Hustle and Grind
Lunch Eater is out on Tuesday, 31 October!
Choose your poison:
Buy it on Kindle.
Buy it on Apple.
Order it at your local indie bookstore.
Something a little different for an apocalyptic story! - GoodReads
So you’ve written a book. Good on you.
This next part is the worst.
Now you have to sell it.
Very early on I talked about defining success when it comes to the writing game. Everyone has their own version of that. It could be that you just want people to read it (I trend towards that end of the spectrum but I do admit that I want more of that). It could be that you want to make 4 (or more) figures each month from book sales.
Often when you fall down the book marketing rabbit hole, as I have done the past month, you find this motto that if you can do the work to write a book (and you want to make sure its the best book you can but fat chance finding anything about how to be a better writer that is actionable on the internet) then you can sell your book.
I certainly understand the instinct but it has long struck me that they are not inherently translatable.
In fact, I would suggest that those who are best at selling their books aren’t necessarily the best at writing but instead are the best at positioning themselves as experts in the field of indie publishing. The ones that run courses on running ads. That have a weekly newsletter with tips on how to run ads. The ones that don’t just write books but instead build a machine for pumping out books and advertising them around themselves.
There’s one guy that runs courses on Facebook ads for authors and without fail he plugs his wife’s books as part of the course and his weekly newsletter. Why? Because he has a captive audience (there are a lot of authors) who want to work out how to make their ads sell their book more, and some of them will check out his wife’s book as part of the constant barrage of info about them that he includes with his content.
There was a time when genre fiction wasn’t dominant. You could see it on Amazon and you could see it in your local bookshop. Last time I went into a chain bookstore, there was one shelf for lit fiction. A decade or more ago they had at least 4 shelves. Now that space is taken up by YA, crime, and romance.
That’s what people read now.
Which is fine, the market is as the market does.
It does make it harder for weirder books (yes, like Lunch Eater) though. Readers want well defined genre guard rails when they pick up a book. It’s dystopian YA. It’s thready crime. It’s happily ever after romance. It’s dark romance. It’s historical fantasy. It’s cozy mystery. I mean hell, I pointed someone in the direction of Lunch Eater the other week and they told me they “only read books about cats.” I don’t even know what to do with that.
I understand where people are coming from. Not everyone wants to jump into a book without a sense of the framework it sits in. We all gravitate to what we know and what we like.
How then to sell something like Lunch Eater? A satire about the end of the world mixed with cosmic and psychological horror? Like an episode of The Office where they all go mad? As though H.P. Lovecraft wrote an episode of Utopia? Cthulhu meets your lunch break? It’s not an easy book to describe.
I don’t mind that, in fact I rather like it. I like that it’s a weird thing that is clearly a satire mixed with a workplace comedy in the first half and then when the turn comes it becomes something else entirely (though I have had one or two early readers bounce of it because they thought it was a straight comedy). Make them laugh and then stab them, I come from that school of writing.
Of course, the other thing with genre being ascendant is that so are series. Oh, series. Used to be that was pretty much kept to scifi and fantasy. Now it’s everything thing. And nowhere is that more the case than indie authors.
Because that’s how you get a sales funnel happening. The model (and this has been the case since the early days of the Kindle) is you make book 1 as cheap as possible. Hook your readers. Then funnel them to the other books in the series which are at the normal price point. As you’re doing that, build up your email list so when new books in the series drop, you can let all those readers know. And write fast. If you’re not pushing out a book every two or three months, you don’t stand a chance.
Standalone books, like Lunch Eater, are just so much harder.
So what do you need to do then?
Well…
You need to run ads, cause how else are you going to get eyeballs on the book.
That means you need to learn Facebook ads. You probably want to consider Amazon ads as well if you’re selling on the Kindle store.
Which of course means that you need to come up with ad creative, which is probably going to be outside your wheelhouse cause you write books not ads (though, midjourney and ChatGPT are things that exist, just saying).
That all costs money, so you have that going for you.
And now you’ll find yourself spiraling down a hole where you are constantly checking your ad dashboard to see if any impressions are converting to clicks plus you’re checking your Amazon dashboard (plus Draft2Digital if you are releasing to other platforms) to see if any of those clicks are converting to sales.
