The good news first: I got my first book blogger review yesterday, and it was 5 stars! http://www.bittenbyparanormalromance.com/2011/09/review-destined-by-allison-kraft.html
I was very excited to read it, and the blog has a fairly large following, so I was anxious to see how the review impacted my sales. Unfortunately… not so much. I know it’s only the next day, but I only sold one Kindle book yesterday, and the Nook, Smashwords and paperback stats didn’t change. So that’s frustrating. Maybe I’m just too impatient, or maybe that blog wasn’t the right audience for Destined. (It’s a paranormal romance blog, but with emphasis on erotic romance. I submitted mine on the off chance they didn’t mind “clean” romance as well, and got lucky that a reviewer happened to be looking for something like that. She loved the book, but if the blog’s followers all prefer erotic romance, then that could be why no one’s buying.)
It’s frustrating to know you have a good product out there, yet can’t seem to get anyone to look at it. I’ve sent it to a bunch of reviewers, got some positive responses that sound like they’re going to read it eventually (many just haven’t responded at all, one way or the other) and joined a bunch of GoodReads groups and other reading-centric message boards. Problem is, in order for the latter to get you anywhere, you have to be an active member of the community, and that takes a lot of time. Time I don’t really have unless I stop working on my next book.
I’ve been getting such good feedback on the book so far. Granted, most of it is from friends and family, but even though they might be more prone to liking it because they know me, they’ve been very positive; more than they needed to be. Like staying up half the night to finish it because they couldn’t stop reading, or saying it made them cry. One lent it to a friend (who doesn’t know me), and that friend liked it enough that she went back and re-read the ending, and said that she was up late one night because she couldn’t stop thinking about parts of it. I love to hear these things, because it tells me that I wrote something that people are genuinely enjoying. I just wish I knew some magic promotion formula to get others to know it exists!
Well, enough whining. Time to go work on editing that second book. The sooner I can have it ready to publish, the better my chances of being noticed. They say the bet promotion is to have more than one book out for people to discover. Thank goodness I already have a few finished, because if I had to start writing the next one from scratch, who knows how long it would take me to finish at this rate!
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