​Those who follow my blog and my Facebook page will have noticed I have, over the last weeks, completed something of a U-turn.
For a long time, I thought that one of the best ways to get the word out about my writing was through legwork. Get to the conventions, meet readers, talk about writing and horror and books. Maybe make some connections, maybe get some review copies to the right people.
There were several reasons for this. Firstly, I knew very little about marketing. Secondly, all the advice I’d read about book marketing appeared to be recycled advice from authors I’d never heard of. Bloggers posing as experts, churning out received wisdom they’d not put into practice themselves. None of it filled me with confidence, for those reasons. Also, frankly, I was nervous about trying something new, gambling money and time I thought I could better spend elsewhere. Like on writing, for example.
The problem is, whilst my writing has improved dramatically since I put out Reformed, my marketing hasn’t. As a consequence, sales of my fiction over the past few years have been depressingly steady. In contrast, and as a testament to simple word-of-mouth marketing, I have done no promotion of my non-fiction books. Sales of these continue to grow, albeit very slowly. However, those books are written for a specific, niche market that is not well served by the publishing industry. The horror market, however, is very well served. Lesson number one: know your market.
Lesson number two: know your experts. The self-publishing industry has few giants, but those who do exist are well known: but what do they have in common? Well, they’ve all done pretty well out of the self-publishing market. But “knowing your experts” means knowing not just their achievements, but their backgrounds. Looking a little closer, and you’ll see a pattern. You’ll see ex-city lawyers advocating unrealistic expenditure on advertising. You’ll see former trad-published authors and people who’ve spent years working and making connections in the mainstream publishing industry. Ex advertising executives, successful freelance writers, people whose partners are lawyers or judges or... you get the picture. People with money to spend on pro editors, pro book cover designers, pro formatters, and also on advertising.
All pretty daunting.
I’m not saying their advice is bad. Hell, I’m following the techniques they advise for building a mailing list. But it is increasingly clear to me that the once level playing field of self-publishing is tilting further in favour of those with the largest financial head start. Which leads me to...
Lesson number three: know your costs and your budget. All of those things mentioned above are achievable. But for those of us with ‘normal’ day jobs, the key things are to prioritise and budget accordingly. Treat your writing like a business or it will forever be a hobby. I used the word ‘cost’ but each of those things I mentioned should be seen as investments.
At the moment my books aren’t making as much money as I’d like. To save money, I found an art students who designed the background for Reformed. For The Tor series I asked an artist friend to paint the cover; as with all my ebook covers, I used Canva.com to add the text. I later returned the favour by editing a script for her. The cover of The Soul Bazaar was designed by an artist I found on Facebook. My Facebook adverts are delivered on the smallest budget the platform allows, until I’ve worked out what’s most effective.
You get the picture. As an indie author you are a business. To grow, you need to look at where your business’ weaknesses are and find the most cost-effective method of addressing them. On an unspectacular wage from the day job, and with all the responsibilities of a young family, I can’t yet justify spending the amounts on Facebook adverts that other individuals might, no matter how they compare to me as an author. But I can start small and grow. I can trade my time and skills with others. I can use free software such as Canva, NaturalReader and Grammarly. I don’t even pay for Word. WPS is free, and just as powerful.
My current goal is to grow my business to the point where it is self-sustaining. I want my sales to pay for the advertising, the cover designs, the website, the materials  (I still draft much of my work using pen and paper), an editor (I currently self-edit everything, which is incredibly time consuming), the lot, before I even think of making a profit from my business.
Being wealthy gives self-published authors a real advantage over the rest of us. Not being wealthy makes the journey longer, and means a lot more work. How long it will be before the scales tip so far that it becomes an insurmountable disadvantage, I don’t know. But it damn well won’t stop me, and it shouldn’t stop you.
What about you? Do you think a limited budget is a significant barrier to success? What thrift tips do you have for other authors?
 
My ebooks can be found at my Pronoun store. I’m on Twitter and Facebook. And don’t forget to download your free copy of The Cauldron.

I bought this out of curiosity – an impulse buy, after seeing it reduced in Forbidden Planet in Cardiff. I saw the name Tobe Hooper and decided to go for it.
The book is written in a semi-documentary style, recounting the occurrence and aftermath of a zombie outbreak. The source of the outbreak was the screening of Tobe Hooper’s long forgotten (fictional) debut feature, Destiny Express, at the Texas SXSW festival. Everyone who sat through the film become a sex-obsessed undead psychopath. And from there on in things got weird.
This fast-paced comedy horror (think Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) is written from multiple first-person perspectives by characters retelling their story to an interviewer who remains unnamed until the very end. Blogs, tweets, personal papers and news reports give us further information. It’s over the top, irreverent, and reads in parts like a cheesy 80s horror flick that probably went straight to video. The writing style is breezy and casual and often very funny. If you’ve read John Dies At The End you’ll have a good idea of what to expect.
You’ll also be just a little bit disappointed.
It is quite funny, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious. It is gory, but cartoonishly so. The characters are scared, but never terrified- and neither are we. Worse, large parts of it make absolutely no sense. It simply isn’t inventive enough to get away with skirting around huge plot holes such as never explaining the 9:33 thing, which has no connection to anything else in the story; or how the virus/whatever was spread via the film; or why remaking the film should undo the virus; or why and how the cure reached those who didn’t watch the reworked film... I could go on.
I enjoyed the format in which Hooper chose to tell his story. But, having reached the end, it feels now more like a collection of ideas he thought might have been cool to throw on the page, rather than a fully-formed novel. It strikes me that the editor should have had a stronger hand in the book’s production, but I guess the lure of having a big-name horror brand like Tobe Hooper was too much. I can’t imagine an unknown author being allowed to get away with releasing such a half-formed novel.
The two pounds I paid for this was a fair price. It killed some time, but now it’s going to the charity shop.

​This is the first of Mark Dawson’s books that I’ve purchased. I’ve been following his useful videos on book promotion via www.selfpublishingformula.com, and decided to try some of his work out of curiosity. Also, this was a novella (not too much commitment) and raises money to help a friend of his battle cancer. You can purchase a copy here.
I’ll start by saying don’t generally like thrillers. I find them formulaic potboilers and often not well written. But they are easy to read, and I can see why there’s such a huge market for them.
This particular book was fast-paced, as thrillers need to be, and featured solid characters. Those who follow Mark’s other works will be familiar with John Milton and Beatrix Rose. I found them both to be archetypes of the genre; believable, but nothing that would redefine tropes.
Mark’s writing style, too, is honed to suit the genre in which he writes. The no-nonsense prose focuses on action, with characterisation coming a close second. Sentences are to the point, with little in the way of flowery adornment. He tells you what you need to know and leaves the rest to your imagination; no purple prose here. One thing I did find annoying was his frequent use of the passive voice. The other was the setting. Dawson set the bulk of the novel in South America. The location has no impact on the action at all -it really could have been set anywhere) yet seems at great pains to tell us how vivid his scene-setting is. This eagerness, manifest in a list of local areas that Rose wanders around whilst checking for tails, is more intrusive than anything. Contrast this with Fleming’s scene-setting for Bond, which is always in the background and feels so much more natural and less contrived. However, this could be a symptom of Dawson compressing this information into the confines of a novella rather than 
Overall this is a solid example of genre writing that fits well with what I’ve read of the likes of Jack Reacher and his ilk. As I’m not a fan of the genre I probably won’t buy any more books, but I have no doubt this story will satisfy those who are. So overall then, a well-written example of a thriller; just not for me.