According to Worldmeters 2,553,820 books have been published during this year alone but if you keep looking at the numbers, you might notice that they are changing each second or so. However, the actual numbers might be even higher.
The good thing about this trend is that there is a book for everybody but the downside is that picking a book has become increasingly difficult; how can an avid reader who reads 50 books per year pick up from a sea of 2,000,000 books? The books are being shoved to reader’s faces from all sides and readers need to put a real effort to find a book they’d prefer reading.
Apart from readers, writers suffer even more. If you’re not Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Dan Brown or anyone else who managed to establish their name and brand, the chances are that you’re not going to see many book sales, if any.
You need to build an audience and the easiest way to do it is by building a platform and a mailing list. Some writers have become very successful while most of us live on the long tail, hoping to move forward.
Building an audience isn’s easy. Most writers are doing it, and most of them are doing the same thing; writing about writing because – what – else?
You can find countless numbers of writers desperately giving their writing guides, writing tips, publishing and marketing steps, spending most of their days on social media, and some of them giving away an entire novel or even a book series.
I’m no different, I’ve decided to give my novel entirely for free, although you can still buy it at all digital media sellers supported by draft2digital.
Still, building an email list is an extremely difficult job, despite the fact that I’m giving away an entire novel but I completely understand why readers hesitate to leave their email and download my book.
They don’t know me, they can’t be sure if my book is worth reading. If I tell them that it is, they wouldn’t believe me. On the other hand, people who have read my book and liked it don’t have time to leave a good review because they have better things to do, and I understand that as well.
So, what else is left to do for us? I publish blog posts every day, I’m getting more and more traffic to my website and my medium articles, but still, my mailing list has barely crossed one digit number. How’s your experience?
Yes, we writers like to complain that nobody wants to read our book, but it’s kind of painful and sometimes we just need to say that. We’ve all put an enormous amount of effort into writing the novel and we don’t like the sound of crickets on our reading list and especially our sales reports.
There are writers who live off of publishing books, but the majority of others have very little chance of becoming a successful writer in the oversaturated book market.
The only thing we can do is what we know the best; to write. And, write we will. Blogs, e-mails, novels, stories, articles, poems, dramas, screenplays, whatever our soul desires to play, but that’s not enough. We desire to be read, yes we do.