Last year I was on a major creative high horse preparing for the launch of my murder mystery novel, Beatrice. I’d left my job, so there was lots of time to spend on good and bad (and absolutely horrendous) ideas alike.
One thing I wanted to do with Beatrice was give readers a more active role in the text. A lot of self-published stuff has blown up because readers engaged through fan fiction, which seemed so wonderful! Why not develop a platform for people to do that!
The best-laid plans, my friends… This creative endeavor was doomed from the start.
First of all, I wanted to get the new book into every channel possible. In self-publishing, this often means utilizing Amazon, as well as other platforms to get wider distribution. My writer friend used IngramSpark, so I was like “I’ll do that, too!” If you use Ingram, you can get into actual bookstores because you’re listed on some list (this is where Tedd’s knowledge craters). You also can have your book available in libraries. That sounded trés chic, so I signed up for it, got my ebook and paperback listed, and assumed my book would be on Oprah. That’s how it works, right?
Well, I soon learned that putting the ebook on that platform AND Amazon was a major no-no (obvs the reason Oprah didn’t call). You can do it, but if you do, you lose some of the marketing functionality of Amazon. This Amazon marketing was the reason my first book did pretty well, including getting trashed on blogs, which is a surefire sign of self-publishing success.
I say all that just to mention that, aside from the 50 friends who bought the book because they’re my friends, I really couldn’t do much marketing, and book sales plummeted like an airplane driven by an octopus.
This meant that the forum site I set up for fan fiction had absolutely 0 visitors in the past year. It wasn’t a big deal. I bought a 3-year subscription and thought that would be enough time to see if it gained any traction. Like, why not?
One day a few months ago, I get an email that I had a post on the site. I was super excited. Was it happening? Did Oprah finally post her fan fiction on my forum?!
Well, I go to the site and learn that the post is not someone who liked the book, but some sort of advertisement for finding a parking garage. This was both saddening and confusing. You have to log in to post… like what? And what kind of SEO is on my page that is attracting this bot? Absolutely nowhere does it say anything about parking. Or even parking adjacent topics, like… concrete? What would even draw these bots?!
Well, a few months go by and then I get another bot post… Then another… And then the bots started diversifying. There are weight loss bots, get rich quick scheme drones, Chinese-language ads, another garage bot (?!), and the latest round included an email from semennaxryn. Which… I mean… The one thing that IS on my site is that it is an all-ages, inclusive forum. I guess semen-bot missed that memo.
The only other person with access to the site who gets emails is Ernesto because he helped me set it up. And one day he goes, “You’ve… been getting some posts, huh?”
I would have loved to tell him that it’s all planned. I mean clearly I’m diversifying into selling parking lot spaces for entrepreneurial, Chinese-speaking, male-enhancement sex robots. I’m basically the next Elon Musk.
What I thought would be a fun engagement with readers (who don’t exist because I cocked up the whole selling part of my bookselling), turned into a sad digital pool filter. I’m literally reaching into the skimmer once a month to delete all the posts from sex robots and garage-space leasers. (Once again… how do they even find this site with 0 traffic?!)
There should be a moral to this story, but there really isn’t one. I think the key takeaway is that it’s hard running a multimedia empire, especially when it’s more of a multimedia junkyard full of sex robots and octopi who have crashed airplanes.
I’ll keep trying to get on Oprah, though. I may get lucky and one of her O magazine bots will get lost on my site. The odds aren’t good, but if her bot speaks Chinese, he’ll at least have a friend. And that’s pretty trés chic.