Cathleen's Once Upon a Time Publishing Journey

Hi, all.

So, the last month has been really productive--or at least my productivity is showing results all at once. I've self-published my first book, and it's flanked by two trade anthologies.

I finished self-publishing Dragon Hoard this morning. It had a lot in common with giving birth. I don't think of my book as my baby, but by the end, all I wanted was for the pain to stop. It was incredibly difficult. The emotional resistance was so extreme, I couldn't do it sober. And I know we joke about how we write drunk, edit sober, but I'm a generally sober person. I'm still amazed at all of the "Who are you to think you can do this?" types of thoughts I had to fight my way through. I don't think there's anything wrong with my courage, but the issue was in doubt at numerous points.

Formatting is seriously not an area of strength for me, so my publishing happened in fits and starts over the past week. I didn't go with KDP select. I couldn't have even if I'd wanted to since Dragon Hoard is a collection of short stories, and the publishers aren't about to pull the ones I've sold off their sites. But even without that, I'd not have gone that route, for various reasons.

All the ebooks for Dragon Hoard were supposed to be free, but Amazon won't price match Smashwords, iBooks, B&N, etc. so it's $.99 there, which is a setback. Serious, articulate groveling had no effect on Amazon's decision. I've done a lot of research, and I decided to make the first book free for a number of reasons. So that's the first hitch, right at the start.

I wanted the book to be free because the number one reason people buy books is because they've read a book by that author before and liked it, which makes sense because I do the same thing. But this means that every debut author is inherently screwed.

The research I've done puts it another way. Basically, I guess you have to decide on what your goal is for your book, between reach and income. I decided the best thing I could focus on was increasing my reach. As of today, I have 3700 Twitter followers, 129 blog followers, and 25 people on my email list. It's my third month with over a thousand hits on my blog. That's probably only enough to give away a book. Besides, I really like the idea of giving something back.

Anyway, in the past week I've had 75 downloads through Smashwords and nothing on Amazon, which would seem to indicate that free is better right now. That's utterly without promotion. I haven't told the rest of the world that my book is for sale yet. I was going to do that tomorrow on #SundayBlogShare because my blog stats on Thursday (Thanksgiving) were absolutely dismal, and Friday wasn't a whole lot better. Today was back to normal, but I had no idea it would be. For all I knew, the entire Thanksgiving weekend could have been a black hole.

Besides, I just finished with CreateSpace this morning. Something in my soul likes everything tidy to start off.

I've read a bunch of these threads, and a lot of the focus seems to be on how much money is made or how many copies sold, neither of which are things that really apply to me. I can relate how many people downloaded for free, but my understanding is that a lot of people download books for free and then don't read them. So I'm uncertain what the conversion rate is. How many downloads are usually unread? Half? More than that?

I'm not even really certain what success is for someone at my level. In my genre (fantasy) and furthermore in my subset which would currently be fairly clean fairy tales, what is a positive result? It started as an experiment. Will the genre of Tolkien and Lewis still support the type of tales I read as a child? Or has it all gone grimdark, and I'm writing for an audience of one? I have absolutely no idea.

People say encouraging things, but they could just be trying to help me.

But at least it's up. Fear didn't keep me from publishing. Right now, I'm happy with that victory.

Thanks so much, everyone.

I'll wait and see about Amazon making my book free. It's already been nearly a week. I left time in my schedule for some back-and-forth on it, but the last reply to my wheedling, eminently logical email wasn't encouraging. *shrugs* It's their company--they get to make the rules.

At first I didn't want to let this book go for free, either. But I've already been paid token and semi-pro rates for several of the stories, so I feel better about it that way. I've already been paid, even if only a bit.

