I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of the top 2 or 3 best avenues for book promo by genre. We talk about promoting 'books' like they're a monolith, but I suspect the way Kindle crime readers find new reads is different to how nonfiction pop psych readers find theirs.
I'm sure there are *some* common channels across all types of book, but there must be some that only exist for, say, indie Romance authors, or SFF authors, or litfic authors, or authors writing sports biography or whatever. I'd love to get a sense of those different networks.
I love how some books can be selling like gangbusters, despite being completely unknown elsewhere, because of a community's spreading the word. Later, sometimes they spill out of their niche. But it's fascinating & exciting to me how different books spread.
I'm also fascinated by how little the question 'is the book any good?' gets discussed when I read about promotion. Clearly being good is not a necessary condition (bad books have done well) & being good is not sufficient (great books have done badly). So what effect does it have?
Maybe quality (which I realise is too nebulous to have some objective answer) is a population-level effect. If you were shown 100 manuscripts, reading the first page might give you a better-than-chance guess at whether it sold more or less than the median sales for that 100.
I barely discuss book promotion on the podcast, but for me, the first & most important question is: is there anything, meaningfully, an author can do to shift the needle, or should they invest their time in producing more & better work, & looking after themselves?
Is the best self-promotion to write the next one well, in a timely manner? Should you be spending the morning writing answers to that email interview for that blog, or going for a long walk to refresh & reset? Do the things an author does have any meaningful impact on sales?
Jeez, I ought to get an expert on the show to ask them these questions, rather than lofting them rhetorically into the e-wind.
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