My self-publishing journey: Up the molehill

[long, rambling and angst-tinted why-I-self-published explanation deleted]

Thanks for all the comments! I appreciate the thoughts and support.

ETA: Updated at last, in post #24

MMcDonald64 said:

Sounds like a good plan. Best of luck to you.

Click to expand...

Thank you! I hope to give this a decent run.

kaitie said:

Good luck!

Click to expand...

Thank you!

James D. Macdonald said:

Bringing books back into print is, I think, the best use of self-publishing.

Click to expand...

I love that self-pub makes it possible to reprint. I'll probably do it with my S&S books too, when I get the rights back someday.

I'm struggling with being in flux right now, though. This morning I got a notification from Twitter:

"Just finished Broken Angel by @SWVaughn. Now reading Origins. I must have the whole House Phoenix series, please tell me they are availible?"

The series isn't available right now. It *just* came off sale a few days ago. I'm anxious about potentially missing sales... I was selling a few dozen copies a month of each book in the UK.

slhuang said:

Good luck! *cheers you on*

I haven't self-published yet (though I'm going to), but my understanding is that authors who have series and backlists do the best. So it sounds like you're already starting in a good place. Can't wait to hear how it goes!

Click to expand...

Thank you! I'm hoping that will be the case.

sarahdalton said:

Good luck! I'm so envious of you having a large back catalogue - I've been plugging away with just the one book and it's hard.

Come back and let us know how you get on

Click to expand...

Thank you! I will surely keep updating -- I hope you get the opportunity to write more soon!

LBlankenship said:

(tips hat) Welcome!

Click to expand...

Thank ya kindly.

Thank you, Ann!

Thank you, Merri! I've been reading about your journey since the Dark Ages, it seems. I'm glad to have watched you come so far!

(Also, for the longest time I read your user name as "Merri Hat" -- which I think is pretty cool. But your actual name is good, too. )

Spell-it-out said:

Hiya,

Sounds like you've it under control there swvaughn, best of luck with it.

Click to expand...

Thank you!

merrihiatt said:

I feel like I've been around since the Dark Ages. You can call me any name you like, just don't call me late for dinner. Ba dum dum.

Click to expand...

LOL You and me both...

Norman D Gutter said:

Good luck on your self-publishing journey, SWV. May you have many sales.

NDG

Click to expand...

Thank you!

Well... I may be moving faster than I'd originally planned. At least for getting the first four books back out there.

I actually have a cover for the first book (though I may still be tweaking it) -- if anyone has thoughts / opinions / suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Old Hack said:

You're going to have to resize that image, lovely though it is: there's a maximum size of 400 x 400 pixels on AW, and yours is 576 × 768. Sorry.

Click to expand...

Ack! So sorry about that. Not enough coffee this morning...

'Tis resized. Thank you!

Oooh, I love finding out about new areas of AW! Thank you! I think I'll stick my head in over there.

Kitty27 said:

Congrats and good luck!

I enjoy reading these threads so much. They are chock full of information that I am doing my best to soak up.

Click to expand...

Thank you, Kitty! And hopefully I'll be getting a little more informative soon.

Wow, was it really January that I started this thread?

That smiley is me, cringing at the horror of my own Grand Plans when I first started self-publishing. I thought, gee, everyone who has lots of books to start out with has done so well... I'm sure I'll do great at this, too!

Yeah, maybe not so much.

I'm willing to own up to my mistakes -- and I made a mistake thinking I'd have it a little easier with a decent backlist to sell. As Lex Luthor said in that horrible Superman movie a few years back: WROOOONG! I grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to self-publish successfully, and the appeal of my writing (haha). I am not, in fact, all that.

But I also try to learn from such mistakes. So here I am, starting over again.

------------

I've got five books in a thriller series up for sale on Amazon (covers in lovely sig image), plus two kind of random unrelated books (one YA paranormal romance novel, one adult / maybe "new" adult PR short). I'm working on writing the last book in the series right now -- four of the available books are novels 1 through 4, and the fifth is a collection of related short stories.

I have totally redone my covers, and drastically changed the blurb for the first book, Broken Angel (have to do drastic rewrites for the other blurbs now, eek!). I know that KDP Select is far, far less effective now than it was in the past (SIGH)... but I'm doing a two-day free promo next week, Monday and Tuesday. Just to see if the new cover / blurb can carry it up a bit.

I thought it would be interesting to report my results with the Select promo here. So far, I've submitted my free days to around 15 sites and spent a total of $5 (a donation to one of the freebie sites, cuz I like that one ).

This time around, I'm not going to invest significant $$ in promoting the promotion. I want to see if the revamped listing itself makes a difference, as compared to the Select promo I did back in... February? March? I think it was early March.

[quick results from that one: I did a 5-day free promo, spent around $60 total, and ended up with just over 11K downloads across all Amazon sites, and the month's sales that followed were around $700 total. It's gone downhill fast from there]

I believe that my highly ineffective and non-professional cover, and crappy boring blurb, impacted that effort negatively and prevented me from achieving any permanent rise in visibility. So this one's to see if I'm right.

Should the results from the two-day promo suck, I'll wait a few weeks and try to get into BookBub, and use the remaining three days in a row.

I'll be updating this thread for the two-day promo, and will occasionally post sales figures here for before-and-after comparison. Here are my sales for August thus far:

Broken Angel: 0 US - 1 UK
Devil's Honor: 1 US - 2 UK
Mask of the Serpent: 0 US - 2 UK
Shades of Black: 1 US - 3 UK
Origins: 1 US - 1 UK

I am not in fact from the UK. They just like me better over there.

More totally exciting updates coming soon! LOL