The Field – The Field & Midnight House

Publicity and marketing. All of us know something about those topics. We are inundated by marketing and publicity campaigns for upcoming movies and TV series on billboards, bus stops, and buildings. Not to mention YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and traditional media like TV and radio. This multi-million-dollar campaigns are a huge gamble for studios and production companies hoping that you and I will see these ads and be enticed to go and see or tune into watch the product being advertised. And, for the most part, it works.

But what if you just wrote your first novel and don’t have millions to spend on publicity?

Well, that’s the position I found myself in with my novel, The Field. I had a published novel in both eBook and paperback form but no way to market it to the young adult audience it was intended for. This was a big problem.

I had made the investment into getting the book out for purchase, but I had no real way to make people aware on a large scale that book existed. Yes, I was on Twitter and had created a website for the book, but I was only reaching friends, family, and co-workers.

I knew what I had to do.

Now, there are videos and blogs about how to market your novel for free, and I commend those who do that. I think if you can successfully sell your book and get the word out inexpensively that’s a great plus for you in the long run. The problem I faced was unlike marketing to adults, my target audiences was teens thirteen and up. I don’t know anyone in that age group, so I had to outsource my marketing to people who could reach them.

Enter Smith Publicity.

I mentioned them in a previous post where they made me realize that I had initially pretty much done all the wrong things when I thought about publishing my book (not on social media, no hard copy of the book, and no Author Photo). All of those things were fixable on my end, but I inquired about using their services to get the word out about my book.

After careful consideration, I decided on one of their plans, and in the next post I will talk about what happened the initial week of my team-up with Smith Publicity.

The manuscript for my novel, The Field, sat in a file on my computer for years before I decided to make the move to get it published. Sure, it was ready to go, but I would occasionally open the Word doc and tweak little things every once in a while. However, I knew it was done when the ideas I had late at night for lines of dialogue or sequences to include were already in the book. I knew then that it was time to take the next step into publishing the novel.

But I was afraid. I’ll admit it. I was terrified of having to deal with trolls on social media after releasing The Field to the public. I had already left Facebook and Instagram back in 2016 during the election cycle, so I was overly cautious about jumping back into the social media fray as an author.

And so, I waited…and waited…and made excuses…and waited.

And then one day, as I was getting my haircut, the woman who cuts my hair asked me for the 100^thtime how my novel was coming along and why I hadn’t published it yet. I finally told her why: I was afraid of what the response would be on social media. She looked at me in the mirror and said, “F**k those trolls! Publish your damn book!” Since she had clippers next to my head I agreed that it was time.

And she was 100% right. It was time to publish the book.

That weekend, I went home and started to do research on how to self-publish. Previous to this, I had sent out query letters the traditional way years prior to no avail. I knew that eBooks were popular – I certainly have a Kindle full of them – so I decided to publish my novel initially as an eBook.

And so the process began, and tomorrow I will tell you what steps I took to take The Field from computer file to published novel.