MumblingSage Self-Publishes

I moved to a new city at the beginning of this summer, and cash has been tight. I'm interning for low-to-no pay (that's a separate debate) and so I searched my human capital inventory to see what I had worth monetizing. I'd toyed with the idea of self-publishing some of my short stories, but I'm still happy with getting my fiction professionally published.

What I did have that has proven valuable to people in my social circles (online and in the new city) is my writing experience. I hung out my shingle as a manuscript doctor, but my self-publishing brain-egg suddenly hatched and I decided to write a sort of memoir/guidebook about how I started getting short fiction and ebooks published. It's a question a lot of my friends and acquaintances have, and while I always point them to Absolute Write, I think it would also be handy to have a 200-page book of advice to point to. The core of the book is some old essays and lessons I shared with writing forums in days past, with a lot of addenda based on what I've since learned through my own developing career, the friends I've helped find publishers, and my internship assisting a published nonfiction author.

It won't make me rich, but selling a few copies may help me pay for groceries or even establish a savings account again.

I play to distribute print copies through CreateSpace along with Kindle Direct and Smashwords for the ebook. The price for the ebook is $4.99, comparable with some other how-to guides. Usually I would retail an ebook for even less than that, but I don't want to sell a guidebook too cheaply because there's reputation to consider.

Marketing will include me offering the book for sale when I speak and/or teach classes (I've had some speaking engagements and am planning to apply to teach a class at the local writer's center) and having a link on my website which is also connected to my social media accounts. Given I often become a go-to publishing resource wherever I am (currently Tumblr), I think I may attract some audience naturally. I don't plan to pay for advertising and, Lord preserve me, I do not intend to become an SEO dweeb.

My first step, before I set up the distribution for the book, has been to run a Kickstarter to generate pre-orders and funding for distribution, formatting, and any other costs I may run into. Given I have a very tight budget, it's been helpful to have some funds right away, and also this has given me a way to gauge interest in the project.

As of today, it looks like people are very interested because I've met my funding goal, although the campaign still has 20 days left to run.

I'll post updates here on the Kickstarter experience and then the actual process of uploading & selling the book. Today's been a rough day (I just flew home from a funeral), but I checked my email to see the Kickstarter funding was complete and felt ready to share!

Thank you!

The most impressive thing about the Kickstarter is that a lot of funding came from drive-by traffic: people browsing projects in the DC area (where I moved). I've done IndieGoGo campaigns in the past and drive-by traffic was almost nil.

I know one other funder is a fellow facilitator from an event I worked at, and I think another may be from Absolute Write or another social media locale because it's 'direct traffic' rather than browsing.

girlyswot said:

That's very interesting (and well done!).

Just to give another perspective, my just-funded kickstarter got almost zero drive-by traffic. Only 4 of my 26 funders have ever funded a kickstarter project before, and at least 3 of those found out about my project elsewhere. I think that in order to get any drive by traffic, you really need to be a staff pick, or have some other way of getting on the front page. Location seems to have worked well for you and I bet that there are certain places where kickstarter funding is much more likely to be forthcoming.

Click to expand...

Definitely; the Washington DC literary scene is thriving from what I've seen. And that's a major reason I'm trying this project in the first place.

@WriterBN: my other advice is to give yourself a lot of lead time, and have a calendar of promotional activities planned. I meant to do more blog posts and even write some essays to publish to promote this Kickstarter, but wound up in a time crunch made worse my family crisis. This means I flew out in the world less prepared than I would like to be, and if you have the luxury of time, use it to the utmost. Decide what audience you're going to reach out to, and make sure your campaign description is compelling and your perks enticing.

I just got a $500 pledge (enough to meet my funding goal 2x over) from someone who found my project by browsing Kickstarter. She was interested in one of my rewards, we discussed back and forth to adapt it in a way that was most useful to her, and she signed on.

I realize most Kickstarter funding comes from family, friends, and fans, but I have to say, these particular rewards for this particular nonfiction project are really attracting the browsing crowd.

One last update for the Kickstarter, 12 hours from close:

My angel funder who came through with the $500 pledge has upped her contribution enough to take me over my Stretch Goal (basically, allowing me to 'pay myself' enough to lower my prices on future manuscript reviews for all other pledgers--I've giving out 'coupons')!

I'll be posting my attempt to analyze my Kickstarter statistics over this weekend--still deciding whether it belongs best in this thread or the thread on Kickstarter in this subforum, or some of both. Now, on to the book! It's written, I'm just hitting a sort of Zeno's Paragraph conumdrum with editing, because I edit one paragraph and then realize I should add something on topic X, which necessitates another 3 paragraphs if not a whole new subsection... But having 20+ supporters waiting on me is a great way to beat writer's/editor's block!

Another update: Now that I've got the CreateSpace account and know how to use it, I formatted & uploaded a short story under my penname. It was a sort of "test run" while I keep working on my Kickstarter book. In particular, I used the option CreateSpace gives to have your book formatted & uploaded to the Kindle store as well.

I also uploaded it separately to Smashwords and then to All Romance Ebooks.

The story was so short (5k words, although a round of revisions expanded it considerably) that it didn't seem worth seeking out a publisher to split the cover price with (50% of 70% of $2.99 isn't much). Thus my decision to put it out myself. I decided to make the cover price $2.99 because I had seen other erotic fantasy shorts going at that price, although upon reflection I'm worried that's still too much. I may run an experiment later this month putting it on sale for half-price.

I released the book August 30th and sold 3 copies in all of September. This doesn't count the free downloads I sent out to my email list. All paid sales came through the Kindle store. I never expected much out of Smashwords, but I admit I'd hoped for more from ARE. Part of the problem was probably the way I let my cover art get formatted wonkily to fit ARE's upload requirements. I've recently reformatted the cover and reuploaded it to look more polished.