It Takes a Village (To Sell Your Book)

A Literal Literary Loser Seeks Support

In my ongoing quest to expose all my book marketing mistakes so that others might avoid them, last week I asked the question: Do YouTube Videos and Instagram Reels Sell Books?

As I just launched my YouTube channel three weeks ago, I don’t have a definitive answer yet. My books aren’t selling better. But they aren’t selling worse, either.

Here is what I do have: I have feedback from viewers.

Rachel Callaghan suggested, “Have you considered slyly coming from a different direction as they'll never top you as the USSR expert, since you lived it?”

EastWest Literary Forum & Bilingual Poetry Readings commented: "It would be nice to teach the kid something other than a collection of cheerful platitudes about life in the old USSR."

Since I do not ever recall voicing a cheerful platitude about life in the old USSR, save for in deep, deep deadpan jest, I’m not quite sure what to make of this critique.

I had better luck with advice from Tema Frank (whom I met at the Historical Novel Society North America Conference 2023; writing conferences may not sell books, but you do get to meet cool people!).

Tema, who literally wrote the book, “People Shock: The Path To Profit When Customers Rule,” advised me on two places where I can up my salesmanship game.

She suggested that I leave buy links to my two, Soviet-set historical fiction novels in the YouTube videos’ description, and that I figure out a way to mention them in the videos themselves. Otherwise, I’m not exactly promoting my books, am I?

This is what I mean by book marketing taking a village. Neither of those things occurred to me on my own!

Here is the video my daughter and I made following Tema’s advice (and a little bit of EastWest Literary Forum & Bilingual Poetry Readings’ too. Note the distinctive lack of cheerful platitudes about life in the old USSR).

Check it out and let me know what you think.

But, wait, there’s more! I still need your help!

See how the thumbnail image my daughter painstakingly created, me looking all wise and insightful, her looking like she is “picking up what I’m putting down” (as the cool kids say), is displaying on this page?

It also displayed on Google, and on that site that is no longer about bluebirds.

However, this same thumbnail refused to display on Facebook. When I plugged the URL into their own debugger, I was told:

• Unknown Image Error

Provided og:image URL, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/L_cHvx0JVdE/maxresdefault.jpg encountered an unknown error.

So, basically, the problem is that there’s a problem. But they won’t tell me what that error is so I can fix it.

I am not very technologically minded. I suspect many of my readers are. Can you figure out what is going wrong here, and how I can fix it?

Come on, village! Let me know how I screwed up, this time!