You might already know what the secret is, because it's not actually a secret. It's widely touted on indie author forums across the internet. The secret is:
Write and Publish More Books
Post on any indie forum your complaints about your book sales and, assuming you don't have a weak cover and confusing blurb, you will hear, "Write more books!"
It's the indie model of success.
It can take time, but it works better than any other strategy.
When I was a child, I used to play a game called Fortune Builder. In the game, I built cities. This was long before the advent of fancy graphics. My buildings were mere shapes, my roads were thin lines, and my citizens were encased in black dots that were supposed to be cars.
But this is what I learned from the game. If I built a mall and then built only one road to it, I received fewer visitors than if I built two, three, or four roads to it. The more roads I created, the more cars discovered my mall and the more successful I was in the game.
Writing more books is building more roads to you--the Author. Each book allows readers new avenues to discover you. If you write in the same genre, even better. Readers who discover one of your books, will probably give your others a try.
I decided to write this post after an author friend of mine asked me why I continue writing new books after just signing a four-book deal for my upcoming Guardian Herd series. Well, therein lies the rub. A series is technically one long book, especially since mine are best read in chronological order. There are huge marketing advantages to writing a series--with each release comes new press, new reviews, and new opportunities to promote--but it's still one long road to the same place.
To answer my friend's question, I keep writing because I believe that building multiple roads to me will lead to more readers discovering the Guardian Herd series. I self-published my first book, and I'm so glad I did because I learned about book marketing in the trenches. Indie authors are a determined lot and years of trial and error have led most to the same conclusion about how to attract readers:
Write and Publish More Books
This policy holds true for all authors--indie or not. Keep writing and publishing until you strike a vein, and when you do, all of your books will benefit. But don't stop there, keep going! Odds are you couldn't stop writing if you wanted to, so put your true nature to work. If you've spent years re-wrting the same novel hoping it will be "the one," or you've published one book and watched it languish on the virtual Amazon shelf--pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep writing new material. Keep publishing. Keep dreaming. And keep learning about your craft. A side benefit of prolificacy should be that you also improve as an author, and maybe, at the end of the day, that is the true secret of success.
Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
Author of The Guardian Herd series and the Pet Washer series.
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| Book #1 |
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| Book #2 |
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