Promoting Grimhilda!

I've been working hard on promoting my ebook, Grimhilda!, but it takes a lot of time, of course. Still, the great advantage of ebooks is that you don't have piles of unsold stock lying around eating up your income.

At present the book is restricted to Kindle, but from the 20th April will be available much more widely. I'm hoping this will make a difference in its sales. I've been working with a company called Wheelers, too. They supply ebooks to libraries around NZ, and possibly Australia. (I think they supply to Australia, but trying to find where I saw that is proving a little difficult.) They've been very friendly and helpful, and respond quickly to emails. Grimhilda! is now in their capable hands and hopefully will begin to make her way around some of the NZ libraries from mid-April onwards.

I won't restrict my next book to Kindle - it's restricted to them for the first three months, if you choose that option, an option that's supposed to make it more visible, but obviously hasn't. Some advice I got from elsewhere has suggested that even though Kindle appears to be top-dog in the ebook world, it isn't, in fact, and there are a wide number of other opportunities out there. I'm preparing Grimhilda! for Smashwords too, at the moment, so it's all go.

I've hammered away at promoting on Twitter and Facebook, and have had some interest there...and a few sales. It's slow, but then Grimhilda! is competing against thousands upon thousands of other titles around the world, so she's got her work cut out.

Sales here in Dunedin have been rather sluggish, which surprised me considering that the musical version was presented here, and had good feedback. Several people have told me they'll get a copy, but it's easy to say that and then forget. Perhaps I should purchase a number of large vinyl banners and get the City Council to hang them from their banner poles around the city. Might be a slightly expensive option, considering the skimpiness of my advertising budget!

The other thing that's held up promotion has been the writing of my other book, on my experience of having a prostate operation. It's difficult to write and promote at the same time, something I've always had a problem with. I'm better at writing than promoting, although I do the latter because I have to, and a great deal of the promotion for the musical version of Grimhilda! fell into in my hands. A steep learning curve, as the cliche goes.

Anyway, that's where things are at present.  No doubt there'll be more news in due course!

Of the making of books there is no end...

"We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." That is, "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."

A quote from someone in the 21st century? Nope, the words of a 17th century scholar - and he was only echoing what Vincent of Beauvais in the 13th century said: "Since the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind, I decided to reduce in one volume in a compendium and in summary order some flowers selected according to my talents from all the authors I was able to read."

Even Solomon is known to have said something along these lines: Of the making of books there is no end. The problem ain't new!

The two quotes come from an excellent article by Alan Jacobs on the subject of information overload.