Self-Published: Now What?

I self published an eBook of short stories about three weeks ago. I was super excited once I got through the process of formatting it properly in Amazon Kindle Mobi format. I told some friends, shared it online, gave it away free for the first two days and then sold it for 99 cents after that. It was great.

But now things are slowing down. Things have stopped, in fact. No sales so far in February and, to be honest, I feel like I’m running out of steam. Or at least running out of ideas. It’s hard tooting your own horn constantly. I’m already rearing to go on my next project and I’m not sure what else I can do to get the word out about my first book without taking away too much valuable time from writing my next.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Tomorrow, February 4th, I’m going to offer up Bergen Vignettes for free for one day only. February is the most terrible month of the year and maybe I can make it a little better by giving people free stories to read. So we’ll see how that affects the publicity of the book. And of course, I’ll post the results here on the blog.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what else to do. I’ve begun networking on Google+ and I’ll continue to post here. I’ve heard good things about buying internet ads or paid reviews on book blogs, but right now I don’t have the capital for any sort of investment.

If you’re reading this and you’re a self-published author with tricks up your sleeve to help keep attention on your book after the initial launch phase, please do share in the comments.

The Many Options in Social Media

For a self-published author, a healthy social media presence is always recommended. True, you shouldn’t spend more time online than at the writing block, but you should put in the effort to get your work out there. With that in mind, it’s important that you choose social media tools that work for you, not just the ones everyone tells you to use.

A couple weeks ago, I started this blog, published my first eBook and created a Twitter account. The purpose of the blog was to keep a log of my experiences in self-publishing. The purpose of Twitter was to get in touch with actual people and build online relationships. Already, I’ve found that Twitter isn’t doing what I wanted it to. The vast amount of noise on the site makes it feel like its users only blast out links and useless information about their daily lives. The amount of interaction seems to be minimal from where I’m standing. With that in mind, (and the fact that I would rather avoid Facebook at all costs) I have created a Google+ page for my social media interactions.

Rather than spending frustrating hours trying to conform my online habits to fit the tools, I’d rather choose tools that fit my needs. Now, especially, when I’m so early on in my online presence, it’s easy to try something and quickly make the switch to something that suits me better.

So if you’re reading this and you’re interested in me or my work, please join me on Google+. There seems to be a great amount of potential there with the right people onboard.

The Importance of Showing Up

One of the biggest challenges facing a self-published author is getting his or her work in front of an audience. In the old days, self-publishers had to pay for all the copies of their works and try to distribute each copy by hand. These days, the distribution is in place. All we have to do is get people to see it.

The internet is a wonderful tool, but it can also be a daunting and confusing one and, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be quite frustrating. It’s easy to look at all the successful self-publishers and be jealous of their success, jealous of their huge internet followings. It’s easy to think of those people as lucky, but the fact is, anybody can be successful online. Anybody can have a huge internet following. The part that is easy to overlook is the fact that it takes a lot of work to get there.

Last week I did an experiment. I stayed away from the internet. No blog posts, no Twitter updates, no comments on other blogs, no nothing for seven days. And here’s what happened: views to this blog quickly dropped to zero daily page views, my self-published ebook on Amazon stopped selling immediately, and my Twitter account became dead.

One of the most important things you can do, if you want to increase awareness about the work you do, is to show up. If I show up here, and on Twitter, then it lets people see that I’m active, I’m writing, and that I care enough about my work to do more than just blast it out into cyberspace and forget about it. Being active somewhere online works wonders for your credibility, which is the magic word among bloggers these days.

So instead of refreshing site statistics and sales statistics, write something of value and let the world know that you’re here and you care.

Does Self-Publishing Ruin the Possibility of a Traditional Book Deal?

I’ve often read that one of the biggest reasons why you shouldn’t self-publish is that it ruins your chances of getting published traditionally and it could end up being a huge waste of all the time you put into your writing.
But here I’ll offer another perspective. If you self publish and your book sells horribly and the few people who do buy it, hate it, then you’d probably never have been picked up by a traditional publisher anyway and whatever money you made is more than you would have otherwise.
Alternatively, if you self-publish and make a killing, then you’ve proven your worth as a writer and you’re almost guaranteed to GET a contract with a traditional publishing house if that’s what you still want.
I guess what it comes down to is that you have to be willing to do the work. You have to write the best book you can, spend however long it takes to edit it into a polished product, and then follow through with the promotion and marketing. It’s a lot of work.
I think many self-publishers want to write a book, send it into cyberspace and forget about it. I guess for those people traditional publishers are still a viable option. Traditional publishers will hire editors, marketers, etc to promote you because they’ll have a vested interest in you. But if you consider how much self-promotion you’ll have to do as an unpublished author to land an agent, land a book deal, that amount of work could get you pretty far in the self-publishing world with a strong enough product.
Just something to consider. Now back to writing.