And it sounds corny, but I really wanted to give something back. One website recommended putting up a tip jar on your site for free books, but when I considered it, the strength of my internal, "No!" surprised me. I was poor as a child, and I was always very grateful whenever someone gave me a book. One person gave me a children's literature book that became my most treasured possession. It was published back in the Forties, and let me tell you, the educational standard has definitely slid since, to judge from the content. It has all the old standbys--Mother Goose and Three Little Pigs and such--but it also had poetry by Shakespeare and stories of Greek gods in language that I had to stretch to learn. It was double-columned with thin paper, like a Bible, with over a thousand pages. I've wished so many times I could tell the lady who gave me that what it meant to me. I never saw her again. She was just a friend of my parents who took pity on a little girl sitting quietly in the corner. So she casually lit a fire in my mind that never went out.

Ha. I'm still tearing up writing this, over forty years later.

And from a marketing standpoint, I've got Bellerophon coming out in Feb/March, depending on my cover. (It turns out it's much harder to paint a man flying on Pegasus than it is a dragon head. But I'll nail it--in time.) Then I've got my two-part Snow White and the Civil War in the summer, and hopefully a collection of ghost stories in the fall. (5k written.) If I'm awesome, I'll have a Christmas novella to go with it, but my husband is telling me that's sheer dope-smoking optimism, so maybe not. Anyway, I can make money on them.

Hurray for another Art of Losing author! PM me or contact me on my blog if you want to do an interview. Thinkerbeat has got to be one of the best-kept secrets around. People should totally check them out if they write short stories.

You are all so kind! And hey, I got my first review. It's from AW's own shortstorymachinist, on Amazon, and it's a good one. Not just the four stars, but he really got my book. It was awesome. I felt like all this was a little more possible. Maybe there are other people who want to read what I write. For some reason, that bit is extremely important to me.

Anyway, as long as I'm here, I've had 109 downloads for free (Smashwords, etc.) and 2 sales on Amazon. I have no idea if that's good. I'm sure it can be better, but I'm still figuring this stuff out.

I'll say that I'm really observing the whole diminishing returns effect. Lots of action and congrats on Twitter. A smaller number of likes, comments, etc. on my blog. And a smaller number still for downloads.

ETA: Hey, another review--five stars. This one was for Amazon UK.

Hey, Dragon Hoard is free on Amazon, and it's getting more downloads. Not fabulous numbers (I'll update at the end of the month), but still an improvement. My main hope for his book is to find an audience for the kind of thing I write. Then hopefully my novels won't be just shouting into the void.

Thanks so much, everyone. I'm at peace with Dragon Hoard not being to everyone's taste. I don't like all the authors on classics lists, so my ego can take non-universal appeal.

Now I'm trying to get Bellerophon out there. Painting a guy riding a winged horse is harder than I'd thought, but I'll sort it out.

Well, I owe a very belated thanks to lizo--thanks so much to you and everyone else who actually read my book(s).

I haven't posted here for a while because it doesn't seem like I had a whole lot to offer. A lot of the focus here is on book sales and paid promotion, and I haven't had any of the former, and only one instance of the latter because so far, I've given all my books away. Dragon Hoard has been followed by Stolen Legacy (the novelette reader magnet for my email list) and Twelve Tales of Christmas.

I was going to charge for Twelve Tales. I really was. But when it came down to it, it was a Christmas book. And I'm all wrapped up in Catholicism, and it's the season when we were given the greatest gift...and I just couldn't, in the end. Besides, I was buying stuff for everyone else. I made it my Christmas gift to the world.

It worked out okay, though. Twelve Tales reached #4 in its Amazon category, which had a long tail, but still. Kindle--science fiction and fantasy--fantasy--anthologies and short stories, and it was only for free books, not paid. Anyway, I ended up right under the Brothers Grimm for a day or two, which was heady stuff for me. I totally took screen shots.

Unfortunately, I can't call myself an Amazon bestseller because I didn't actually sell anything. It's a pity that being a "best giver" isn't a thing because it has a certain cachet that really appeals to me.

