Just Five Wishes.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the purple button to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

What’s on your writer’s wish list – List 5 things you have been wanting to buy or try as a writer.

Speaking as a writer who has all the tools that they need to produce both ebooks and paperbacks, there’s no computer software that I really covet. Although my computer is getting on for 9 years old (just about the same age as my writing career) and is getting slow, I have it set up how I want, working on it is like being with a reliable and well-loved friend.

The things on my wish list relate mainly to my nemesis, marketing. While there might be more than five, these are more than enough to cope with.  With marketing in general, it’s all a bit of a Catch-22 situation. While there are free options, which still cost valuable writing time, to be really effective you need money to take part. And you need it up front, hoping to generate enough profit to cover your costs. And for every success, there are the failures and costs associated with learning the ropes.

I would like to have the money available so that I could try more paid promotions without having to sell books before I can get started.

I dabble in advertising when I can afford it, but I’m still in the learning phase, where it doesn’t gain me much in the way of sales or profits over expenditure.

To be honest, I find most aspects of Amazon and Facebook advertising hard to navigate and almost impossible to get consistent results from. Both systems almost feel as if they’ve been designed to extract as much money as possible from you whilst keeping you addicted to finding the magic formula that brings success.

Talking about your books on social media is alright but you can quickly saturate your audience, many groups don’t like too much self-promotion and, as someone who has been trolled on social media, there’s a limit to how much I feel comfortable in sharing.

I would love to be in a position where I could get someone to do my advertising and social media for me. For that to happen, I would need to be a lot more successful than I am now.

I’d also like to attend more events, they’ve been a bit thin on the ground recently, for obvious reasons. There are a few coming up, the distance to them is becoming a thing. Unfortunately, none of them are local, the cost of actually getting there has to be factored in as well as the potential for exposure.

Moving away from marketing for a moment, there are a couple of other things I’d like.

I’d be very grateful if the voices in my head stopped jumping around from one project to another. It’s very disorienting, why can’t I just finish one story before you show me the start of another?

Lastly, I would like more people to leave reviews and tell their friends about my books (as long as they liked them), encouraging more sales and exposure.

Not much to ask, is it?

Until next time.

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