3T Writing Tidbit

This is a slight step away from strictly writing into the marvelous, frightening world of book marketing.

One of the things I used to wonder is why there are all these articles on Steps to Follow to Promote Your Book, and they'd usually consist of things like

• Grow your newsletter to sell more 
• Offer free books to grow your newsletter 
• Offer free books to get more reviews to sell more
• Make sure there's a call to action! (or trigger)

In other words, how to increase your reach.

Now don't get me wrong, these are good and valid recommendations. But even following them, you won't sell much better unless you have a good book that people want to read.

In other words, how to increase your appeal.

Who writes articles about that? Who writes articles about the surefire way to write a blurb to get those one-clicks? Yes, the trigger is important, but so too are desire and ability. Few people write articles about how to stoke the desire to buy your books (at least, not in a step-by-step version).

Promotion is both about the books' appeal and their reach. But it's easier to quantify reach, and that's why there are more articles and posts about it.

I challenge bloggers to help authors increase their stories' appeal. How do we create the perfect blurb for our book? How do we look into our story and extract the marrow of what will appeal to readers? What if our book isn't anything like the bestsellers in the genre--and that's why we're writing, because we're tired of same-old, same-old?

So many articles on "promotion" are really on reach. Even when there are articles on appeal, it's how to promise to the broadest audience via stereotypes (dark, brooding vampires).

How do we appeal to our readers?

Published since 2009, over the years I've accumulated various items of writing wisdom. The Third Tuesday Writing Tidbit showcases these items in no particular order. Click here to see all 3T Tidbits.