An Uphill Battle

So far, self publishing to me has been an upward battle. I feel like I’m fighting for every sale. So far I’ve made $0.70 on sales. That’s two paid sales. I’m hoping it won’t be like this forever, and from what I hear, it won’t be. It seems a bit like pushing a big rock up a hill. At some point I’ll reach the top and then it’ll all be downhill from there. With word of mouth marketing, plus my own self-promotion, which I cringe to do, but still must do. It’s difficult to find a way to get my book in front of people’s eyes without turning them off by sounding like an ad. I think one of the best ways I can do that is by ensuring that the actual content of the book will market itself. That the 116 people who have it sitting on their Kindles will enjoy it enough to recommend it to a friend, and so on. That kind of marketing takes time in the beginning, but only in the beginning. If people have enjoyed my book, the sales will soon start trickling in more and more. And if nobody liked it, then I’ll just have to write a better book and start again.

Professional Writer

After giving my ebook away free on Amazon for two days, today I made my first actual sale of Bergen Vignettes on the Amazon Kindle Store and it feels amazing. OK, so my profits will be around 33 cents, and the US Government defines anything that makes you less than $400 per year at to be a hobby, but who cares? Just the fact that someone was willing to take a risk on me, however small, is a tremendous boost.

Three days ago, all the stories in Bergen Vignettes sat on my computer hard disk rotting. OK, so digital files don’t really rot, but they might as well have. Nobody was reading them, I barely looked at them, they were just there. The hours I spent writing them, the emotions I poured into them, didn’t matter in the slightest bit. They might as well have not existed.

Then I started this project to test the waters with digital publishing. Three days later, those stories sat on the bookshelves of 115 different Kindles. Granted 114 of those downloads might have just been because the cover has a nice picture and it was free. But that final download, that makes all the difference.

Here We Go

I woke up this morning and my Kindle book was live. What’s more, 11 people had already downloaded it! I have made the book free for the first two days and set the price to be .99 cents after that. From what I’ve read, even though Amazon pays you much less royalty (35% vs 70% of books priced between $2.99-9.99), pricing the book at $.99 offers the chance of reaching a much broader readership. Plus, my book is just about 18,000 words, merely novella length, so I want to charge as little as possible.

So check it out now, while it’s free (January 11-12) and if you like it, consider writing a review

And then get back to writing!

First Step to Self-Publishing

Well, I have certainly learned a lot about the self publishing process over the past day and a half. How did I do it? I published my first Kindle book to Amazon! OK, it’s not actually published yet, but it will be in 12 hours (that’s how long it takes Amazon to add your book to their system).

What a process this has been. For my first leap into the ebook foray, I compiled a short, 18,000 word collection of short stories based on my experiences living in Norway. When I began the process, I already had the stories compiled in a Pages document (I’m on a Mac, but I have access to a Windows/Linux machine too). To be honest, I was rather naive at the outset. I thought the process would be absolutely simple. Just an export and conversion or something. Actually, the Kindle Direct Publishing site mentioned that one could format their document in Pages and then export as an ePub which could be uploaded to Amazon. It sounded great. What they didn’t mention was that the Pages ePub module tends to be a bit finicky and also tends to ignore basic formatting like page breaks.

So after many hours and unsuccessful attempts at making a decent looking .mobi or .epub file, I decided to try another program, Calibre. Calibre is a great program for ebook management that also offers the option of converting pdf, html, mobi, lit, epub, and other formats. But still, I couldn’t get the manuscript the way I wanted. The biggest obstacle was creating either a valid, working table of contents, and/or a NCX document structure file. These are the sections necessary so a reader can easily navigate between chapters, or in my case, short stories. Indeed, it is a hugely important aspect of an ebook.

