A word to the not-so-wise…
…for authors and book promoters (and interested readers): I get offers all the time from book promoters asking me to use their promotion services, almost as many suggesting I jazz up this website. I realize the latter is getting a bit long in the tooth, but any jazzing up will be done by the same company of website gurus that I initially used to create it, Monkey C Media. The former are a bit more complex to automatically ignore, so allow me to explain. (Penny Sansevieri et al, take note.)
The main problem I have with book promotion services is an old one: It’s “book promotion,” and not “books promotion”! While I might never run that marathon of writing another novel again (that’s a longer race than writing a short story or novella), I’ve already written a few! And most of them are part of a trilogy or longer series. No book promoter I know promotes entire series. (Hell, none of my traditional publishers promote series either! They don’t even promote single books!)
One would think that series represented some kind of contagion, something gross and untouchable. While I have no stats to support this boycott by book promoters, I think that some readers might be interested in series.
Has anyone ever finished a novel and wished there was a sequel, another story involving most of the same characters as the one just finished? Or maybe someone just reads mostly complete series? I do both as a prolific reader…and always have, even before the Covid pandemic. Knowing there’s a series means that I can have a lot of good reading ahead of me!
So, book promoters, I’ll ignore all your damn emails and continue to treat them as spam until you can offer me a promotional package for an entire trilogy or series. I’ve never seen such an offer from any of you, and I expect I never will. So don’t waste your time or mine!
Of course, there are probably many reasons why book promoters ignore series. I don’t know them because there are no stats comparing promos of single novels to promos of series, simply because the latter don’t exist. But I suspect the reasons are similar to why a publisher doesn’t offer contracts for a series except to a lucky few authors: It’s too much of a gamble. They want authors to take all the risks.
Series, though, must sell well simply by observing the huge sales of collections! Joffe, the British publisher, for example, seems to do well offering complete ebook collections to the reading public. (I’m a fan!) True, it’s better when the novels in the collection are “evergreen books” (the entire series was probably released book-by-book at one time, but each novel is “evergreen” because they’re still as exciting and fresh as the day they were written—i.e., they continue to entertain readers.
So here’s what I’ll offer to Joffe or any other publisher to work around stupid book promoters who don’t want to promote series: Choose any one of my series and turn it into a collection! I’m willing to do that for any of my series except “The Chaos Chronicles.” (I already made that into a collection myself.)
Ah, but will a book promoter even promote a collection? Who knows? Will it need any promotion? Again, who knows?
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