I have done one promotion that was excellent, so much so that it completely dwarfed everything I've ever done social media-wise. It was for Voracious Readers Only (http://voraciousreadersonly.com/), a group that's just getting started, but it's only for people who are willing to give their book away in exchange for email addresses. That's been my real focus, and I'd been feeling bummed because I didn't have anything like real results to show for it.

It's embarrassing, but after all my focus and time spent on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (a very distant third), and my blog (two year's worth!), all I had to show for all that work was forty names on my email list, and two of them were my husband and son.

Now, a couple months later, I have over a hundred and fifty names. And okay, that's still tiny, but it's way better than what I had before. It used to be, all I could say was that at least I wasn't invisible in cyberspace.

And this is the super-cool bit. Now I'm getting actual fan mail.

People like my work. They thank me for writing it. One guy even told me that my book put the joy back in Christmas for him.

And okay, I'm sure other people have this happen all the time and it's no big deal anymore, but this is what I'm really writing for. I want to touch people's lives. I want something I penned to help someone as much as LOTR helped me. That's really it. My big why. I mean, we already live a middle-class lifestyle. I've got my house in a forest on thirteen acres. If I want to take in a person or rescue a dog, I can already do that. I grew up poor, so I already feel rich, although getting out of southern California suburbia was nearly enough to do that by itself. It's been twenty years, and I'm still glad I'm living someplace that's not squished in among millions of others.

I am going to try to sell books later because I need to justify all the time I've taken from my family to put into this thing, and also because of the challenge. Sure, anyone can give a book away. Getting people to part with actual cash is harder. And plus, I'm sure there are people out there who mostly buy books and who look at free books though squinty eyes. My big goal is to find more readers. If I do enough of that, the money thing should take care of itself.

So I'm planning on releasing Bellerophon and another short story collection this year, (To the Victor) and I was going to charge for them--a whopping 99 cents. And I was going to ask for any suggestions from Those Who Have Gone Before. The paid Amazon ads are an obvious place to go, even though it could backfire. When you're paying a quarter a click and only making 35 cents a book, it could easily go into the red. I can afford a certain amount of that, though, so I was going to plunge forward with it anyway, although I'll report back here if it turns out that giving my book away would have worked better in a short-term financial sense.

Anyway, what paid promotions have worked well for you?

Yeah, I was afraid of something like that...and Bellerophon's a stand-alone. I might just chalk it up to the cost of doing business. Fortunately, we're business owners, so my husband understands losing money short term for long-term gain.

Ironically, it would be less expensive if I just gave Bellerophon away. But I don't know. Maybe that will look pathetic, like I don't think my books are good enough to sell. I already have three books for free. Really, that should be enough.

What I want is to have my books cheap enough that people will grab them as an impulse buy. That's why the $.99 price tag. I was thinking next year I'd start charging $2.99 (if my readership has expanded enough to make it feasible). By then I'll have five books out, so hopefully I'll have a decent base.

I mentioned this earlier up-thread--the goal at this point isn't to make money. (Really, if I want to make money, nothing that I can do pays like construction.) The point is to develop a reader base.

I get lots of glowing reviews, and my stuff goes through SYW and SYW-trained beta readers before I even think of publishing. I think the writing's fairly solid. It's a matter of finding the people who get into what I do--which is like the opposite of grimdark. (Think 70s and 80s fantasy.) And then, there's finding out if there are enough of them so I can decide if this is worth the time and money spent running this thing like a business. If after working this gig for another couple years, and if my best-selling book tops out around a few hundred copies, I might as well treat this like a hobby. Put it out there, tweet, Facebook, and blog a bit, send it out to my list, and call it good.

I can suck up some monetary loss to gain more readers. Is there a dashboard or something that I can log onto so I can see how much my Amazon ad is costing? That way I can pull the plug on it if it gets too hideously expensive.

I know lots of other people have used Amazon ads. Did you notice an increase in your email list when using them, or is it sales only?

And also, to reiterate my earlier question, what other advertising have AWers done that paid off well--preferably in terms of subscribers?