It pays to publicise yourself

It’s been a busy day today, trying to drum up sales for my eBooks. Time was when a writer could give his words and pictures to a publisher, then sit back and let that publisher worry about getting it all together, designed, promoted and sold. But times change. It’s okay if you are a big name author with a lot of followers. Publishers will fall over themselves to publish your books if they think there are enough people out there waiting for your latest words of wisdom. In the specialist field that I work in it’s a bit different.

I’ve come to believe that for writers like me the way forward is to self publish, and the cheapest way to do that is as an eBook. It’s relatively simple to do that if you have a few basic design skills. My latest tome is a classic camera book called Clockwork Cameras. It’s all about the way manufacturers of the past used clockwork in their designs. I’d already self-published it with a print on demand service, but the unit cost, and therefore the price I was forced to sell it for, was a bit high. So now I've converted it to an eBook. Click here to see the way it appears on Amazon.

So it’s up there on Amazon waiting to be sold. But I have to find buyers. That’s the tricky bit, and here’s what I’ve been doing today.

• Written press releases which will go out tomorrow to photographic magazines with a picture of the cover.

• Written a news story for the newsletter of the BFP, for whom I freelance

• Put an announcement on the Internet Directory of Camera Collectors, which is received by email by camera collectors around the world.

• Prepared artwork for a small advertisement in the newsletter of the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain.

• Announced the publication on Twitter.

• Announced the publication on Kindleboards, which is read by people who contribute to, or buy from, the Kindle store.

• Oh yes, and mentioned on this blog.

These days, if you want to be a successful writer, you have to be prepared to also be a strong self-publicist as well – and to know where to aim your publicity. The big question, of course, is will it generate sales? Watch this space.