Boy Howdy, Am I an Idiot

I just thought maybe all of the ZERO people that read this would be interested in hearing how stupid I am. You see, somewhere around 2 years ago, right after completing this website, I entered into a couple of Newsletter Swaps and Book Promotions. They are both fairly standard ways for independent authors such as myself - and maybe such as yourself, too, how would I know? - to reach new readers and find more fans. The promos which I joined lasted about 3 weeks, after which time I had gained a grand total of 0 subscribers to my newsletter. Which seemed to me like an unmitigated failure.

I reasoned that something, somewhere in my marketing was wrong: maybe the cover wasn’t good enough, or no one was interested in the book I was offering to give away? Maybe the email they were supposed to be contacting just didn’t work? Or maybe the website had been designed by a lunatic, and was flawed - ridiculous even - and full of rambling, stupid nonsense (I know, ridiculous thought)? Either way, something had gone wrong and I would need to fix it. So I rolled up my shirt-sleeves got right to it…

…Eventually. What does “eventually” mean? Well it varies, but in this specific instance it means “A Year-and-a-Half "Later”. I did an initial sweep, obviously; not even I am that lazy. I didn’t see any issues with the email services I was using to collect the requests to join the newsletter, so I determined that I would probably need to expand the novella which I was giving away into a full novel. Then I would have to go back through my entire set-up to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes.

So now here we are, that expanded book was coming along well - although slowly. I figured that, since I have been giving proof that no one wanted it, and thus no one was waiting for it, I could take as long as I wanted to finish it, right?

Anyway, I started going back over the information I used to set up my marketing sites and strategies and things, and something possessed me to start working on a newsletter. It had always seemed like a waste before, since I had no subscribers. But then again, a newsletter is one of the most effective ways for independent authors like us to drive sales, so I would need to start using it again pretty soon. Because you can’t have subscribers to a thing that doesn’t exist…unless you’re a Fire Festival, I guess.

Anyway, I pulled up that site and discovered almost instantly that, not only was I an idiot, but my previous promotions were NOT the unmitigated disasters which I had heretofore supposed. Because instead of having 0 subscribers, as I anticipated, I had over 200. That’s not a failure, that’s a qualified success! 220 subscribers to a non-extant newsletter! Most of whom joined a year and a half ago, at the time of that promotion, and NONE of whom had heard anything from me in all that time.

So I have spent the last week building up a newsletter, adding pages to the website, and re-pulling my hamstring. To be honest, they’re not all related, but they ARE things that happened. The point is, now that I know that the infrastructure is sound, I am going to start promoting the *** out of this stuff. So GET READY, WORLD! You’re about to hear a lot more about some stuff you don’t really care about, would rather ignore, and basically wish would just go away and leave you alone.

I can’t wait…