It’s not dead yet! Don’t give up on books you wrote years ago. One of my popular books is selling again. There was a hiatus, but Walking Drinking Thinking Across Scotland is selling with almost no effort from me. Thanks.
Writers can make up (or rephrase) stories that become books. Authors are writers who’ve written a book (my definition), and can make up stories about sales. Sales are up. Sales are down. It’s all because of… Frequently, we do not know why someone buys a book. We know even less about why several people buy a particular book. Go ahead; make up a story about it.
My book about walking across Scotland (which has a much too long title to repeatedly type) sells steadily except for a roughly two-year gap when I thought everyone else forgot about it. Welcome back.
In the last several months, the rate has risen to approach the sales velocity of when it was first made available. Why? I don’t know. I like to think it is from word-of-mouth from reader to reader. Maybe. Maybe not. If my book fills a need, that is great. If the sales expand because the need has expanded, even better.
This is one reason I prefer self-publishing. In traditional publishing, the publisher could decide that book sales were falling off quickly enough that they should drop the book, or at least dropped its priority. Conventional wisdom, as delivered to me, was that, if the book sales weren’t encouraging after three months it was time to drop it.
Traditional, conventional, anachronistic ways of doing things persist because we are a species of habits. What was wise isn’t necessarily so after a while.
Self-publishing enables a book to develop an audience over months or years, assuming the author has the patience. That also means the author may not make much money at the start, but considering that a self-published author is responsible for the entire business operation, a bit of pacing isn’t a bad idea.
Writing and selling books is a lot of work. It is too easy for me to hurt me by trying to maintain the same pace of a traditional marketing campaign. I could definitely do more, much more, but I’m taking a much longer view. Each book I write helps sell the others. Everything doesn’t depend on that one book. They can support each other. Conversations about one can lead to getting someone interested in another. Someone reading my book about walking across Scotland might be interested in my book about bicycling across America (Just Keep Pedaling).
In casual conversations, I think I’ve managed to connect each book to another, not by a marketing strategy, but by listening to what a reader wanted to read. As a one-person operation, that can take time.
At the same time, I bow to my friends who are much more financially successful authors. Some rely on ads. Some rely on social media. We all hope for good luck.
Maybe that intensity of a book marketing campaign that relies on everything getting done in three or four months works best. I prefer to pursue each at its own pace. Every sale gets amplified on social media. So does every positive reader response posted on social media. I should check Amazon reviews every day, but I should also floss every day. Of the two, dealing with weird and bad Amazon reviews doesn’t help, and costs me time and emotional energy.
Walking Thinking Drinking Across Scotland is, as a good author and friend said, is not a Hollywood book. It was a slice of my life as I dealt with realities familiar to many. I didn’t even intend to write a book about it. The doctors had lined up over $8,000 for diagnostic tests for me. That wouldn’t cure anything; it was just for diagnostics. I talked to them and they all agreed, without taking any of those tests, they suspected the root cause of my problems was stress. I realized I could walk across Scotland for three weeks for less than half of that. I did. I had a life-changing experience, and I realized I had to write a book about it, mostly in case it helped others.
Much of this post has been about book sales, but if my book has helped others in similar situations, and they’ve mentioned it to others, then it is a successful book. Those readers may not have needed it when it was published, but they’re finding it now. That makes me pause as I type this because this post reminds me of those days and that lesson. It helped me. I hope it helps others.
And, as I guessed at one time, sales outside of Scotland and the US made me wonder how many readers simply enjoyed reading about a Yank from rainy Seattle meeting a bunch of Scots on some epically cold and wet days. And there was the day when the train was filled with kilts, a beer cart, and a busted toilet.
For whatever reason, welcome back, readers – and sales, of course.
tomthewriter.com 
Leave a comment