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Originally Posted by Jeremy The moral for me, someone who dreams of becoming famous as a writer, is that I should focus all my energy and resources in finding a good agent, who will hopefully in turn find a big publisher that will spend heavily in advertising. |
Sadly, Jeremy, it rarely works that way. What usually happens is that first the book or the author makes a big splash, and then the publisher spends heavily on advertising. Even then, it's less a case of the publisher trying to convince us as readers that we want what they have than an announcement that they have what we want.
In fact, the opportunities for fiction writers -- and particularly writers of genre fiction -- to promote our works have been, traditionally, very few. Oprah is never going to choose our books for her book club, and unless we become international best sellers
first network talk shows are not going to book us as guests.
The thing about online advertising and promotion is that it's still comparatively new. It
may offer us opportunities that we never had before. Or it may turn out to be the same thing all over again. We don't know yet, and we'd be foolish not to make the effort. It might also be that methods that were effective for a time may eventually cease to work at all. For instance with viral marketing, as people become more aware they're less likely to fall for some of the ploys. We get so much of it here, those of us who spend a great deal of time on this forum have learned to recognize it, often before we've finished reading the first sentence.
There may be other methods effective now that won't be effective next month or next year. We need to figure out what those methods are and use them while we still can, and not waste our time on other things that won't work.