For some authors, self-promotion seems to be their strength. If they have any doubts about the quality of their work, then they sure as hell don’t show it. You’d think they’d written the book for all time in the way they talk about their middle of the road thriller. If I sound jealous, it’s because I am. Not because I want to write middle of the road anything, but because I want to be able to have that level of confidence and self-assuredness about a product that has gone through the quality control I have chosen for it, not the route that industry experience diehards would have picked instead. But for that to be the case, I’d have to be a different person. Probably American.

I recently read an article called How to Reach More Readers by Harnessing Retailers’ Algorithms by Simon Denman. I think the opening that caught my eye was the line Most authors I know enjoy marketing about as much as filing tax returns, and my first thought was ‘that much?’. But the article itself posed some interesting theories about how marketing and promotion now work in an internet based age. Bookstores don’t really have algorithms. For a good long time they’ve had experienced professionals who would be able to guess how many copies would shift based on their local demographic and retail location, but I strongly suspect that is now a growing art.

It leaves me to question then, how many of the best selling self published authors are doing this kind of thing? I know that with my daily life, I’m not sure I have time to work out algorithm selling strategies, even if I was at that point in the journey. It’s no secret that I’m just starting out on this road, with a couple of books queued up but still in the final stages of edit and cover design. Whilst I look forward very much to the satisfaction of getting them out there, the prospect of marketing is bad enough without having to factor in scheduling a three day continuous upswing in sales to trigger some piece of maths somewhere in the amazon superbrain.

So is it luck or strategy? And does anyone know of a guaranteed way to do it without requiring some kind of advanced calculus…?