A long time ago, I remember reading a complaint by a wanna-be author about young authors who, with little life experience, wrote best-selling debut novels. The complainer said that he thought that one had to run with bulls, shoot big game, and fight in wars before writing a book. He was really ticked off that novices had the nerve to succeed as authors without emulating Hemingway. I, on the other hand, was inspired. Maybe I could write a book, too. I knew very little about anything, so I was qualified. The only thing holding me back was my innate laziness.
My personal motto is “Take the path of least resistance.” Why struggle when you don’t have to? You can get there the easy way, or the hard way. The choice is kind of obvious.
I remember being awed, many years ago, by the marketing expertise of an Avon lady in our 20-story office building. I first learned of her existence in the ladies’ room. She had put a stack of Avon catalogs next to the sink. Out of curiosity, I visited all of the ladies’ rooms on every floor, and I saw an identical stack on every counter. That was ingenious, in my opinion. With very little effort, she had reached every potential female customer in the building. She became my role model, even though I had no idea who she was.
Then the Internet came along and entrepreneurs started buying up website domains with the names of big corporations and famous people. Big corporations and famous people were not amused, but many of them were forced to pay big bucks to the domain owners to buy back their names. Some of the companies sued the domain owners, but many chose to just pay up and be done with it. A new world had opened up for me.
So, I started a website. The site, www.spbroundup.com, is a list of self-published books. I had two purposes in starting the site: to promote the work of self-published authors, who needed one site where book buyers could go and find titles for all tastes; and to have a big corporation, like Amazon.com, buy it. The big corporation would have the resources to improve my site which would benefit indie authors, as well as me.
I mentioned the site on LinkedIn.com’s author and writer pages, and received a number of book submissions. I started entering the information, and then I got more submissions. I couldn’t keep up with the demand which was, in truth, small. But it was bigger than I could handle. Now, I have a backlog of titles to post on my site—and an inbox full of annoyed emails from self-published authors who want to know what is taking me so long to upload their book information. The worst part is that the site is taking up a lot of my time and nobody has shown any interest in buying, or even visiting, my site.
I think it’s time to change my path. This one is very resistant. Maybe I’ll start selling something in restrooms. If you’re a big mail-order company looking for an indolent rep, feel free to send me catalogs.
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