has to be done!

If I am understanding this question correctly, the biggest challenge for me is writing fight/battle scenes.  There is a lot of conflict in my epic fantasy series, and I really wanted the reader to visualize the battle between two epic forces.  I think I have accomplished that, because many reviewers positively comment on the action and battles in my stories.

 

Getting the stories noticed is also difficult, and all of us must work hard if we want to make it.

I agree that marketting is a significan challenge. I spend far more time marketing than I did writing. It is more frustrating as well. At least with writing you can see the progress but with marketing you have little or no idea of what has worked and what hasn't. I agree that's not always the case, but my book sales ebb abd flow and with the time lag between what I have done, marketing wise, and the time for folk to respond, it makes it very difficult.

Also, frustratingly, I follow folks advice and it doesn't always pay off even though it seems to work for others.

David

http://davidburrows.org.uk/

David,

Would love to hear what works for you and what doesn't work. That's what some of us are trying to narrow down, although I know if differs for different books and different authors. I did an event last weekend that I thought would be a slam dunk. Did a seminar at a popular social networking conference, presenting an alternative view to what tends to work for businesses in social media. About 30 attended my seminar and I told them that they could download my brand new e-book on the subject, free of charge, on Smashwords, with a coupon code.

Knowing that the subject matter was very important to them, and the book was much more extensive than my talk, I figured almost everyone would download it, and being social media mavens, they could spread the word on their networks and write my first reviews.

Nobody downloaded it. None. I was shocked!

Neither did I get any sales for my personal finance book when I did two interviews on Atlanta's biggest news stations.

But other things have worked very well for my books, like getting reviews from top bloggers in the field of my books. People also buy my books when I teach authors on how to publish and sell more books.

Not sure Steve. Last year I sold an average of 100 ebooks a month and it was almost scarily just that. 100 a month. This year sales have dropped and it's hard to fathom why. I have two websites, I link to other blogs, I blog, twitter and facebook. I just have to keep at it.

This was an informative website on books and all things related http://www.sff.net/people/victoriastrauss/website2.html#PUBLICITY

David

I too am amazed at how sales can be so "scarily regular". We're selling about 4 or 5 per day - pretty steady. But we have several books out there.

What do you think you did to get 100 a month selling? That's great!

No idea what I was doing correctly. I thought 100 a month was poor. I now look back with nostalgia.  I am hoping for it to pick up again and have a new novel to market. I made a mistake in a sense as my first book was a trilogy, and that was hard to market as my costs trebled. having a stand alone novel should make life easier - I think :)

What was interesting about the regularity of numbers as the sales were split between US and UK and if one dropped the other compensated. I'm beginning to suspect aliens.

Gosh, that's an ugly 1990's looking site. And the information at sff.net looks old as well. Nothing about social networking, blog tours, true SEO.

100 ebooks a month is actually good for most book authors. My guess is the reasons for the drop in sales are that you've skimmed the easy sales and there is a lot more ebook competition.

Hey, I liked that website. (I hope it's the one I posted about and not mine :)) She has taken a lot of time to put some very useful information together, so credit to her and she has my thanks.

Not sure about easy sales. It's a good suggestion but don't forget there are several hundred million people out there. (I would be happy with 1% sales by the way) Statistically 100 a month is a sneeze on a summer's breeze. (Not sure that worked but you get the picture).

 

 

Hey Dave, maybe Im naive but 100 sounds good to me, unless your starving for art of course. lol

It's still marketing!!!

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