Closer to Completion . . .

The acquisition of ISBNs for my upcoming ebook has hit a slight snag, as it seems Bowker is confused by the fact that Lullwater Press previously obtained the ISBN for their first publication via LuLu and is now asking for a batch of them directly. I figure I can at least work on a final grind and polish while waiting for this matter to sort itself out.

The next phase is going to have to be the dreaded M-word: marketing. It's not my strong point by any means, and certainly one of the reasons I steered clear of the very thought of self publishing for so long. Granted, by putting these out as electronic editions, at least some of the heavy lifting in the Letting People Know It Exists Department will be handled by large, scary corporations. But I know from experience that merely offering something for sale on the Internet is no assurance that anybody will notice, let alone make a purchase.

Non-skeevy marketing in the Internet age seems to break down to three simple (if not always easy) steps:

1. Find your people.

2. Connect with your people.

3. Love your people.

"Find your people" means to figure out what sort of person would enjoy your book or find the information in it useful to them. "Connect with your people" means to go to the places on the Internet where those people hang out and get to know them. As they learn about you, some of them will notice that you have a nifty book that you're awfully proud of and will decide that you are a sufficiently cool person to be worth spending money on. At which point you love those people thoroughly, celebrate them and keep in touch with them about other nifty things that you're doing and if they continue to like you, they will continue to spend money on you.

That's the bare-bones gist of it. (Which many people will pad out into enough pages to fill a PDF ebook that they'll either sell you for twenty-seven bucks or give to you for free if you sign up for their mailing list.) I'm currently stuck a bit at Step One. I do think that this book will be useful to introverted souls like me who could use these tools for making their lives better. Now I have to figure out where to find them. (Introverts, after all, don't tend to hang out in the open the way extroverts do.)

Come to think of it, figuring this out might be a job for a Sub-C Session. How convenient.