The Spoons That Are My Ears!

Like many writers, I love writing but I don't much care for promoting my works once they have been published. For a start, I'm not very good at promotion. I have no marketing skills, no commercial urges, and it's not only a bothersome effort trying to be efficient in the act of advertising my books but it also seems to have a depressing effort on my mood. It feels cynical, almost undignified.

Be that as it may, I accept that promotion is necessary. But I have long wondered how well my books would do if I did no promotion for them at all. I mean, absolutely no promo. No mentions of them on my blog or on social media, no talking about them to anyone. Just publish and be damned.

To answer this question, which isn't much of a question, I arranged for some of my stories to be issued as chapbooks by Trojan Donkey Chapbooks.

Let's be clear: this is my own imprint, set up specifically for this experiment. I published 25 chapbooks in total and they are limited editions, by which I mean that the moment a title has sold 60 copies it will be removed from sale. I wanted to see if any of them would sell without promo, and if so, how many, and how quickly or slowly.

Most of the chapbooks contain stories that have already been published but are generally out of print. Some of the chapbooks contain work that has never been published before. To be more precise, five of them contain previously unpublished work.

The first chapbook was published last February, and then they were published periodically until June, when the final one was issued.

I was pleased when they began to sell, not rapidly, admittedly, not even steadily. I was intrigued to find that they sold very unevenly. None have yet reached the sixty copies limit but a few are close. Others are nowhere near that limit, and two of the chapbooks have yet to sell a single copy.

Have I learned anything from this so-called experiment? Not really. I have learned that promo is a good idea, but I knew that already. I have learned that chapbooks with fairly straightforward titles sell better than those with more elaborate titles, which I think is a shame.

The picture above shows a sample of eight of the chapbook covers. I chose them at random. A grid showing all 25 would be rather too unwieldy.

Nexy year, or the year after, I suspect I will create an omnibus of the best of the chapbooks and issue it not only as a paperback but also as an ebook. The chapbooks as they currently stand don't exist as ebooks. I guess my hope is that they will now become collectors' items. That can happen.