This week has been full of marketing-related work for my book, Pajama School – stories from the life of a homeschool graduate. Much of it is just on the thinking and planning and making contacts level, but I’m realizing that in order to be effective I am going to have to keep branching out – way out! – of my comfort zone. Ever the optimist, somehow I think I subconsciously embraced the notion that my books would pretty much sell themselves once they were on the market. Haha. Hahahaha.

Marketing is such a nice word. I think whoever coined it did so to gloss over the not-so-nice connotation of the word, “selling.” But in reality, I’ve realized that “selling” is exactly what I have to be good at in order to sell these books. (imagine that…) The bad news? I really, really, really don’t like selling. And I’m not very good at it (which is probably why I still have a couple thousand books sitting in our garage!).

Anyway…all that was the lead-in to say that I came across a very brief post that nicely summarizes this whole world of book publishing – be it traditional publishing, vanity press publishing, or self-publishing. Any writer would do well to carefully read and process the statistics and advice offered in it, especially noting the concluding paragraph:

“And so, if you are about to embark on a new manuscript, educate yourself thoroughly about the industry, its scams, and potential pitfalls. And more importantly, learn to market yourself well, for this, more than any other skill, is the determining factor in your success or failure.”

In my opinion, this marketing business is the hardest aspect of any of the book project thus far. I suppose for the naturally gifted salesperson this would not be the case (and if that happens to describe you, will you please call me? 🙂 ). It’s a LOT of work, with little results to show for it…at least not yet. But the repeated reminder from Proverbs is that labor – of the persevering, daily variety – is what eventually ushers in the harvest.