Well, for starters, you and I write them. And we are complete non-entities in this ever-growing sea of self-published authors. I must tell you why I’m writing this piece. A newly published author in a facebook group I belong to, was expressing his frustration at his e-book not selling to his expectations. A familiar story, you’d agree.

So I told him we are all in the same sea and all we can do is just keep writing as many books as we can; make sure the stories are well thought out, well written, proof-checked, and properly formatted; advertise, get the word around and leave the rest to the Universe.

I told him that I have written a short story collection, two children’s story, (with 50% of the proceeds going to elephant conservation as the main character is a baby elephant), a ‘how-to’ book on creating an e-commerce website, and another short story. I have advertised on facebook, Google Adwords, Bing and posted on my facebook status page. I put them up at all the major e-tailers, and created a dot com website from which people could buy direct. Let me tell you, I am not laughing all the way to the bank yet. It’s still at a frown stage, hopefully, it will crease into a smile, then widen into a maniacal laughter at which point the security guard at my bank might want to check my sanity before letting me in.

The point is, we are writers. And like a lot of the now-famous authors say about the days before stardom sought them out to the bestseller list, a writer writes, no matter what. Stephen King wrote in a trailer park. Ray Bradbury on borrowed typewriters in local libraries. Joseph Heller took eight years to write the masterpiece Catch 22 which was ironically rejected 22 times. You should read the list of famous rejection letters if you want inspiration.

The reason we must keep writing, is that it’s unwise to stop at one. Even if it gets picked up by the publishers in a freak coincidence, what next? Are you going to say, ‘Sorry, I could only do one?’ So the more you have, the better the chances of selling. At least people checking out your profile on social media and e-tailers might be impressed enough to try one of your offerings, and if they like it, they might even buy more.

Like someone said, there are two situations in life: one where you can control and another where you can’t. And in the latter scenario, the only thing you can do is control how you react to them. Tearing your hair out, getting frustrated and yelling out the window will not help. It might give temporary relief, but, in the long term, it will drag you down.

Another anecdote comes to mind, about this student who was impatient to learn the art of sword fighting from a Zen master. Student asks the master how long it would take him to be good at it. Master says ten years. Student says he doesn’t have that much time and that he needs to learn quickly. To which the master says in that case it will take twenty years.

One last dip into the philosophical river to shore up the morale. It’s from the Bhagavad Gita, Song of the Lord, a sacred Hindu text (part of the epic Mahabharata), where Lord Krishna, Bhagavan, tells Arjuna the reluctant warrior that his duty is to fight and leave the fruits of it to Him. The essence of it was expressed in the Rober redford movie titled the Legend of Bagger Vance with Will Smith playing Bagger Vance (Bhagavan) and Matt Damon the reluctant golfer was R.Junuh (Arjuna).

So keep writing and let the sales happen as and when. If we focus on the writing, the rest will take care of itself.

I’ve always, almost always, disliked the fb 'like'button and how casually people click that. It's like a bodily function.  Liking some post is fine, but it seems a large bunch of people people sit around waiting to see how quickly they can hit the like button, regardless of the nature of the posts. You could post something bad about the like button, for instance, and they will click it anyway. Because it’s easy to do, costs nothing and makes you feel like you are doing the guy a favour.

There’s a reason for the rant. I just finished my second burst of ad campaigns on facebook to promote  my ebook (a short story collection called Ten Twisted Tales, inspired by Dahl and O’Henry) and all I got was these stupid 'likes'. On my first foray into fb ads, I chose right hand column ad, ran for a week, and got a lot of traffic but no sale. That cost me around $39. The second time around, I chose both right hand column ad and the newsfeed ad. While I got ‘likes’ from total strangers, none of it resulted in a sale. This time, I ran it for 2 days and set the budget to $3 daily.

I ran another ad to promote my ebook on creating a website for beginners with a launch price of 99 cents, again, a lot of traffic but no sale. I stopped this after a day. I used the conversion metrics which measures the effectiveness of your campaign by asking you to copy/poste a script on to your web page’s header tag. Doesn't help much to know that a lot of people come to your and buy nothing.

I’m going to try Google Adwords. Let’s see how that goes. Right now Weebly is giving a promo, you spend $50 and they give $150 worth of voucher free. I’m told Adwords works when people are already searching for a product related to what you are selling.

On the flip side, you learn by trial and error, and that much more informed the next  time around. Which means I’m not going to spend on fb ads. Am sure there will be ‘likes’ for that too.

Ok, a quick post on a rather painful 20 plus hours trying to create a Facebook ad for this site. After being anti social for quite a while, mainly put off by people who 'liked' everything from status updates on food to posts on violence to animals (shouldn't there be a 'dislike' button for certain posts?), I decided to go back to facebook to let my friends know about my recent endeavours in the e-publishing area.
A week or so of researching and reading up on the subject and taking a course on Udemy which was very helpful, I decided to step into the unknown waters of social media ads with caution. Start with a small amount, they said, hence. This is what happened:
I went to the page I created for my ebooks on fb, and created an ad, went through the process fairly smoothly till I got to the payment page. I paid through Paypal, and the page went straight back to 'create an ad' page again, with no confirmation of any kind. And facebook is not known for reverting to customers is what I gathered when I entered my question in the search bar(also learnt that I wasn't the only one with this issue). Then someone in the forum suggested using Power Editor but that works only on Chrome, so did that. It must be one of the clunkiest pieces of software/tools that I've worked with in my life. After wrestling with it for a while (you have to hit the Campaign tab, create a campaign, and then create an ad, and hit upload button), I was puzzled by the audience reach which was 20. It just wouldn't go beyond that ridiculous number even if I included all the continents in the audience tab. I gave up and was toying with 'Pay with a tweet or a post' mode. Meanwhile I wrote in the fb forum, and again, I wasn't the only one with the issue. It was good to know in a safety in numbers sort of way, but it wasn't good when you realised fb wasn't answering anyone on the issue.
Then suddenly it occurred to me while I was fiddling with Power Editor why the number didn't go beyond the stubborn 20.  Here's why.  There's a field in the audience section where you decide who sees your message. In that there is a field that says : 'target people who are connected'. And if I entered my facebook page url in that field, the audience reach number immediately went to 20 and refused to budge. But it changed once I removed my facebook page I created for my books. And, oh, just received an email from facebook saying my ad was approved. Will let you know how that goes. Hope you found this useful.