I’m going to be honest — I’ve just about given up any hope of my book ever gaining any sort of traction in the marketplace of new ideas. I don’t know if people even read books anymore, so I invested in creating an audiobook, but that isn’t selling, either.
Perhaps it’s the subject matter. God is a complicated subject, and maybe people just don’t have the time nor interest in pursuit of a difficult subject. I don’t think anyone can accuse of me of giving up without a fight, but it does seem to be a losing battle, not just an uphill one.
Seventeen thousand people follow my Facebook page, The God Conclusion, but only a small fraction of those people have bought my book, or read a free copy in exchange for an honest review. I have had difficulty even giving away free audiobooks, and apparently most of those who accepted them never bothered to listen to the book because they never wrote a review. Without honest feedback from readers, especially in this economy, people just aren’t going to take a chance and spend the money to buy my book, so wasting more money on advertising seems futile.
I got excited to see a new review had finally been published on Amazon, but then I saw the review was one-star, and the person who wrote the review obviously never read the book because he described it as “Typical YEC nonsense” and my book does NOT argue for Young Earth Creationism. In fact, it does the opposite, talking about the Big Bang and a universe that science tells us is billions of years old. I don’t argue about the age of the Earth at all, and consider myself Earth-age agnostic. I believe the universe could conceivably be billions of years old AND in a global flood, which is just a form of mass extinction, and the fossil record tells us there have been multiple mass extinction events. It’s a grotesquely unfair review, of course, but it’s also the only sort of review I’m getting.
Specifically, the review says this:
The author probably doesn’t really believe he “debunks anything Dawkins actually says, he has to be just interested in selling books to his right wing, religious, conspiracy theory believing followers. Literally every argument he makes for the existence of a God is just tired debunked apologetics. What a complete waste of time. Seriously, anyone can write a book.
MikeB70
In response to this review I would say, if anyone can write a book, why haven’t you? What anyone can write without any real effort at all is a book review, and they can write it without even bothering to read the book. As long as you’ve spent $50 on Amazon, they don’t care if you’ve read my book or not. They could easily check MikeB70’s purchase history and confirm he never purchased the book, but then Amazon would have to care about what happens to their vendors, and they don’t, really.
Not only do I believe I have thoroughly debunked and destroyed the best argument Richard Dawkins has made, I’ve put my money where my mouth is and spend thousands of dollars on advertising and podcast expenses. The problem is that my return on investment remains in a significant deficit and I don’t really know how to solve that problem, except to sell books that none of my followers have interest in buying.
This puts me in a somewhat confusing situation — I’ve made it abundantly clear from Day 1 that the Facebook page exists to promote my book, and that effort is almost a full year in the works and with the addition of the podcast and those expenses, I’m still in the negative income phase. Translation: it has been costing me real money…I’ve been paying some serious money to Facebook for the privilege of creating this Facebook page to entertain you. Once I stopped spending about a thousand dollars a month to expand the page audience, the audience stopped growing. I’m not attracting new customers to the page, and the existing customers just aren’t buying what I’m selling.
Some of you have called this a ministry, but it isn’t. Churches pass around the collection plate so the pastor doesn’t pay for you to attend his church. I don’t like to feel like I’m begging, but I’ve already been reduced to begging for reviews and people to buy my book, and those pleas have fallen on deaf ears. The Rolling Stones can claim they ain’t too proud to beg, but I am. I set up a few ways in Facebook for people to help support the page but don’t want to beg people to use them. I created a Patreon page and didn’t bother to mention it, because it will be embarrassing when nobody supports me.
I’ve been told that chastising the seventeen or so people who accepted a free copy of my audiobook six months ago but never bothered to write the review they promised was unseemly, and didn’t seem Christian in my approach. Maybe it wasn’t Christian of me. Maybe I shouldn’t care. Maybe I shouldn’t take any pride in my work, which does intend to glorify God. Maybe I don’t even know what it means to be a real Christian. I’ve never claimed to be particularly good at it, but I certainly do claim to be one.
I’ve never claimed to be a Christian apologist. I have ZERO days of theological training. The God Conclusion was never intended to proselytize for Christianity; it advocates specifically for the unnamed Creator God and uses scientific evidence and logic, not Bible verses to form the points of my argument for the existence of God.
An atheist claims that no gods exist. He or she is my ideal target audience. So, here’s a question: why should a Christian buy my book? To give a copy to the atheists they know. Why should a Christian read my book? To understand the arguments inside, so they can later be discussed with the atheist friend. Even if a Christian doesn’t agree with every point of my argument, the overwhelming nature of that argument as a whole and the fact it all seems well-supported by corroborating evidence should provide lots of fodder for a most interesting conversation.
Why should the atheist want to read my book? Well, if they read Richard Dawkins my title should have caught their eye, even if it isn’t the first or only book with that title. The mere fact I claim to use logic and science instead of theology to form my argument ought to be intriguing enough to pique their interest unless their mind is fully closed to competing ideas.
Sadly, most of the atheist visitors to my page haven’t seemed very open-minded, which is how I get reviews like MikeB70’s.
Here’s what I’m currently thinking. It’s time for me to step back and focus on my work in the hope of eventually producing income. I’ve got three moderators, and they can all post jokes and Bible verses just like I do, to keep the page alive. I’m actually very close to finishing my next detective novel, which will be titled Atheist’s Prayer. I’m going to focus on finishing the book and handing it over to my editor. Once it’s in her hands, I’ll come back to the page and check in to see how things are going.
What I’m saying is, I’m not going to be on the Facebook page every day, for most of the day. I’ve already scheduled some jokes and verses to be posted for the next few days, and I’m hoping that Wilfred, Pam, and Colin will keep you entertained while I do some actual real work that could conceivably produce income for me and my family. I probably should have spoken with them prior to making this announcement, but reading this morning’s review was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I believe I am a fairly decent writer, and my reviews (the real ones) seem to validate that belief. I think I’m better at nonfiction than fiction (making up stuff is surprisingly hard when you want people to believe you) and I can always improve, of course, but to do that, I have to keep writing. The easiest book I ever wrote was my collection of short stories about animal rescue titled Always a Next One, which also happened to be one of three of my books to receive a Reader’s Favorite gold medal.
So, my nose is about to be pressed to the grindstone, of my own doing. The God Conclusion didn’t turn me into a bestselling author, but Atheist’s Prayer just might, if my plot is interesting enough and the story told well enough. I won’t know until it’s published, and it can’t get published before it is finished. As much as I’ve enjoyed the often heated exchanges with the atheist elements of my audience (that was sarcasm, by the way) I’m going to have to work hard for a few weeks, and that means no more goofing off on Facebook for a while, constantly getting suckered into mindless arguments.
Hope to see you when I return soon. Just need to take a brief hiatus.
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