I Want to Write, Not Market
I don’t know what it takes to have a successful blog. In the archives on my website, entries go as far back as November of 2017. My debut novel hit the market in May of that same year.
I don’t know what it takes to successfully market a book, but I’m going to learn. Success may come through failure. My writing has won a fair number of contests. What it has yet to conquer are the readers. When you fall down, get back up. The phenomenal basketball player Michael Jordan is credited with saying, “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
My name is JC Crumpton, and, as a multi-genre writer, this is going to be my journey to learn how to market a book. I need to learn how to move my reading audience past friends and family. How to get my writing to be the topic of random conversations about an entertaining or thought-provoking story.
This isn’t going to be just my journey. I want to share the hardships and triumphs, so we all work together. I will not be the cause of my own failure by not even attempting to try. To capitulate to anonymity is not in the cards. Not today. To yield to the easy path is to extinguish who and what I am. I cannot allow that.
In the words of the author C. S. Lewis, “Failure, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
The Tools
There isn’t a time in my life where I can remember not wanting to be a writer. Every time I read a story—or even the words on the back of a cereal box as a kid—I wanted to create images and worlds like those I experienced among the pages of a book. I went to the University of Arkansas and earned a degree in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis. No hopping or undecided majors for me. I knew what I wanted, and I went after it.
Then, I got married in the summer of 1998. Around that time, I started working as a freelance journalist for the second largest daily newspaper in Arkansas. Did it for seven years and racked up over 1,000 bylines, learning quickly that I couldn’t support my family that way.
I took my liberal arts degree and went to work selling to the world’s largest retailer while I continued to keep my dream of writing alive. For 25 years I have been on the frontline of both failed and successful marketing stories. In a quarter of a century, I have learned that the best and most efficient way to sell a product is to have people talk about it. The word of mouth.
But how do I do that as a writer? I want to write, not market. I stand behind a desk every weekday. Why would I want to do that to get my books on the bookshelf of bookstores? I have been published by small to medium publishers. I have self-published and have even started my own label to get my work out. I participate in more than one circle of writers and artists. Why can I not write award-winning stories and books and just sit back and let them organically succeed themselves?
Because that’s not the way the world works. Being in sales in my day job, I know I need a war chest of tools to help my efforts bear fruit. Here’s what I’m starting this journey with:
- My self
- My writing
- My social circles
- My professional circles
- My web page and its blog
- My newsletter (forthcoming)
- Guerilla Marketing for Writers by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, and Michael Larsen
- Create Your Writer Platform by Chuck Sambuchino
- Social Media Marketing for Dummies by Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond
The Journey Begins
This is the introduction to the quest. There may not be a holy grail at the end of it. There may just be a dragon that devours me and leaves me as a pile of bones at the back of its lair. But what I’m not going to do is nothing.
During this endless trek, I will post successes and failures. I am also a licensed soccer coach and will use the things I taught my players (and their parents). At the beginning of each season with a new crop of players sitting around me and their parents behind them, I would tell them that I would teach them the beautiful game of soccer, I would teach them the skills they needed to put their best game on the pitch, and I would also teach them how to learn from losing.
It seemed counterintuitive at first glance, but my players took it to heart. Each year, I began with new players. Each year, we started out not being where we wanted to be. But by the end of each season, we were winning trophies and dominating on the pitch.
Together, through these experiences, we will learn the game of marketing and selling what we write. We will develop our business skills that we need in today’s world to facilitate the promulgation of our writing. And we will learn to navigate through the forest of failures to find the clear path to our destination.
As a famous puppet once said, “Do or do not. There is no try.” [that would be Yoda]
