Rending parts of my soul in the name of profit

So there’s a crazy idea I’d like to postulate to you. Let’s say you have a product. Everyone who knows you and knows of the product seems to like it. Everyone who likes it seems to recommend it to others. Great. Every recommendation makes you, the creator of this product, feel immensely proud and satisfied.

What if I told you that in order to increase the feelings of satisfaction, get ready to put in 2 – 3 times more effort in the marketing of that product than the time it took to create the product? Would that seem like something you would enjoy doing?

No, me either. So that’s where Mimic stands. It’s a product that seems to bring joy (well, 4.14 out of 5 stars of joy) and has driven secondary sales through recommendations and a wider circle of people. Yet, I can’t figure out how to crack the nut of Marketing of this product. I’ve boiled it down to three really simple reasons, in my opinion.

1. The publishing industry isn’t setup to reward authors, it’s designed to reward books. While there are several authors for which this isn’t true (some guy named Stephen King comes to mind), the VAST majority of authors are working book to book. The agents and publishers seem to be primarily there to service the work, not the author. Yes, I admit that wasn’t a great choice of phrase. What do you think I am, some sort of a writer?
2. I have a job and a family. Fundamentally, I don’t write so that they can eat. My other job takes care of that, and that other job therefore rises to the top of what I need to do with my hours. When that other job leaves me tired and empty, it’s the writing that suffers. I don’t ever want the thing that suffers to be my family. I write because of the joy it brings me and hopefully the joy that it brings others who read my work. I would love for that to have a different dynamic in my life, but honestly I think I missed the window on that. It seems like authors have a really hard time of it right now, what with AI generated slop and other fast-fiction problems. I thought when writing Mimic that if I didn’t have sex and violence in abundance, I wouldn’t be able to make a dent. I don’t think that’s the case, I just think it’s really hard to make a dent. Which brings me to #3.
3. Marketing isn’t a skillset that writers are imbued with. I would, generally speaking, say that we are a pretty introverted bunch. Writing is our therapy sometimes, and writing is the way for our inner thoughts to be heard. Some of us are really bad at speaking our emotions and our thoughts, so we write them down. The act of sharing that is, as a result, a vulnerable experience. Now try and take a part of that whole and sharing it with the world, for the latest post on social media to dissect it and critique it. At least when the book is a physical thing, you have the ability to hide beyond the relative anonymity of the published form. I don’t feel that with a social media post for some reason.

Which means I have stalled out on promoting Mimic. With, let’s be honest, not a lot of work. I would prefer to release another book, which is of course, what I find to be easier than putting myself out there. Engagement farming happens by the click, and each click requires work. Work that I could be spending polishing my second novel. A novel I hope is more commercially successful so I can sign a contract and let someone else work on the marketing aspects of it.