A Writer's Life: Can Blogging Help You Sell Your Books?
Claude Nougat’s Blog
guilty, I’ve done it too, all the first book
of my series are priced like that.
in spite of forbidding reams of statistics
and a title reminiscent of Karl Marx.
The end result is the same: way too
many books around.
Ditto for the worldwide success
achieved by Karl Ove Knausgaard, an
unknown Norwegian writer. His novel,
bizarrely called My Struggle which
translates to “Mein Kampf” in German,
reminiscent of Hitler’s famous book, is
less a novel than a huge memoir
thousands of pages-long that traces his
“growing up”, his “struggle” to
understand the world around him.
Book 1 starts off with a witty
observation: people love to watch
death on TV – war reports from the
Middle East, volcanic eruptions, fires,
floods etc – but turn their eyes away
whenever someone dies around them.
The corpse is immediately covered with
a blanket and whisked away in an
ambulance, bodies are stacked in cold
storage rooms etc Why, he asks, are we
afraid to see a corpse in reality when
we spend our time doing so on TV?
Good question.
Because the truth is, you’re never going
to read all those books you’ve stored
up in your Kindle (or elsewhere).
Conventional wisdom has it that
blogging helps to sell books, and the
more successful your blog, the more
books you will sell.
Not so.
Yet, marketing gurus and hugely
successful bloggers like Adrienne Smith
maintain that with blogging you can
“make a living” (see here).
Another major reason is that people
don’t feel like reading novels the way
they used to.
Don’t get me wrong, the desire to be
entertained is as strong as ever – who
doesn’t like to unwind at the end of a
hard day’s work in front of the TV with
a drink in hand? So TV series like House
of Cards or Game of Thrones replace
long evenings of reading novels.
Perhaps you can if you sell something
else than books.
And here is why (in my humble
opinion). There are two factors at work:
(1) market saturation and (2) TV
competition for your free time.
No question, of late, the ebook market
has become saturated. If you have an
e-reader, I bet it’s full of books you
haven’t read, books you uploaded
when they went free.
Over the past three years, there has
been a frenzy of giveaways to “gain
new readers”, and I confess that I
joined the crowd and made my books
free several times, with decreasing
success each time. Gone are the days of
10,000 downloads (at least for me)! Of
course, now 99 cents (the launch price
of an ebook) is the “new free” – I plead
People read fiction only when there’s a
blockbuster around, 50 Shades of Grey
and the like.
Otherwise people prefer to read nonfiction (if they read at all). This is why
Thomas Piketty‘s book, Capital in the
21st Century, is immensely successful,
In general, books t