As I've posted in another thread, I released my very first novel on Amazon KDP (e-book) and I thought I'd share what I've learned so far about self-publishing.
Firstly, when I started out writing a novel, I made a determination of what audience I was writing for - in my case, the doomer / post-apocalyptic crowd. It's what I like, I've read quite a few books in this genre, and I had a great story I was desperate to put down on paper...lol.
Along the way, I made a point to read the reviews of other books in my genre, especially the negative ones, as I didn't want to repeat the ever-so-common mistakes of first-time self-published authors. The book "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" has been invaluable in this regard - if you don't have a copy of this book, run, don't walk, to grab your own copy. Read it at least 3 or 4 times, study it as if you were taking an exam on it. Do the exercises. I cannot recommend this book enough. Even so, it took me longer to edit and polish my novel than it did to actually write it, and as a result, I released it nearly three months later than I had originally intended.
For those of you who have yet to release a book as a self-published author, be aware you're at a tremendous disadvantage compared to published authors who have professional editors cleaning up their work (not to mention their writing has to meet very high standards just to get with a publisher.)
How to overcome this disadvantage, you might ask? Edit, edit, edit, until your eyes bleed, and then edit some more. Get other people to read and crit your work (something I didn't do enough of with my novel.) Read lots of other books and study how they write - such as limited use of adverbs, avoiding long paragraphs, and most importantly, coming up with a good "hook" to draw the reader in from Page 1, Paragraph 1. When I wrote my first draft, it didn't take long for me to realize I was a long ways from having this book ready for release, and yes, it was quite discouraging at times.
But I kept at it, and I finally did release it about two weeks ago, using social media to announce it to the world. Now, this was a bit of a challenge for me, as I'm not big on social media - I was a real facebook-hater until quite recently. Not good if you want the world to know about your book...lol. However, I was able to get many of my friends and relatives to post my book on their facebook pages, and that was a huge benefit to me in getting the word about about my novel.
As for what I've done since then, I've posted about my book in forums for folks who like these kind of books, with excellent results, and I will continue to do so - it's free, and doesn't take a whole lot of time. As for reviews, I have NOT made any effort to get people to write reviews, as I think this is highly unethical. I only want "organic" reviews so I can have a good idea if I've written a good, enjoyable book or not. If I get a couple not-so-good reviews, and they're kind enough to tell me why, this will be invaluable information I can use for my next book. I really don't think reviews help all that much, unless they come from somebody famous or whatever, so I try not to sweat it too much...lol. I've seen far too many books that have 20 or 25 5-star reviews in the first two weeks, only to have 1 and 2-star reviews trickle in later on - not a good thing, as readers were fooled by all the good reviews. I prefer not to go that route - if my book can't stand on its own, then I need to work on my skills as a writer.
Have I been happy with how it's gone so far? Heck yes! I came into this thing with very low expectations, so I couldn't be more pleased with how it's done so far. Seriously, there are over a million books I'm competing against, so cracking the 10,000 barrier in less then two weeks is a big deal, even though it's still not a huge number of books. I think you have to break the top 1000, or even the top 500 to get to where you're selling 100's of books a day. But hey, I'm certainly not complaining...lol.
I'll leave at this for now, but I invite all of you to ask any questions you my have about self-publishing and the process of selling books on the KDP platform.
Firstly, when I started out writing a novel, I made a determination of what audience I was writing for - in my case, the doomer / post-apocalyptic crowd. It's what I like, I've read quite a few books in this genre, and I had a great story I was desperate to put down on paper...lol.
Along the way, I made a point to read the reviews of other books in my genre, especially the negative ones, as I didn't want to repeat the ever-so-common mistakes of first-time self-published authors. The book "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" has been invaluable in this regard - if you don't have a copy of this book, run, don't walk, to grab your own copy. Read it at least 3 or 4 times, study it as if you were taking an exam on it. Do the exercises. I cannot recommend this book enough. Even so, it took me longer to edit and polish my novel than it did to actually write it, and as a result, I released it nearly three months later than I had originally intended.
For those of you who have yet to release a book as a self-published author, be aware you're at a tremendous disadvantage compared to published authors who have professional editors cleaning up their work (not to mention their writing has to meet very high standards just to get with a publisher.)
How to overcome this disadvantage, you might ask? Edit, edit, edit, until your eyes bleed, and then edit some more. Get other people to read and crit your work (something I didn't do enough of with my novel.) Read lots of other books and study how they write - such as limited use of adverbs, avoiding long paragraphs, and most importantly, coming up with a good "hook" to draw the reader in from Page 1, Paragraph 1. When I wrote my first draft, it didn't take long for me to realize I was a long ways from having this book ready for release, and yes, it was quite discouraging at times.
But I kept at it, and I finally did release it about two weeks ago, using social media to announce it to the world. Now, this was a bit of a challenge for me, as I'm not big on social media - I was a real facebook-hater until quite recently. Not good if you want the world to know about your book...lol. However, I was able to get many of my friends and relatives to post my book on their facebook pages, and that was a huge benefit to me in getting the word about about my novel.
As for what I've done since then, I've posted about my book in forums for folks who like these kind of books, with excellent results, and I will continue to do so - it's free, and doesn't take a whole lot of time. As for reviews, I have NOT made any effort to get people to write reviews, as I think this is highly unethical. I only want "organic" reviews so I can have a good idea if I've written a good, enjoyable book or not. If I get a couple not-so-good reviews, and they're kind enough to tell me why, this will be invaluable information I can use for my next book. I really don't think reviews help all that much, unless they come from somebody famous or whatever, so I try not to sweat it too much...lol. I've seen far too many books that have 20 or 25 5-star reviews in the first two weeks, only to have 1 and 2-star reviews trickle in later on - not a good thing, as readers were fooled by all the good reviews. I prefer not to go that route - if my book can't stand on its own, then I need to work on my skills as a writer.
Have I been happy with how it's gone so far? Heck yes! I came into this thing with very low expectations, so I couldn't be more pleased with how it's done so far. Seriously, there are over a million books I'm competing against, so cracking the 10,000 barrier in less then two weeks is a big deal, even though it's still not a huge number of books. I think you have to break the top 1000, or even the top 500 to get to where you're selling 100's of books a day. But hey, I'm certainly not complaining...lol.
I'll leave at this for now, but I invite all of you to ask any questions you my have about self-publishing and the process of selling books on the KDP platform.
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