Art or Business? My Take on the John Locke Method

As you may or may not know, I’m currently halfway through my very first blog tour with my new release, Jinn Nation. As well as being a marketing strategy in and of itself, running the tour and getting people to read my guest posts and enter the giveaways has required a lot of marketing and promotion (ie. a lot of social networking). Although I’ve loved doing this and have met some fantastic people along the way, I’m almost looking forward to next week when the tour’s over and I can get back to what I (hope I) do best: writing (I can’t actually manage both, it’s too hard with a 4-month-old!) This mad marketing has got me thinking about the ‘John Locke method’ of selling e-books, a method I wouldn’t personally adopt because for me it means coming down on the side of writing as business rather than writing as art, and this makes the English Literature graduate in me a sad panda.

Not that the John Locke method doesn’t work of course; it works very, very well. If you don’t already know, John Locke is the first indie author to sell 1 million e-books for the Amazon Kindle, an accolade that was previously only held by bestselling traditionally published authors such as Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Lee Child. One of his latest projects is a how-to guide to marketing and selling your self-published novel called How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!; the blueprint for the ‘John Locke method’, which seems to basically comprise of pricing books at $0.99 and utilising Twitter. There’s nothing wrong with that (although I often wonder how people view $0.99 novels, whether or not they think they must be crappy because they’re so cheap; but then John Locke has sold over a million books in just 5 months doing this and I definitely have not), but it was the line “my books may not be great literature, but they certainly don’t suck… I no longer have to prove my books are as good as theirs [traditional publishers]” from the book’s sample that put me off purchasing it.

I can’t help but believe that books shouldn’t be a ‘paint by numbers’ affair, written only to make money. I think they should be loved and sweated over, whether it’s a novel about a vampire dating a high school cheerleader or an opus dealing with the stuff of the soul. I know writers don’t aim to live in poverty and it would be weird if they did. Marketing and promotion will always be necessary if you want people to take notice of your work, I just feel that as an indie author it can be all too easy to find yourself focusing solely on the marketing, hopped up on success stories like John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Before long you’re studying the bestseller lists and adapting your work to copy what is selling instead of being true to your own interests and inspirations. But maybe that’s just me. After all, didn’t Dickens often write just for the money? He wrote his novels in segments to be published in magazines, each one ending on a cliff-hanger, and I’m sure I read somewhere that he wrote A Christmas Carol to make some quick cash for the festive season, little knowing how popular and influential it would become. I suppose Charles Dickens and John Locke might have made good Twitter buddies if they’d lived in the same century.

There’s still time to follow my blog tour if you haven’t been doing it already (and if you have, you rock!) Vampires.com have already kindly posted an interview with me, and later today they’ll be posting my guest blog about why I created my vampire character, Dylan (although to be honest, he snuck into my brain fully formed and demanded to be included in the completely different story I was writing; there wasn’t that much ‘creation’ involved, it was more of a hold-up on his part). There’s also still time to read my interview and enter the giveaway to win an e-copy of Jinn Nation in any format of your choice (I’m not formatist!) over at Oh, for the Hook of a Book!, or head to Donna’s Blog Home to read a guest blog about my inspirations and check out the best review I’ve ever had I’ve also been leaving exclusive excerpts of Jinn Nation all over the web (I know, I really should clean up after myself…) So if you fancy reading a snippet from my novel that isn’t included in the bog standard Kindle sample, have yourself a look at these wonderful blogs:

No Trees Harmed
Donna’s Blog Home
Oh, for the Hook of a Book!

Look out for more giveaways, excerpts and blog posts towards the end of the week!