Brutally honest

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening to you. I trust you are all good?

I haven't been here in a while. Truth is, I have nothing noteworthy to write. I got news from the Binge Watching Cure, and though they enjoyed my short story, they won't be publishing it. I was really disappointed, because it brought me back to square one. The problem is simple. I can't promote my published book, the Theater of Dusk. Or rather, no matter how much I try, I see no results whatsoever. There are some logical reasons I know and can refer to. 

• The  book is a collection of short stories. Readers prefer novels.
• The short stories don't belong to one genre but many. This makes it even more difficult to pitch it to an audience.
• There are tens of thousands of new books published in Amazon every month, so mine is buried under the sheer bulk.
• I don't have money for advertisement.
• I am self-published, so I don't have a publishing house to take care of promotion and advertisement.

As a result of the above factors, I was hoping to publish my second book in order to help the first one too. But I don't have the necessary money for editing, so that isn't going to happen. The Binge Watching Cure collection would have helped me reach a wider audience, but they don't want my story after all. And every other method I've tried so far has failed. Here are some examples:

• I've contacted dozens of reviewing blogs. I haven't heard back from any of them. Two blog owners who contacted me and said they were interested, were probably abducted by aliens because after that they vanished.
• I have organised three giveaways in Goodreads, in which I gave away a total of ten books. Three were lost in the post and I had to post them to winners a second time. In the end, all I got was one review and two ratings. Oh wow.
• I've paid for Facebook advertisements. As I said in my previous blog entry, when I do that I get sales before the advertisement, which renders the whole endeavour surreal and pretty much useless.

As you can guess from the above, I got sick of struggling. I've been trying and pushing and racking my brains for three years now and haven't achieved anything, so I will no longer bother. I'll go back to writing and try to save money in order to publish my novel. If anyone needs to contact me, please use my Facebook page. I will update this blog when I have something book-related to say, which I hope will be sooner rather than later. Other than that, I really should devote my free time to writing rather than rambling.

I hope to have good news for you soon and thanks for reading this blog. I do appreciate every pageview I got.