Book Marketing and the Introverted Author
Thank you to all of the artists that the AI was trained from that allowed the generation of this image.
New authors don’t have the force of numerous readers behind their sales. Or no readers at all. Chances are, if you are an introverted author, you don’t have a large Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) team either to get the reviews-machinery turning. Sure, there are pay-for-review services out there. But oftentimes, these services will have readers that don’t care about your genre reviewing your work. We don’t want genre mismatches with reviewers because the chance of getting a helpful review or an authentically honest review is slim.
The best ARC teams are those made of people the author openly communicates with. And one thing that introverts are not eager to do is build communities that they have to… talk to or meet with. This is especially true when it comes to criticism. Mix imposter syndrome, introversion, and poor self-esteem, and holy crap, you have a mess when it comes to building a reading community. By the way, I have all of those attributes. Sucks to be me.
Nearly every successful indie author I talk to has a large social community that follows them. This converts to a large reading community. It’s a chicken-or-egg situation. Does the social/reader community come first, or do the readers come first? If no one knows a book that they might want to read exists, it doesn’t get read. And how do readers know a book they’d like to read exists? Recommendations. Getting tips from friends and family is one of the best ways to get readers. But, again, it all starts with having a community.
On the friends and family side—it’s dismal there as well. I don’t have close family ties and most would not understand the genres I write. There could even be some disowning going on if they did. On the friend side—-well, I’m an introvert. I have many friendlies and very few friends. I differentiate a friendly from a friend like so: a friend will do something for you; a friendly probably not (i.e. all smiles and niceties). This is so ironic because I dedicate my life to helping friendlies. I might not be good at growing friendly relationships into friendships, but I love helping others. This is utterly not reciprocal. Woe is me.
So, shit!
What is an introverted author to do? I am trying to figure this out now. I have heard of some throwing money at the problems with ads. That is plausible—pay to get a handful of readers outside of friends and family to give book recommendations. If the ads are targeted well, you might get some recommendations to prime the social pump. And if you are lucky, this might start a chain reaction.
From my many author conversations, many poo-poo ads for new authors. I think many of these same authors forget the early days when they had no community. They did… something to prime the reader community pump. Writing a whole bunch of books alone isn’t the ticket to growing a reader community, either. Again, if no one knows your books exist, what good is it to have fifty of them that no one knows exist? So, I know this article doesn’t have a lot of answers. I guess it’s more of a rant. A way for me to vent. There’s one thing I can say for myself: the prospect of hitting all the genre-specific book communities and casually finding ins for promoting my books feels yucky and inauthentic. (heavy sigh)
