I have this crazy idea.\u00a0 I want to get my book into the hands of an enormous number of people.\u00a0 I heard of a guy whose book was given out to a hundred thousand people by some corporation for some reason unknown to me.\u00a0 And after that it became very popular and sold millions of copies.\u00a0 Now obviously that\u2019s a crazy thing.\u00a0 I think this was a hundred thousand physical copies not e-books.\u00a0 Why a corporation would pay for a hundred thousand copies of a book to then give them away doesn\u2019t make any sense unless it\u2019s the Gideons giving away the Bible at hotels.<\/p>\n
But for whatever reason it intrigues me.\u00a0 Now theoretically I can give away a hundred thousand copies of my e-book by emailing them.\u00a0 Of course, an e-mail provider will charge some fee for that much bandwidth.\u00a0 But in terms of the files they\u2019re free.\u00a0 The trick would be to interest a hundred thousand people to request the book and actually read it.\u00a0 There are book sale sites (e.g., Smashwords) that allow you to lower the sale price to zero.\u00a0 But the trick would be to attract the right audience for the book.<\/p>\n
I admit it\u2019s kind of a goofy idea.\u00a0 The whole reason for writing a book is to get people to pay you money for the privilege of reading it.\u00a0 This stands that concept on its head.\u00a0 But I think it\u2019d get more satisfaction from knowing that a huge number of people had read my story than having a few hundred pay me for buying it.<\/p>\n
I have a lot more research to do to figure out all the details of how doing something like this would work.\u00a0 I want to target a right-leaning audience and so I\u2019m looking at advertising on one of the right-leaning sites like Red State or something like it.\u00a0 But one of the things is making sure it doesn\u2019t cost me too much money.\u00a0 After all I\u2019m not a trillionaire.\u00a0 I\u2019m just a regular old multi-billionaire you know.<\/p>\n
My book sales on Amazon reached one hundred tonight.\u00a0 Maybe that was what triggered this megalomania.\u00a0 After all it\u2019s only a few orders of magnitude between a hundred and a hundred thousand.\u00a0 What\u2019s that between friends after all?\u00a0 But I have learned a little bit about how difficult it is to reach across the \u201cdigital barrier\u201d and communicate with the mass of humanity out there.\u00a0 It requires you to master the secrets of the \u201calgorithm\u201d and \u201csearch engine optimization.\u201d\u00a0 Either that or you have to shell out a lot of dough.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ll have to say it must have been more fun in the old days when a writer could sell a short story to Analog for a few hundred bucks and have a hundred thousand people read that story and give their feedback in just days or weeks.\u00a0 I know there are now digital equivalents.\u00a0 There\u2019s a site called Royal Road where free content is uploaded and people vote with their eyeballs.\u00a0 And maybe I\u2019ll go that route.\u00a0 Of course, I understand that most of the content is sort of video game fan fiction which is completely impenetrable to me.\u00a0 And maybe an audience for my stuff would never show up there.\u00a0 But I should look into it.\u00a0 Well anyway, enough about this.\u00a0 I\u2019ll figure it out and see if it can be done and if it\u2019s worth it to me or not.\u00a0 Ah, the trials and tribulations of a great literary artist.\u00a0 Oh, the pain, the pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have this crazy idea.\u00a0 I want to get my book into the hands of an enormous number of people.\u00a0 I heard of a guy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[5147,1290],"class_list":["post-36251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-book-marketing","tag-my-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n