Is Book Promotion a Waste of Time?

Yesterday, I read J.A. Konrath's post about the value of publicity and spent the rest of the day thinking about it. The article posed a lot of questions about how the relationship between publicity and book sales. This led me to ask myself - is book promotion a waste of time?

New authors like myself tend to spend a lot of time promoting our work on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Kindleboards, etc. I probably spend between six to eight hours a week on those sites and I'll bet that's the low end for many authors. Has all that promoting and community participation sold me many books? It's hard to say but I don't think it has. I'm guessing that the number is in the low double figures and that's a poor return for a full year of promotion.

Based on that, you'd imagine that my kindle book High Road to Tibet - Travels in China, Tibet, Nepal and India is struggling badly in the vastness of the Amazon. Far from it in fact. "High Road to Tibet" has held a steady spot in the Top#5 best sellers list for Asia Travel on Amazon.co.uk and Top#10 on Amazon.com for categories such as China and Tibet. So how are readers finding my book?

For example, if I want to find a book on Amazon about fixing my car, I do a search there for "car maintenance". I'd then check the results, check some reviews and, if the price is right and it's available for the kindle, buy it there and then. This is the same way people are finding me on Amazon. They don't know I have a Facebook page or Twitter account and probably don't care either. They just want to buy an entertaining and informative read about travel in Asia and that's what I'm hoping to give them in High Road to Tibet.

So, don't worry if you're not sending out a hundred tweets a day or on Facebook every hour. I wrote a previous post on how to improve sales on Amazon so that's worth a read if you want to make it easier for people to find you on Amazon. Time spent this way will do more for sales that anything else you could do.
John

High Road to Tibet on Amazon.com
High Road to Tibet on Amazon.co.uk
High Road to Tibet on Barnes&Noble
High Road to Tibet on Apple iBookStore