I’ve been on a learning binge lately, as it seems the latest marketing trend for people offering services to writers is to put on “summits.” These are generally several days worth of recorded presentations or interviews with various people related to writing, usually “book coaches,” marketing people, editors, and sometimes writers. All of these people promote the event to their mailing lists. They’re free to attend, but you have to sign up to get access, and you usually only get access to the sessions for 24-48 hours after they’re posted, but you can upgrade by paying a fee to get longer access (usually lifetime), and there are usually some other bonuses for those who upgraded. And then they usually have it set up so that to get the handout for the session or whatever other thing the speaker refers to, you have to sign up for the speaker’s mailing list, which means you’ll get invited to even more summits, and it increases exponentially.

I can’t resist the opportunity to learn or to get free things, so I’ve been doing a lot of these. I’ve yet to find one that would have been worth the upgrade, but I’ve picked up a few tidbits here and there, including a lot of promotion and marketing ideas. I guess I’m always looking for that golden nugget that will really make a huge difference.

It really seems like I should be doing more video. I hate to dive into Tik Tok, in part because of security concerns and in part because I just don’t want to deal with it, but supposedly it can really sell books. I don’t know if I should revive my YouTube channel and do more videos, like possibly some “vlogs” to talk about my writing and give updates, in addition to the writing how-tos. I keep coming back to the fact that I’m trying to target readers, so would they really watch videos? But it does seem that when I post a lot to Instagram, my sales go up.

I’ve started doing a little advertising on Amazon, but I haven’t noticed a huge difference in sales. Then again, this is usually about the time after a recent release that sales tend to drop, so maybe the sales staying about the same is actually an increase over what it would have been.

Of course, here I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re reading this, you’ve already found me and probably already read my books. My challenge has been in reaching more people and convincing them to try my books. Once someone reads something, they tend to be hooked. The trick is getting awareness in the first place, especially when what I like to do is write, not make graphics or videos. I’ve heard that most of the promo stuff does no good, so you should just use that time/energy to write more books, but at some point you do need to reach new readers to make all that time spent writing worthwhile.

Are there ways/places you hear about books? The best marketing is word of mouth from other readers, so the best way to keep me writing is to tell other people about my books. Otherwise, I’ll have to find a day job, which would really cut into my writing time, so fewer books, released more slowly.