Having been part of the new wave of self-publishing for over a year now, and run the gamut of marketing techniques, joined about every social networking site I thought might be sensible and done a certain amount of work purely for the number crunching than for the direct relevance, I have realised there is one important, overriding task that faces the self-published author that they must address with everything they write.
The first thing to remember is that the revolution happening in publishing puts the writer in command of their own work thereby taking the role of authorship back to the days before editors and publishing houses dominated and craftsmen and women produced their own work. The revolution though, is one of delivery, just as Caxton’s press, it is not one of content.
Any writer living at any time has to make sure their written work is the very best they can produce, this will not always mean it is good writing or even worth reading. It simply means that the focus of any writer is the quality of the written work. Everything else follows from that. The very best marketing strategy any writer has is that they enthuse readers with their artistry because readers always recommend books they enjoy.
The Internet won’t sell any more books for you than Blake sold making his by hand, or printing presses enabled people to do through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All it does is give your excellence a showcase and if you are not excellent enough you will fail.