I will do the unthinkable. I'm going to do nothing about selling copies of my book. I can already see the "savvy" experts shaking their 20th Century heads. You watch a show like Shark Tank and the mill-billionaires always ask the novices, "How many have you sold?" And "What are you doing to market your product? Which in my case the product is a novel called The Black Butterfly Woman. I would have to answer the Sharks, "Six books in six weeks". Now they will look at each other knowingly. And my marketing is this blog, "New Novelist". When I tell people about my novel they almost invariably respond with "I don't have a Kindle reader". And then when I tell them how wonderful and revolutionary the Kindle Fire is and even easier to read than a real book, which was way beyond my expectations, I begin to feel like a Kindle salesman. The truth is I don't want to be involved in the act of selling anything. It's not in my nature to be a salesman. I have no joy and therefore no enthusiasm for barking and huckstering and therefore no time for it. All of my passion is burning hot for writing.
In my novel, Vo Tuyen, the Black Butterfly Woman, tells the weary soldier, "You must move beyond motion." It is a mystery, one that takes the soldier many years to resolve.(The other big question The Black Butterfly Woman answers is "Why do the Vietnamese fight us so hard and not love us?").Move beyond motion means to do all of the work necessary and then let it go. If it is meant to have force in the universe the universe will align with it and everything that is supposed to happen next will happen next.
In Wolf Totem, Jian Rong says the same thing after the student and the master have set all the wolf traps perfectly and after great preparation. The student asks if he should check the traps. The old master says if you have done all of the work, God will do the rest.
And so I rest my case and my novel and do the unthinkable and move beyond motion.