Review: Useful for All Authors
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 14, 2013
The recent revolution in electronic publishing has brought the prospect of being published to the widest possible audience possible. It is now possible more than ever before in history for all of us to become authors, to distribute our works to the public, and earn some money in the process. However, the biggest obstacle that most authors face is their inability to actually attract readers and buyers. The technical problems of distribution, and even of writing and editing of manuscripts, have by and large been resolved. The book marketing, unfortunately, has proven to be a much bigger challenge."100 Small Fires ..." is a very useful and informative small resource for authors. Whether you are self published or have been published through and established publishing house, you will need all the help that you can muster in promoting your book. "100 Small Fires ..." gives you many good ideas on how to go about it. Many are by now very familiar to most aspiring authors (such as building your online and social media presence), but there are many others that are unusual and creative. I found all of these suggestions interesting enough, although quite a few felt a bit gimmicky. My favorite suggestion was to try to make an audio version of your book - with accessible recording devices, it is now easier than ever before to make your own audiobook. The audiobook market is still very much low on content, and if you can make an audiobook that appeals to a wide audience and sell it at a substantially higher price than your ebook, then you could really distinguish yourself and make a lot of money in the process."100 Small Fires ..." is very good at giving you an estimate of the total cost of each of these promotional tricks and strategies. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually assessing how effective any one of them is, it falls short. Even if you had all the money in the world and could spend it at all of these "fires," it probably wouldn't be such a good idea to actually do so. I wish we could have been given a better assessment of effectiveness of various strategies, but that would have probably required a substantially more in-depth analysis.