(I’ll tell you something that may turn you off Amazon even more - Amazon is tracking you when you’re on the site. What that means is you don’t always need clicks to convert to sales straight away because when you don’t buy something on Amazon… Amazon will send you a follow up email down the track that tries to push you towards making that purchase. It’s pretty grim.)
But you’re in pre-sale at the moment and thing is that books don’t sell books, other people sell books. You need social proof and that means reviews. So you need to get the book to people.
You send copies to the readers you already have, the ones that are interested in what you put out because they enjoyed your earlier books. Some of them will give you reviews, though not all. Not everyone wants to provide a review. Not everyone likes the book. Not everyone will read it.
(Funny story that happens to all authors - you will hear from so many people that they want to read your book - generally, 20% of them will actually do it. Some just forget. Some had no intention and are just being polite. Some think it will curry favour with you - there is someone at my work that does that. Some would happily read it but won’t buy it.)
But you get some reviews going and they are generally good.
An enjoyable read and an author I would check out again for his dry humour.
A bit of a mad idea for a virus end of the world adventure! Well written & good plot, made it an interesting read! I will look for more by this writer!
Though you get the odd one that read as though they are written by AI and seem to have just riffed on the lunch part of the title.
Lunch Eater reminds me of a beloved book that I read years ago, entitled “The Girl with All the Gifts.” However, Lunch Eater presents a neater environment and leaves me with a very refreshing feeling throughout the story. The book Lunch Eater made me laugh several times throughout the story. This is the first time I have read about a character with a big appetite and appreciation for food, just like me. Sean uses a first-person writing style, which makes the story more realistic. The story's pace is just right. When I thought I already knew what would happen next, Sean wrote a different twist to the report, making me read the entire book in just one sitting.
Of course, you do get readers reaching out to you via email because the book has touched them in a way you never expected.
A book like this I think typically would really bring me down. This reminder that nothing on this earth makes any sense. That the people in charge of our day to day wellbeing are either clowns with god complexes or apathetic office workers who care more about their lunch and their status than the people their decisions affect. But, experiencing this story was in a way cathartic for me. Like I’m not alone in feeling the way I feel about the world. Every character has a slightly different approach to the world. One is indifferent and annoyed. Another is paranoid. One is worried. Another is optimistic. No matter what your attitude, the same thing is going to happen to you. So the question I was left with at the end is what kind of attitude do you want to have for the end of the world?
And that sort of response reminds you why you want to write books in the first place.
You’re getting reviews, people are reading the book, your ads are running, you start thinking about how you could get some mainstream press for the book. You wonder whether you should start buying bulk copies and leaving them on park benches, or on the train, or in food courts, or try to smuggle them on to the shelves in chain book stores.
You find yourself working with tools like Photoshop and coming up with potential post cards that you could use as marketing materials. You start workshopping ad copy. You wonder what the best filter for your ad images is.
Hell, pre-orders are not doing too bad and you find that your rank on Amazon is better than you expected.
But it never ends.
I remember when I was just a writer.
This is not a sob story.
This is simply part of what needs to be done every time a book goes out. Personally, I hate it. It’s what makes me often stop writing.
The past month, I haven’t written a word of Toy Guns because I’ve been doing all of this other stuff in the hopes that Lunch Eater will have some level of success. Gurus that tell you they have an unbeatable system that means you can spend 15 minutes a week or whatever are a dime a dozen in this space but at the end of the day, you end up tying yourself in knots to try and sell a book that may ultimately have a pretty niche audience anyway.
I would love it if you could all share this post. If you could review the book. If you could buy the book. If you have read the book and enjoyed it, send a copy to a friend. Let them borrow your paperback copy. Tell people you know who are also public servants how it really dials in on the modern public service. Burn the book and post the video of you doing that on Instagram. You don’t have to do any of those things but those things are the life blood for an indie author.
Though the truly messed up thing about the publishing world these days is that even if you are traditionally published, you’ll probably need to do all of these things as well.
Even if you don’t leave a review somewhere for the book, do feel free to reach out to me via email to let me know your thoughts. I may not have much to add because ultimately as the author I am dumb but I’m more than happy to have long ranging conversations.