Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: If your book took off tomorrow with enormous worldwide interest and sales, are you prepared for all that entails?

And remember to pay a visit to my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

This one is quite a pertinent topic for me this week. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my novel, Chasing Shadows and its follow-ups. From the perspective of my writing, I have a wealth of ideas. Almost too many I sometimes wonder. But how do I shift copies? I’ve done okay with friends and family and people in the social circles that I inhabit. But beyond that, it’s been very hit-and-miss. As of April this year, Chasing Shadows celebrated its first birthday, so something needs to change.

The short answer to this one is no, I am not even remotely ready for my book to suddenly go global and develop a mass of interest. I’m okay with creating the occasional piece of promo material such as the image above. But I’ve come to realise I need to sit down and work out what my elevator pitch is. Imposter syndrome really holds me back from pushing further. I don’t rate my own work too highly, don’t believe it warrants people parting with their money for it, so don’t push it as hard as I should.

I need to look at advertising. I’ve heard that Amazon ads or Facebook ads are better, depending on who you ask. So my solution will be to run some tests, put up the same amount of money on each platform and take notes. I can’t expect to sell any copies of my book if it isn’t in front of people. As for distribution, as a self-published author, I sell through KDP/Amazon. I also offer signed copies which I ship from home, printing labels and packing in book sleeves, though I cannot compete with Prime free delivery. This certainly wouldn’t be entirely sustainable if I suddenly became wildly famous and generated a mass of sales, but I’d definitely make it work.

But the key thing is, I am slowly but surely becoming more aware of what I need to do to improve my chances, and am willing to work on it!