Marketing things to remember.

This is the first week of reducing my blog time to once a week instead of twice a week.  The main reason is that spending two full days of the week to blog, browse forums, post, tweet, Facebook as well as read and post on all of the blogs I follow and find new ones to watch just takes too much time away from writing.  I ended up choosing Tuesdays to do this for two reasons.  First was at the recommendation of someone on the KDP support forums.  They said that they had worked for years doing charity work and said that Tuesdays by far were the days that people had a little bit of extra time as well as money to spend.  The second reason is that Tuesdays mark the day that new books get released to the markets.  Those two reasons made sense to me.

New release Tuesday brings me to the main topic of my blog today.  When I should have been writing, I was on the KDP forums Monday and there was a post from a frustrated author who could not find their book with out directly searching for it.  Their question was if they could not find their book, how would anyone else.  Her book Godhead was released on July 4th.  A Monday.  I spent about 20 minutes looking through Amazon to see if I could "find" her book.  I did eventually under the new in 30 days in the romance department.  That's when it hit me about the Monday bit.  There were 11 pages of romance eBooks that came out on July 5th.  And when I searched on the 11th.  Her book was on page 30 and it was only a week old.  In the end, my advice to her was that she needed to sell, market, and promote her work.  People are just not going to stumble upon it and to be aware of how the market works.  Her book got dumped on and had less than a day before it was on the bottom of heaping pile of new books.

My own experiences with this situation are similar.  About 3 days after Requiem showed up on Amazon, I was browsing around and came upon the discovery that a week later Random House was about to dump the entire back list of Star Wars books onto the market.  My book is primary sci-fi genera and secondary fantasy.  At first I said to myself "Oh man, this sucks."  But it didn't bother me past that because I had already been selling my book and it was doing well, with positive feedback.  But there was the thought that if I had known, I would have waited a week till after.

The book world isn't the only industry that works like this.  Take the upcoming final Harry Potter movie this week.  If your movie is now finished, there is a feeling of pride and anticipation to get it out to the world, but premiering your new movie the same weekend as Harry Potter isn't the best of ideas.  Waiting a week or two will be much better, or even holding off for a minor holiday weekend that has no competition.

As a self published author, all the decision making is mine.  My question to you is:  When you are ready to publish your next piece of work.  Are you going to publish on a Tuesday because that is the major new book day and will have the most people randomly browsing and they have new books on the brain?  Or will you wait a day to publish so your book has the longest chance of being seen on the new books list?  Or maybe just publish it on whatever random day it happens to be when it is ready?