Learning as I go: lizo27's self-publishing thread

Just going to chime in with the 'this is a long game; don't give up' advice.

A lone book is a hard sell.

Please stop checking your sales except for maybe once a month. Anything else is crazy-making.

Write your next book. Set deadlines for yourself when you can get it done and when you can get it out. Do whatever you must to make those goals.

I promised myself I wouldn't give up until I had 3 books out and I could assess what I was really doing. Now that I'm on the last legs of prepping book #3, I realize that's still too soon and that I need more books/another series out (and that putting 2 years between releases is a bad, bad idea--that's not actually trying. Don't make my mistakes! Make your own )

PS 17 sales in the first two weeks is pretty awesome. Stay the course and focus on getting more books out.

lizo27 said:

It doesn't help that I don't really know what it means to be successful as a self-publisher. Should I feel like a success if I sell a hundred books? A thousand?

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Let's start with: How many sales does it take to break even on your financial investment?

lizo27 said:

Okay, this is a a good, practical measure of success (though I fear I may have shot myself in the foot by overpaying for ads). Thanks!

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No problem. I like it as a metric of success because it's (a) a genuine milestone for any new business and (b) generally achievable for most people self-publishing on a budget. Once you reach it, you celebrate, then set another target.

lizo27 said:

It's my understanding that bloggers and book reviewers just don't do self-published books. So I guess I just have to let book one sink to the bottom of the sea while I work on book two.

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Who told you that? There's bunches of bloggers and reviewers out there. Some of them surely review self-published books.

There are a lot of companies who organise blog tours and reviews for self-published books. I'm not advocating paying them necessarily, but if you could find tours they've done for books like yours, you could figure out which blogs might be interested in your work so you can approach them independently.

I think you're probably fine. In fact, this is a good thing!

The way KU works means that it's a smaller pool of books to draw upon then the rest of Amazon. So any book you put in there is going to be more noticeable to the horde of KU subscribers looking for free content to guarantee that they get their money's worth out of their monthly $10.

This is why I'd recommend the program for most new authors... Sure, you don't get paid full price for your novel, but you get paid something, and more importantly, it's likely to get you read.

And folks who plunk down $10 a month for that all-you-can read book buffet? They are VORACIOUS. Moreover, they like to tell other folks when they find something they really like. And they're not shy about reviewing, either. Hell, I'm pretty sure at least half my Amazon reviews came from KU folks.

So that 700 pages? That's roughly four people reading your book, and (221 pages times .0045, dah dah dah carry the two...) about a dollar in your pocket for every one who finishes it.

Huh, not too shabby! With your page count you're making only a little less than your 35% royalties. That works.

So think of Kindle Unlimited like a book club, where you're letting them buy your book at a slight discount. They still count as sales on your end, and you can kinda track how many of them happen each month by adding up total KENP and dividing by your page count.

Yeah, some people just read really fast when they hit something they like.

Well, like you said, it was bound to happen. However, I would prefer to think that they cared enough to actually say something.

Given the prevailing culture on Goodreads, if they hated it, you'd have a frothing review with a lot of capslock and gifs right now. Goodreads ratings tend to skew lower than Amazon ratings. A two-star rating just means it wasn't to their taste.

On Goodreads it's also possible they didn't even read it, they just didn't like the concept or cover or something else.

I really need to get on Goodreads. I've been waiting until I actually publish...I didn't want yet another social media reason to procrastinate. I'm finding FB, YouTube, and twitter distracting enough.

lizo27 said:

Haha, true. Ah, well. I'll be philosophical about it in a moment--just have to get past the initial pinch.

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There'll be many more over the lifetime of a book, especially if you do free promotions. You just have to dust yourself off and move on

Hey lizo, sorry you're feeling down!

Low sales are pretty much the norm for self-pubbing, particularly for a first title. One of the perks of self-pubbing, though, is that you have some flexibility to change up things that aren't working.

Have you given any thought to jazzing up your cover a bit? I'm not sure it's really conveying how exciting your book actually is according to your blurb. There's dark magic and a race against time! I think you could show that better on your cover.

(And there's my unsolicited advice for the day, so sorry!)

lizo27 said:

Now have one full week of zero sales, and one page read in the last four days. I'm trying to work on the second book but my enthusiasm for the whole project is pretty dead right now. Don't know what to do.

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Keep going! If I stopped writing every week (or month!) I didn't sell anything, I wouldn't have a trilogy coming out this year! Building a catalog is very important. It's a long game.

Really, I think a better cover couldn't hurt, and your story should make it easy. Nice gothic structure in the fog, find a good clear font for the title and author name, with a Hal Bishop mystery subtitle, and I think it would give forwards a much clearer picture of the contents.