The Showcase, missing readers and other matters of crucial importance

An introduction to the "Author Showcase" and why it seems to me to be Important and Good.

Those of you who have been following this site (and if not, why not, pray?), will have noticed a new addition over the last few weeks. The Author Showcase has expanded from one “exhibit” to four, and will hopefully add another very soon; plus, possibly, my alter ego, MJ Kingston, if we can find room.

It’s an interesting reflection on the world of social media that I have never met, in person, any of the current members of the showcase. Three of them – Randileigh, Sylvia and Martin – don’t even live in the same country as me. Yet we’ve all chatted quite cordially online, we’re all facebook friends and, in a world where online life is increasingly – and rightly – being regarded as less entirely a positive thing than hitherto, that’s a Good And Decent Thing. The one author who does live in England – Heather – is also a bona fide member of the Tyne Team having, voluntarily and entirely of her own accord, acted as a wonderfully competent proof-reader on the first two Shattered Land books.

The idea behind the Showcase is expressed on its home page (here) and I don’t need to expand on that much. Or maybe I do. A couple of people (not those featured in the Showcase, I may add) have asked: what’s in it for you? Well, for one thing, it makes this site a richer place to visit. It’s something a little different. And for another, I own at least one book by each of the Showcase team, and have enjoyed their work. It makes me feel good to promote them, even if only in the very small way represented by a corner of my website.

We need, my friends, all the help we can get, we indies. And here is why.

Back in the day, when the Kindle was a new product and e-books hadn’t been heard of, Amazon invented online self-publishing – via their KDP platform – as a way of generating new content for the Kindle. The reasoning is simple and brilliant:

We have no books. There are a million people out there who want to be published authors. Why not let them provide us with books?

This, a million people duly did. So having been short of authors, Amazon are now up to their corporate neck in the buggers, and Jeff Bezos has had to get Extra Security to keep them from breaking down the doors of his mansion. Indies are everywhere. It’s like one of those cute facebook posts featuring a million puppies all jumping up and down and barking at the same time, except all of those puppies want you to buy their novel.

And the place where all those puppies are jumping is – right here on Social Media. I am a member of over seventy book promotion groups. I have, at present, 523 followers on Twitter, of whom about 400 are fellow-authors who want to sell me their books, and about a hundred are people who want to sell me an additional 5000 Twitter followers (Most of the latter – and I’ve checked – only have about fifty followers apiece, so they’re clearly not using their own services, are they?)

The remaining twenty-three are an assortment of friends, former colleagues and a likeable twenty-something blogger from Norfolk called Jess, who is an actual and undeniable fan, plus she seems to like my jokes. Also, for some reason, I have as a follower the American actress who provided the female voice of Siri. I have no idea why this lady chose to follow me, but I am very pleased to have her on board. She seems to be a very nice person.

So what I want to know in all this are – where are all the actual readers? You have a million indie authors all enthusiastically marketing their books to each other – and no readers. My own personal surmise is that they’ve gone underground. I imagine it as being a bit like The Walking Dead. They’ve all retreated to an underground fortress (filled with books, of course), to escape the hordes of ravening authors who are lurching around outside the steel-reinforced gates, waving flyers about their latest free promotion.

Don’t get me started on the subject of free promotions. That’s another post all on its own.

ANYWAY, he says, dragging himself back to what PG Wodehouse would almost certainly have called the res, I politely urge you to visit the author showcase and discover the wonderful books that my friends have written. They don’t actually, bite.

Thank you, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say, for your sweetly-faked attention.