I’d like to think that it does, but that hasn’t been my experience so far. Once upon a time a while back I had another pen name. I was trying to write to market, and the results were kinda meh. I wrote press releases and paid for them to be sent out, interviewed bestselling authors and posted to my blog, I guest posted on other people’s blog, I interacted on several forums on a daily basis, I built up a big twitter following and tweeted frequently – conversationally, interacting with other authors, not spamming – and, nothing. My sales were okay, but marketing made absolutely no difference.
I’ve talked to countless authors who paid for advertising in various places, with mixed results. In some cases, they got a big temporary boost and then things sank back to normal. In some cases they even made their money back with additional sales – but again, sales went back to what they were before the ad, and it didn’t make any long term difference.
So I created a new pen name. I wrote what I personally wanted to write, what I loved to write. I got great feedback from my readers. I decided to try paranormal because that is what I read. I got even better feedback. And finally I published a BBW werewolf romance, and here’s all the marketing I did – I sent out an announcement to my 43 newsletter subscribers a few days beforehand. And I announced it on Twitter but nobody clicked that link; I checked, so I know. And I announced it on Facebook, to my 6 Facebook followers.
And the book took off like crazy, and very quickly hit the top 100 on Amazon, and now I have hundreds of newsletter subscribers, and I’m still ranking in the top 100.
So, my feeling is – it’s the book, not the marketing. From now on I shall continue to write absolutely the best book that I can, forget about what’s selling, what’s trendy, what’s the flavor of the week, and just write what I would want to read. And I’m going to spend most of my time writing, not marketing.
And now – back to writing.
Hey, Georgette!
I’ve been asking this exact same question myself lately. I’ve also had a few pen names in different genres. (Two I tossed, one I kept.) I studied the bestsellers list to see what people are buying and looked at what I liked to read on my own shelves, and tried to come up with a happy in-between. The result is this pen name and the other I kept for my tamer, YA titles. I’ve done a little of “this and that” with marketing, with the results being varied depending on the genre. My contemporary titles killed it in royalties while my epic fantasy didn’t fair very well. My urban fantasy titles continued to be steady sellers, and now I’m starting to move into paranormal romantic suspense in both my YA and adult pen names. It’ll be interesting to measure “Lola” against my YA pen name and see what kind of traction I get. I will say I’ve noticed the authors who are the most successful financially are those with a large backlist. A lot of them don’t even do that much marketing; they just have a crapton of titles, and that’s what’s driving their exposure. So that’s been my main focus, although I still do some moderate marketing I know works to increase the number of eyeballs on my books. =)
All the best to ya, and congrats on being able to ditch the day job! I’m hoping I’ll be there in another year or so.
– Lola
I do find that having a mailing list helps give my new releases a boost, and my Facebook page has grown to have a few hundred fans, so I always announce new releases there as well. However, I have yet to find the magical marketing solution that will help a new pen name sell a lot of books – all I’m doing is keeping in touch with the readers that I got AFTER my books became a success.
I’ve also thought of YA, because I like reading YA paranormal and YA dystopian.
Good luck with getting to the point where you can quit the day job – I hope you get there soon!