Writing Wednesday: Cool Kids Don't Always Cash In

Happy Canada Day!  Today should be when Alex Cavanaugh and his minions whine on their blogs about their securities.  Which makes it appropriate to post this today.  During the Andrew Leon Debacle(TM), people on his blog would comment about me, "I'd never buy one of his books because he's a meanie!"  To which at one point I said, "You didn't buy my books before this, you aren't buying them now, and you won't buy them in the future."  Which is true so far as I know.  The people reading his blog weren't my target audience, so it's not like they were buying my books before they thought I was a meanie.

Anyway, it got me to realize that in many cases being a popular blogger doesn't make you a popular author.  I'm not naming names, but there are several authors I follow who get dozens of comments on their blog entries and have way more followers than me and yet their books hardly sell at all.  Whereas my alter ego who has no blog, no Twitter, no Facebook, no social media presence at all, has sold lots of books.

In an entry a while back I think I mentioned how I don't really care about doing blog tours, cover reveals, etc for my books anymore.  It's the same thing where I never really saw any benefit from doing those and books where I haven't done that have actually performed better.  Which really book blogging in general is probably pretty useless unless you're someone who's famous already.

The point isn't to say that you should be a dick to everyone, but I'm just saying that it's probably not going to matter that much.  In my unscientific opinion there's no correlation between being a popular blogger and being a popular author.  So if you're worried you're not blogging enough, just relax.

Someone once asked me if you're not going to go around to hundreds of blogs to make inane comments to make "friends" then why blog at all?  I don't know.  At this point I suppose I just figure I should have some kind of online presence.  And what the hell, it gives me a soapbox to rant from on occasion.  As with many things I'm just going to try to not take it too seriously.

Recently I read this Reader Magnets book Cindy Borgne pointed me to and basically in it the guy says that social media (including blogs) is pretty much useless.  He uses Wordpress for his site but pretty much just to get Email addresses for his mailing list.  That's where (supposedly) the money is made.  With that in mind I decided to start a Wordpress site for my alter-ego, so now you can go to www.ericfiller.com and find...pretty much nothing yet.  According to this book it's important to have some books for free, which I have to wait a few days until some of my Transformed books come off KDP Select so I can put them on Draft2Digital.  By the end of the month I should have the first six off KDP Select.  (That would be Transformed Into a Little Girl, Schoolgirl, Whore, Geek Girl, Dominatrix, and Goth Girl.  The others don't expire on KDP until late August or early September.)  They don't get that many downloads from Amazon anymore, so it's not much of a gamble to offer a couple for free.  But anyway, it helps substantiate what I'm saying, that it's not all that important how popular your blog is when it comes to selling books.

BTW, today should be the last day to get Where You Belong for free.  Amazon has price-matched Chance of a Lifetime for free now, so if you never downloaded that, it's free again!