Don't like Facebook, Amazon?

I opened a Facebook account at the request of a client soon after it launched in 2004. He wanted to know what FB was, and whether it had any potential value to his business. That project completed, not finding much on FB of interest to me, I closed my account in 2013. 

Jump ahead to fall 2024, and the release of The Unlived Lives of Raymond Quinn. I suspected that FB should be part of my book marketing plan while not wanting to get back into it. Nonetheless, I did expecting to find things pretty much as they were eleven years earlier. Very little was the same.

When it comes to selling things, Facebook had evolved into an essential sales juggernaut, one I had to learn in detail to have any chance of successfully promoting my books.

I now spend hours monitoring my FB ads and marketing strategy, including attribution ads appearing on FB synced to Amazon; the undisputed book sales king.

​FB generated the interest, Amazon handled the sale.

You've written and self-published a book. You don't like Amazon, Facebook, maybe both. I feel you. Get over it.

Unknown, self-published, first time authors need both to have any chance of more than the 50 or so sales that is the average for the approximately 2,600,000 new self published books released each year.

Learn all you can how the system works. Do that and you significantly increase the chance of your book doing much better than if you don't.

​It's not all you can or need to do, but it is at the top of the list of what you should do.