On Marketing

So I was incredibly blessed to have been traditionally published for my novel "Under The Full and Crescent Moon" last year and it's a speculative historical novel that follows a young woman defending her Muslim matriarchal society through her mastery of Islamic law, but one of the things that comes with being traditionally published is...

That you just don't have access to the information that would prove which kinds of marketing that I did led to actual sales. The publisher has that kind of up to date regular sales information. I do have access to some indirect metrics, such as how many visitors come to my author website, and how many clicks there have been on the Link Tree page that I set up. You'll note that both of those are things that I created and can access data for.

Which leads me to another bit of marketing that I setup and can access data for, that I was told was incredibly important for an author, and that is my mailing list. And that is one avenue of marketing that just did not work for me I don't think.

A part of it maybe that I decided to not go the popular substack route, for various reasons, and instead set up the mailing list through a mailer service called mailerlite. Maybe the visibility tools that substack provides would have worked better in exchange for giving up a lot of control over what I write as substack at this point is a full social media platform but I really don't think so.

I think the core of the issue is that newsletters work better the more 'new' information you have to provide to subscribers to make it valuable. And I can see that being incredibly true for authors that have multiple projects going and especially are writing stories that span multiple volumes or have recurring characters. Because there's a lot of new, interesting information to give at a pretty regular pace.

I am not that author. I had one idea for a novel, and it took me 15 years overall and 8 years since I seriously started writing to bring it into the world and I just don't have anything else coming out anytime soon.

And a newsletter is a full medium of its own. I cannot just copy/paste from my blog or something into a standard newsletter template and feel any pride in just spamming it out into the world. And I'm certainly not going to AI slop generate it either, that is just not an option for me.

So the combination of a newsletter taking real effort to do well and the fact I just don't have new information to provide regularly made it not a great fit for me personally.

I still love the dozen or so subscribers that I have, I was happy to send them a one year anniversary note for my novel, and I'm going to keep it around just in case there is something of value to send them in the future. So it's been far from a waste.

Which begs the question, how has my main marketing activity of social media posts and videos like these done? I have zero idea, because, as I said, I just don't have access to the data that would prove it one way or the other. But. If you're interested in my novel please check it out. It's available everywhere books are sold and you can request it at your local library and I appreciate all the support. And if you really do want to sign up for the newsletter then I'm not going to say no. You can find it from my website. And hopefully soon I'll make a video about the kind of marketing that probably did by far the best.