The good news is that your book seems to be doing well without a large amount of piracy!
Interesting! *collates data* Thank you for letting me know!
Of course, this may just mean I'm not popular enough to pirate.
(Yet!)
Bought it, read it, loved it!
And now I'm waiting for the next instalment...
*dies of the flattery*
Thank you, Captcha.
I'm curious how this will work out, since the prevailing self-publishing advice (I think?) is to release books closely in time (a few weeks/months?) so you can keep readers aware of your existence. Almost an entire year in between books, and three years (?) to put out four books--why, that's almost big-trade-publishing slow.
Yes, yes, yes, I know.
A-book-every-couple-months is indeed the prevailing SP wisdom.
Unfortunately, I can't write that fast to the quality I'd want to release under. (I can
type that fast, sure, but I can't
plot that fast, usually, and I certainly can't research or edit that fast . . .)
It's (potentially) a problem.
I'm hoping that by writing to a niche, I'm writing books that are not interchangeable -- that people are willing to wait for and not forget about. I'm a smidge faster than "fast" trade publishing schedules, and in SFF I think that may be okay -- as a SFF reader I consider "a book a year" in a series to be UBER FAST, and I remember being impressed by Robin Hobb and Jim Butcher before I got into self-publishing and everyone was like, "a year, oh no, you're dead in a year!"
This is another part of the reason I'm aiming my promotion at general SFF readers and reviewers and not at people who specifically read SP work: the former are likely to be delighted with my release schedule; the latter would likely forget about me.
The question of whether to release faster is sort of moot because I'm not willing to release something I'm unhappy with. But I'm kicking around ideas to start building my business plan around my turtle-like speed more. For instance, maybe I can write two books a year if they're in different series -- if unsnarling plot is what's slowest for me, maybe writing another book in parallel won't slow down this series, and will give me another release. I've been playing around with a few ideas for another series, though I probably wouldn't be able to get a new series off the ground till 2016, if then, since I'd probably need at least a year for the first book. Maybe I should look into short stories / novellas / novelettes as a way to stay on people's radars (though is the ROI for cover art / editing worth it to self-publish at that length? Would I forgo that level of production quality for shorter works? I don't know). While editing books 2 and 3 I'm starting to write more shorts and submit them to trade markets; if I get some traction there maybe it'll help my name stay on people's minds in between.
And I can SP them under CC once the short story contract lapses.
So, yeah, that was a very long answer.
But yes, most SPers who make a living
do put out a book every few months, and rely on fewer sales each over a vast number of titles to make decent money. It's not a bad business plan, considering how hard it is to write a single book that takes off (and how impossible it is to
plan for a single book or series to take off). To be honest, I can't think of a single financially successful self-publisher who
doesn't have a release schedule that's faster than mine is! Which certainly makes me a less-ideal self-publisher, so I AM looking for ways to mitigate my slower speed.
