When it dawned on me last year that I was making less money but spending more time promoting and marketing my books than I did three years earlier when I had fewer to offer, I decided to take a break from writing and focus on what I was doing wrong. Since my marketing strategy hadn’t changed during these years, I was pretty sure it was the industry that had changed around me, and I had to understand this in order to turn things around. First, I looked at some statistics. According to Bowker (U.S. agent for issuing International Standard Book Numbers—ISBNs) and Amazon (who controls the retail book market and e-book publishing market), the number of new books published has risen in double digits each year for the past several years, meaning our competition keeps getting increasingly stiffer with time. The influx of self-published books in particular has driven these numbers up with an increase of more than 70% since 2013 (according to the Authors Guild 2018 Income Survey). Book promotion sites have changed too—many of them have gone to the wayside; new ones pop up all the time; and others have grown in size with the rest of the industry,…
