Psychedelia Gothique

 I’m all about the Free Webinars. The other day, it was “New York Times Bestselling Author” Alessandra Torre, whose promotional post I found on Facebook. She writes romance and erotic suspense and seems to do well at it. She promised to teach me (and countless others) " 5 Secret Site Tools on Goodreads to Sell More Books ." 'm already investing hundreds or thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours; on publishing and promoting my book; so, anytime I can get something free, it's worth at least looking into. Reedsy and MailChimp and Ingram Spark all offer free training and tutorials. Mostly it's stuff you'll have heard dozens of time before - primarily aimed at complete beginners. Depending what part of the learning curve you're in, every one of these 'courses' can teach you something useful or at least help you work out where you stand in the grand scheme of things. I've sat through tutorials at all three of those sites - usually just track...

A few weeks back, I mentioned on the listserver for SF Canada (a professional writer’s organization of which I am a member), that I was starting  a blog series on self-publishing that was going to essentially be a report from the trenches regarding the challenges and triumphs I encountered on the way to launching my first novel, The Human Template .  I was hoping that some other members who are currently going through or have recently gone through the same experience would be will to do guest posts on my blog. Several of them expressed an interest, so today, I am posting the first of those.  Joe Mahoney’s first novel, A Time and a Place came out in October 2017 from now-defunct Canadian small press, Five Rivers Publishing. I have long believed that author promotion shouldn’t end shortly after your book is launched and falls short of the bestseller lists. Mahoney is an living example of someone following that conviction. He gave me permission to reprint a post from hi...

 I’m curious to see how this web series takes shape as I move on. I’m tired of blogs delivering mini-tutorials on Self-Publishing, while seldom delivering any nitty gritty from the trenches. By sharing my journey, I’m hoping you can find something to take away that helps you on your journey. You can say, “that worked for Sproule, why not for me” or “that didn’t work for him. Should I scrap or tweak my approach to the same marketing challenge? Here’s one of my biggest challenges – staying organized to help everything come together at the right time. Keeping track of ALL of the marketing efforts I’m making on every front is going to be essential over the coming months. I have a natural aversion to unnecessary administrative work. Goes against my ADD attention span. I start a list in one place and leave it on the computer there, so it’s not available over the weekend. Then I start a second list and despite whatever good intentions I may have, the two lists seldom get amalgamated...

  Dammit, I’m an author, not a marketer, layout artist, proofreader, cover designer, publicist, interviewee, cartographer… But wait. I chose to self-publish. And if ya wanna do it right, ya gotta do all those things and more! Sometimes I need to remember what brought me here in the first place and just sit down and write, but finding the time to do that when you’re caught up in the myriad of other jobs can be a challenge, and it makes for some very strange moments – like feeling guilty about fiction writing because you need to get the newsletter out or write letters to reviewers. I tell myself it would be easier if I was able to write full-time. I could just divide my day into strict time zones – mornings for writing, afternoons for marketing and the rest of the writing-related things that need doing. All my full-time-writing friends are giving me the stink eye (or laughing quiety behind their covid masks. I can feel it. “Oh, yeah,” they say. “Just you wait. We’ll see how tha...

One of the most important early steps in marketing a self-published book is approaching reviewers so that when your book does become available, there is already a bit of a buzz on the street and online, letting readers know that it’s worth checking out. For years, indie authors were unable to get reviews from the more respected book review venues like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal. Those publications were inundated by requests and ultimately saw the potential to create new revenue streams by offering to review indie books for a fee. In doing that, they had to ensure that their own labour costs were covered, reviewers could be paid, and there was a bit of a profit to be made at the end of the day.     All in all, these have been positive developments, creating a more cohesive (if ever-evolving) sense of community in the literary world. They had to hire more reviewers and since most reviewers are also writers. The increased opportunity to write reviews for...