The Marketing Gamble

A few of us were talking at Saturday's NESCBWI Salon about how putting together some materials to give to independent booksellers and driving around to visit them is risky and not just because many of us are writers because we aren't outgoing enough to be salespeople.

Independent booksellers are hugely important. Many of us see our books in independent bookstores far more frequently then we see them in the chains. But any marketing effort--and visiting booksellers is just one of them--is gambling with time because the time you use to market is time you could have been using to write the next book. Under the best of circumstances, it's very difficult to tell if you're getting much of a response to an individual marketing effort, so you always wonder--what is the best use of Wednesday?

Then on top of that, there's the nothing sells books business we keep hearing, which tends to make me feel that I might as well just go hiking on Wednesday.