Release date, and marketing plan.

The first, I have. The second, I'm a bit sketchy on. I've never been very good at selling myself (and in saying so, I'm proving it right off the bat. Skillz); unless I'm pretending to be arrogant for comic effect with friends, I'm generally self-deprecating, because I've always felt like that's a better quality to find in a person than actual arrogance, so I've spent years cultivating it. But too much modesty is harmful to someone who has something to sell, to get out there, to spread... and confidence in your own work and your ability to market it to people isn't a bad thing at all. You can be healthily, tolerably confident in something you've done without being intolerably arrogant. I definitely believe that. I just find it hard to pull off.

So I've taken steps to prepare myself for selling my eBook, and steeled myself emotionally for their epic failure. These preparations take the form of the following:

Compiling a list of book bloggers. These people are everywhere on Twitter, and they're infinitely more helpful and nice than I'll ever be, and they love to have books suggested to them. They'll review them, write blog posts on them, spread the word, you name it... but they have to like your work first. So you can't be all like, YO, READ MY BOOK ABOUT A MURDERER WHO RIDES DRAGONS IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY IN THE YEAR 6043 PLZ to someone who likes to review chick lit. It just won't work. So what I've been doing is reading blogs and working out tastes so that I have a list of people who might actually like my book, and when it's released, I'll send them personal e-mails (not templates, never templates) begging them to love me. If even one of them does, it's better than none, isn't it.

Throwing pictures about, and that. I've made some images to put up on my Twitter page, as the background, and across the Facebook pages I manage, so that everyone who stumbles across me will know that I have a book available to buy. I'm not hard selling. Except maybe I'll post 400 tweets a day with links to the Amazon page.

Facebook ads. I've done this before, and it wasn't fantastic, and it gets an even worse press these days. You hear that unless you're spending big, Facebook will make sure your ads are hardly ever seen by anyone who'd care; but who knows if that's true? Who wants to risk it? I dunno. This is just a consideration right now. It's an option.

Communities. I'm a member of several writing communities on Facebook, so I'll post it around there. The problem I have is that most of those are just full of people begging for other people to read their work, and no one who actually reads any of it. So while I'll let them all know what I've done, I won't expect much feedback. Cynicism is cool, kids. More useful, I expect, will be my presence on Twitter (and my Twitter friends), along with some new tools I'm toying with like Triberr.

Friends and family. Yeah, this is what I'll resort to in the end. Bugging the shit out of everyone I know until they've all bought 5 copies each. I've already started - I've sent 529 texts since I started this blog post, and before the night is out, I will have sent 529 more.

So that's the plan I have right now. It's not comprehensive, or structured, or sensible, but nothing about my life right now is. I live in the fast lane, baby, and when you live like me you'll understand that we ain't got no time to put our seat belts on.

Oh, and the release date? July 23rd. Because I fucking love working to tight deadlines.