What's the Hardest Thing to do as an Author?

This question has been asked numerous times over my career and today I was sitting in my living room trying to decide what else I needed to do with my writing career to make it successful. I have concluded that the hardest thing to do as an author is to let others know about your gift. Now don’t get me wrong, the task of writing a story is indeed one of the hardest things to do as an author, but marketing and promotion of our stories hails in comparison.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not trying to figure out how to promote and market my work. I sometimes get a headache just thinking about it because naturally I am an introvert and don’t like to tell people about my business. When I finally decided to create a Facebook author page I was scared to death. I didn’t want to have “followers” but I knew they would be vital to my future career plans as an author.

Marketing and promotion are hard things to do for any business, so just imaging how hard it is for a single person who has poured their heart out on three hundred blank pages. To a degree, writing my books have been easy compared to getting the word out about them. But alas it does get easier as I learn what works and what doesn’t work.

One tactic I used to do was join Facebook groups and “promote” with link dropping in all of them several times a week. Um, that does not work. Then I decided to start using Facebook ads to promote my books and although I would get likes and people actually saw the ads, nobody was actually buying my work. So that was wasted money. Then I decided to finally try Amazon’s marketing tool and to my surprise every time I did a campaign I sold at least one book. However, I would sometimes spend upwards of fifteen dollars to sell one copy, even though a couple Kindle Unlimited copies were being “purchased” as well.

This month the I have sold ten copies of my latest book using Amazon’s marketing campaign tool as well as selling books out of the trunk of my car. I think I may have found my sweet spot, but it did not come easy and it will not be easy going forward. Still though, I am satisfied that I am selling my work to new readers who are actually reading it (my KENP count has been to the last page of the book so far). So, what’s the hardest thing to do for an author: marketing and promotion. Just know you will have to spend some to make some but do it without going into debt and you will be alright.