I recently released my third romantic suspense story – which is excellent, since I’m finally starting to build a backlist of titles. Ignoring my previous vow not to do any more contests or major hoopla for the release (because in the past I’ve found release day activities do absolutely nothing for sales), I did blog posts on all of my major blogs, along with a contest on my Fantasy Ranch blog (home to the novel that was released).

I uploaded the novel digitally all over ahead of time as I usually do to make sure it’s actually available on release day. The print copy was available a couple weeks early. And digital copies started selling about the minute it went up on Amazon, and sold right up until release day, when I made the big release announcement. You’d expect sales to go up more still, right?

All I got was crickets. In fact, sales ground to a halt amid the announcements, and the contest was pretty paltry as far as turnout goes.

Please understand, I’m not complaining even a little bit. I’m merely analyzing, and I’m actually happy that the results are consistent with my first and second books. Because this is very valuable information to have in terms of deciding what to spend time on.

With my erotica shorts (the third of which I’ll be releasing sometime this week), I don’t do the fanfare thing, and never have. I post a simple notice on my blog that gets fed through facebook & twitter, and one on the BSB blog, and that’s it. They start selling when I upload them, and tend to just continue on as they were through release day.

Part of that could be genre, but I think part of it is the whole “hoopla” thing surrounding a release seems like it could be turning people off. Or else it’s Murphy’s law. Either way, I’m glad, because there’s only one logical approach to take from here on out, and that is, no release day hoopla. A simple blog post that feeds out and announces that the book is available when it’s available will be plenty (I’ll include an excerpt) – I’m not even going to stick to a firm release date except to hold myself to a deadline.

No contests (well, I’ll probably still do Goodreads contests for print copies), no extra promo, no extra effort. Because sales seem better in the absence of all that extra “stuff”, counterintuitive as it seems.

Do you have to get the word out about your book? Sure…but increasingly I really think a simple announcement, submitting to review sites and the occasional guest post are plenty. I think a social media presence is important too, but only insomuch as you meet and talk to people, which makes them curious about your books. A link here and there on twitter isn’t a bad thing, but the constant link pushing, the big blog tours, etc that I see authors doing to try to get their books out into the public eye – I just don’t think any of that is really necessary. Will it boost sales in the beginning? Sure, maybe. But then everything will die down, and I think the author risks being disappointed when sales fall back to “normal” levels after the excitement is gone.

Of course this doesn’t apply if your ultimate target is a traditional publisher. In that case, yes, you need to push your book hard to sell as many copies in as short amount of time as possible, because that’s how sales work in the traditional publishing world. A trad publisher’s goal is to sell as much as possible in as little time as possible (because books have so little time on the shelf in stores), so it would make sense for them to want to see that from an independent author.

As for me, I’ve got all the time in the world…so no need to wear myself out. I have time to let sales build gradually. Yet another thing I love about being independent…