First ten days of publishing for the Amazon Kindle and forty two sales

Ten days ago I published my first book, The Nameless War, for the Amazon Kindle and as of Sunday 31st July I've had forty two sales. The book belongs to genre of military science fiction, which is a pretty narrow category, so these sales are very encouraging. The whole exercise has been a bit of an experiment and so far the whole process of publishing for the Kindle has been very smooth, no problems have jumped out at me yet, so I’m waiting now to see if any reviews come in. I’m planning on putting up a short story next within the next month. So watch this space for further experience.

It's here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DTO04K/?tag=absowrit-20 and here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005DTO04K/?tag=absowrit-21

To be honest not much in the way of advertising thus far. A couple of posts on sites I know that would have my most likely readers, that kind of thing. I've been looking a few of the suggestions I seen on this site and some look practical for me.

MMcDonald64 said:

I just grabbed a sample as I like military sci-fi to some extent. I loved the Lost Fleet series. One thing about your description, for me at least, is there is no mention of a main character, just five people who stand in the way of destruction. That might not be a problem for most military science fiction fans as I'm not in the usual demographics for that genre, so my opinion might be totally invalid here.

What drew me to the Lost Fleet series was the mention of Black Jack Geary and his circumstances. The concept was intriguing to me. Of course, I'm probably not your target audience. While I don't mind space battles, the tech stuff isn't what would keep me reading.

Anyway, 42 sales in 10 days is great!

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Thank a lot and no opinion honestly given is invalid. To say the least I banged my head against the wall for a while trying to come up with the description. Ultimately I went for short and sharp because the five main characters are each basically a front man (and woman) for five separate but interrelated threads and trying describe their activities, even in brief was likely to result in a page of text.

I've looked at the blurbs of the military scifi books that I own (The Lost Fleet, the Starfire books and some of earlier Honorverse books) and really none of them go into much detail. Certainly when I going looking for reading material on the Kindle marketplace if a description goes on for more than a short paragraph, I'm not going to give it the time of day.

But we will see what the book reading public has to say.

Cloud Eight said:

That's an outstanding start!

I share your head-banging in the description dept. Still tweaking mine, still not satisfied. I think it's harder than writing the book--and really important to draw in readers.

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Yeah, it is difficult. What I did was check the blurbs of books I own in the same genre that I have read often enough to be completely familar with the full content. Now these are books that have gone through the professional publishing process and descriptions are short and generalized. The one for 'In Death Ground' by David Weber and Steve White is:

'In difficult ground, press on. In encircled ground, devise strategems. In death ground, fight.'' 5000 ye ars later, in the time of the 4th Interstellar War, Sun Tzu'' s advice still makes perfect sense for the humans and their allies the Orions.

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So what I'd say is look at your genre and by guided by what the professionals have come up with.

Rubay H. said:

I downloaded the sample and so far, so good. Your formatting looks excellent, too. Did you do it yourself or hire it out?

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Did it myself and as far as I can make out it went smoothly. The file was from WORD and I sent it to my Kindle a couple of times. The only bit that did involve a bit of messing is I put an image on the front page same out I'm using for my avatar here, it doesn't appear on the sample and it took a couple of attempts to get it small enough to fit on the front page with the text.


Since there seems to be the interest here I'll give on Sunday my sales figures for the second full week.