After some more unsuccessful attempts and online researching, I finally decided to switch to the Windows machine and use Microsoft Word. It was a last resort, but actually worked surprisingly well. It allowed me to create a nice table of contents and it kept track of the document structure via the built-in styles. Then I used the MobiPocket creator, recommended by Amazon to compile and structure the .doc file as an ebook. Everything finally looked pretty good. It was definitely much more work than I was expecting, but hopefully it’ll be worthwhile, least of all as a learning experience.

I’ve even created a Twitter account now for potential reader interaction. I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to spend on marketing, but I’m curious how much promotion Amazon does itself by recommendations, etc. Of course, I’ll be posting periodic updates with the results of this experiment.

Now go get writing!

Experiments

The more successful self-publishing stories I read, the more I want to jump into the fray and get my feet wet. I’ve been working on a short collection of vignettes loosely based on my experiences living in Norway. Many of the pieces are flash fiction, consisting of just a few hundred words, while a few are longer. It’s not anything I would ever consider trying to get a book deal with. It’s the kind of project that traditional publishers would consider too much of a risk. Not to mention the fact that the entire collection only weighs in at the length of a novella. But novellas, and other literary fiction, experimental stuff, is the kind of work that could possibly fare well in the self-publishing world. Along with genre fiction like mysteries, romance, and christian fiction, niche writing seems to do pretty well.

To me, this seems like a perfect way to test to waters of self publishing. I think I will finalize a few more stories, create a nifty cover, and see how it fares in the Kindle and perhaps Nook marketplaces. I’ll, of course, post the results here on the blog.

In the meantime, I’m compiling a list of interview questions I’d like to ask a few of those successful self-publishers if I can get any of them to agree to answer them. If you are just stopping by and have any of your own questions you’d like to ask the successful few, post them in the comments and I’ll consider them.

Now back to writing!

A new age of publishing.

Welcome, new readers. For this first post I will use the same text as the “About” page. I do this because I feel it is information worth reading so we’re all on the same page.

A new era of publishing is upon us. Anyone who writes words can push a button and publish them to an audience whose size knows no bounds. The largest online book retailer (Amazon.com) and the largest brick and mortar book retailer (Barnes & Noble) have both realized the potential of digitally published books and currently, they both offer ways for new authors to become publishers all on their own, circumventing traditional publishers, smashing the gates that once barred unpublished writers from an audience.

There are still gatekeepers, however. More now than ever. Every single person must become a gatekeeper. Each reader must sort through all the millions of works published every year. With traditional publishing, once you made it through the gates to publication the publishing house would market your work enough to ensure that they made as much profit as possible from it. Now, you must market yourself (or hire someone to do it for you) and while making it through a gatekeeper may grant you a few sales (word of mouth) you’ll need to keep your work fresh and consistent to make enough profit to survive.

This is the new world of publishing. A dawn of a new era. As the industry emerges from the dark ages to become a free forum, writers all over the world are presented with unparalleled opportunity, but with that opportunity comes the daunting task of great responsibility. In other words, the self-published writer is entirely responsible for his or her own success. The writing, the marketing, the selling, all falls to the writer. This cost of participation alone, puts many potentially great writers off. They’ll publish one work to the internet and leave it alone for some weeks. They expect the work will sell itself and when it doesn’t the writer becomes angry and frustrated and gives up on the whole process entirely. For that type of person, traditional publishing will the major avenue of income from writing.

Then there’s the other kind of writer. The new breed who aren’t afraid of becoming writers, editors, publishers, and marketers all in one. Many people have made livings from selling electronically published content. Fewer, but still many have made themselves small fortunes to rival the most successful traditionally published authors. These are the kinds of people I’m interested in. These are the people who will lead publishing into the light. Pens raised triumphantly, they will teach the rest of us, through their actions, how the ever-growing world wide web is creating the opportunity for our works to find the audiences they deserve.

You may be wondering who I am. My name is Nick Counts. I’m a writer in this digital world, new to the concepts of publishing in any form. While I would love my stories to find homes on bookshelves and e-readers across the world, I am unsure of how I will reach that goal.

It is my hope that, over the course of this blog, I will discover just how to do that. And if you, reader, dare to follow me, then perhaps you will learn as well.

Further Reading:

Createspace : Amazon’s Self-Publishing platform

PubIt! : Barnes & Noble’s Self-Publishing platform