People Stopped Buying my Books
Which means you should change that...
I couldn’t figure it out. How do you get people to read your books? Do you beg and go the ego direction? Do you cold-email everyone you can think of? Do you splurge on marketing gimmicks? Do you talk about how pathetic your book sales are and wait for the suddenly interested readers to flow in?
I’ve been thinking about my three published books: The Crew (literary YA); Two Years in New York (my COVID/NYC memoir) and Controversial: The Substack Essays (my essay collection covering politics, culture and literature).
My main thought is this: I’m sad that they’re not selling.
The Crew was selling when it first came out in late January, 2024. Hundreds of copies. Some good people reviewed it. It got a blurb from a reviewer at the U.S. Review of Books. It has won so far two Indie Book Awards. Writers’ Digest complimented it strongly. It has 43 good Amazon reviews. And yet: Sales severely dropped off months ago to a trickle, most days zero. Two Years, the memoir, has sold very little; ditto Controversial, which surprised me.
The Crew was a novel that was literally 15 years in the making. Hundreds of drafts. Endless editing. Dozens of reads by literary agents. One which very nearly almost took it. Were it not for Trump! (See above essay re agents.)
This despite reaching out to dozens of writers on Substack hoping they might review the book. Most don’t answer my inquiry. Some do and say they don’t write book reviews. A couple offered to do one for money. (Which I turned down.) Only the smallest trickle agreed to read it.
A while back there was a Dear Polly letter post wherein a woman’s traditionally published book had been published six months or a year prior and she felt pathetic because no one was buying it. Double goose-eggs. But when Polly posted the letter, people in the multiple hundreds suddenly became intensely interested; they wanted revealed the name of the author and the title of the book. Polly checked with the letter-writer and confirmed this was ok. It seemed to become a mini-sensation. I read comment after comment saying, I can’t wait to read this book.
I couldn’t figure it out. How do you get people to read your books? Do you beg and go the ego direction? Do you cold-email everyone you can think of? Do you splurge on marketing gimmicks? Do you talk about how pathetic your book sales are and wait for the suddenly interested readers to flow in?
The answer is: I don’t know.
Of course, there are so many angles. Talent, luck, connections, timing, etc etc. I have the talent, certainly, but not necessarily the luck and definitely not the connections or timing. And that’s a lot of it, isn’t it? Luck and connections. Who you know means everything. Who can blurb your book? Who thinks it’s timely for the current market? Are you part of a writing community that can help promote it? These are all valid questions.
And of course there is endless competition; the market, whether traditional or self-publishing, is flooded day in and day out with books books books books books. Here I am, 42 years old and a writer all my life and I still feel like I haven’t “broken in.”
But then again, maybe that’s just my story. I know I’m far from alone. This is also the joy of Substack. And my Substack, for sure, is growing.
Anyway. Enough complaining. It is what it is. Life is life. Things are as they are, as the Buddhists always say.
I’m not special, unique or different; I understand that. I just want more people to buy the books, read the books, praise the books and spread the word.
Is that too much to ask?
(I am half laughing as I write this!)
~