Well, if you all remember last week, I was creeping up on marketing strategies mountain for my new book. This is my satirical side—not to discourage but to give you a little chuckle…

Book marketing is a strange psychological experiment disguised as a professional requirement. You write a book—often alone, for years, powered by caffeine and fragile hope—believing the hard part is creating something meaningful. This belief lasts exactly until someone asks, “So how are you planning to market it?”

Marketing a book requires a unique blend of confidence and humiliation. You must believe your work is worth attention while simultaneously begging strangers to notice it. You post about your book online and feel like a genius one moment and an embarrassment the next. You delete posts. You rewrite posts. You repost anyway. Growth, they call it.

You are told to build an audience before your book exists, during its launch, and forever afterward. The audience is mythical, like Bigfoot, but everyone assures you it’s out there. You must show up consistently, which means turning your creative inner life into bite-sized content optimized for platforms that change their rules weekly. You are encouraged to be “authentic,” which somehow still requires analytics.

Then there’s the launch. Launch day is marketed as a climactic event, a magical alignment of stars where sales surge and dreams come true. In reality, it often looks like refreshing your dashboard while pretending you’re not refreshing your dashboard. You thank people for buying your book even though you’re not sure anyone has. Gratitude becomes proactive.

Advertising enters next, wearing a friendly smile and holding a spreadsheet. You learn acronyms you never wanted to know. You spend money to “test,” which is a polite way of saying “guess repeatedly.” You are told the data will guide you, but the data mostly asks philosophical questions, like why one ad worked yesterday and absolutely not today.

Throughout all this, well-meaning voices repeat the mantra: “Just write the next book.” This is true advice, but also deeply funny, because your brain now associates writing with exposure, judgment, and open-ended hustle. You loved writing once. Now you love it with conditions.

The madness of book marketing is that it asks artists to become marketers without losing their souls, patience, or sense of self-worth. Many do lose at least one of these temporarily. And yet, writers persist. They market imperfectly, awkwardly, stubbornly—and then they write again.

Which may be irrational, but it’s also the only sane response.

Now that you’ve had a coke and smile get back to those darn keys!!!

Thank you for your continued readership and support. Until next week….Blessings and Peace!

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