Today, though, I saw a post about the "Liebster Award," where the writers of "small" blogs promote one another. Thing is, apparently their definition of "small" is less than 200 followers. Please, people. I have four.
Yup. Super tiny blog here. But I bet there are bloggers out there who don't even have followers at all. Is that because they're bad at blogging, or don't know what they're doing? No. It just means they haven't gotten to a point in the community where people notice them. At 25 followers, people start to have buddies they can partner with, and get the ball rolling. At 50, groups form.
But what about those of us who are still struggling to get to that point? We all want to reach out to the community, but we're so obscure that we can't even find each other out there. And believe me, I am working hard to try and find even a handful of writers who are languishing at the same level that I am. This is the hardest point for an author to be at, and yet it's the one where we have the least support.
After all, when you're where I am right now, you start to question whether you can really do this or not. I read success stories about breakout authors, and they all start along the lines of "I couldn't even sell a hundred books in my first year." You know how many books I sold in six months, print and ebook sales combined? Twelve. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those went to close friends and family.
I'm looking for people who have that same level of frustration--whether they've already written their book, are still working on it, haven't started or are years deep in the marketing rut. I want to form a sort of alliance here. Does that mean more popular people can't join in? No, of course they can. But only if they can set aside that bit of success they have, and work with us.
I got...
ReplyDeleteUh, 2 or 3?
But that's Blogger. You've got 120 on Twitter, and even if your tweets do get lost in all the other people they probably follow, that's still 12 times more than I have! ;o
That's because I followed like 200 people on Twitter before, then realized it was too much and unfollowed them. A heck of a lot of people will just follow you back if you follow them. Maybe I should start my quest with Twitter, though...
ReplyDeleteI've sold even fewer books than you, man. It's tough!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I found that networking through the NaNoWriMo group on Facebook helped tremendously, as did writing "how-to" posts. New readers aren't interested in my personal life anywhere near as much as they are in my informational posts. It's a lot easier for me to talk about myself on my blog (as writing tip posts take a lot of time to put together), but when I do, my readership tanks accordingly. I wish it wasn't so, but alas...it is.
blog.katmellon.com
Kat, being informative and helpful has always been one of my weak points. I just don't know how to do it! I looked around your blog and saw that you do a terrific job of writing advice articles. I might even use it as a model myself...
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