Couple of inputs colliding in interesting ways.
How To Build A Blog Without Social Media:
So here’s my 2023 experiment. Building LTD up in a sustained way without doing the thing everyone’s been doing since the 2010s – leaning on social media as the one and only growth tool.
Let me point you now to ooh.directory, Phil Gyford’s growing directory of living blogs. And it updates live when any of them post a new piece. That’s one plank in a new stage for personal publishing.
A big part of my, when I got started, my launch plan was, how many people can I reach out to, give free copies away, give them an eBook copy ahead of time to read, so that hopefully when it does launch, it gets momentum because there’s a lot of people talking about it.
I reached out to probably 120 different bloggers, influencers, reviewers, people I found online or on social media, and basically just from a cold call pitched them, an email or a message on social media, pitched them, hey I wrote this book, you don’t know who I am, my name is nothing, but I wrote this book, this is what it’s about, I’m super pumped, and I think you would enjoy it based on seeing what you’ve been reading and writing about.
That took a lot of time and effort. It was a lot of hard work, but I felt that was necessary to get the ball rolling.
Out of those 120 that I approached, I had maybe 15 of them that took me up on it.So, it’s difficult, but at the time it was worth it because a lot of the 15 people had great things to say and they are posting on their blogs, they’re leaving reviews on Goodreads and on Amazon, or on BookBub, and so that helps spark more interest.
The conventional wisdom is that social media doesn’t sell books (unless you kill it on TikTok). I’m bad at social media and semi-ideologically committed to not getting good at it, so for me it’s sort of true by stipulation.
So the question becomes, what else? These are a couple of answers. Ellis is talking about building a blog audience and Webb is talking about launching a fantasy series, but the common answer (at a level of abstraction) is “approach curators.” So that’s a thought.
Currently reading: THE WICKED + THE DIVINE Book 1, Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie. My 11-year-old daughter is very into mythology, so I thought it might be time to see if I could recommend WicDiv to her, since it’s one of my favorites.
The panel at the top of this post shows up on page 22, right on the heels of a four-way murder-suicide.
Probably have to wait on this one.
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