You're hoping to leverage the Production Revolution to get out your novel, your music, your comic, what have you. I've been covering the reasons that the new tools for media creation and distribution aren't going to turn everyone into a potential media success (such as time and technical skill) and I'm going to continue to rain on the parade by noting another factor: marketing ability.
There's an odd paradox afoot here in the world of self-marketing:
- There are endless books, columns, blog posts, about how people need to be good at marketing their products when doing the self-publishing thing.
- Despite the issues of Item #1 being communicated through every possible media including telepathy, people's marketing skills apparently still stink so this stuff keeps coming out.
It doesn't matter how good you are or how much work you produce (unless you make so much it gets you attention), if you can't get people interested buying your stuff. That's a matter of marketing – which makes sure the right people know of your work and want to buy it.
Marketing is really, really, challenging. As I've done my own research I now understand why people can actually make a career out of it. Think of the different things you have to do for marketing:
- You have to find the right media for making people aware.
- You have to use that media the right way to communicate about your product(s).
- You have to do the marketing at the right time, to the right demographic.
- You have to do #1-#3 consistently.
- You have to improve and adapt #1-#3 consistently.
- You have to be in this for the long haul.
Doing all of these things takes time, discipline, and effort. Of course the other part of the equation is even knowing how to do these things – after all how much of us get marketing training and education if we don't pursue it as a profession?
So on top of being able to do all the things you need to do to market your creations, you have to figure out what to do in the first place. At that point you can probably turn to all those people writing books on marketing who are probably pretty annoyed no one seems to be listening (at least until they check their book sales).
There's another barrier for you – the Production Revolution still requires marketing, which takes some serious research and discipline (or luck). It's a whole other skill set you have to learn – and not everyone knows they have to learn it.