Telling stories, selling books, finding readers
It’s self-evident, of course: The more you roam with a certain pack, the more of them you’ll see. So it is for me these days. Everywhere I look, I see story-tellers, writers, authors. They are not behind the barrier of celebrity and distance. They are right there on my screen, right here in my own community, available, accessible, welcoming. Some of them write short posts on Facebook or Instagram, but many of them put their writing out into the world through more formal channels — blogs, online magazines or websites, and also in book form — actual books with covers and paper pages, published by a press or self-published, either way available for purchase. But writing and publishing the story is one thing (two things, really), actively promoting it to find readers is another thing entirely. Google throws up 1.2 billion hits in response to a search for “books published but not promoted”, the top hits making clear it is nigh on impossible for your work to find readers if you don’t — or