Sad but true, numbers don’t lie – free sells. 

When I put my first self published book up on Amazon, I knew I was doing it all wrong from the get go. In the course of about a day I went from “Hey, I think I might do this thing” to “Hey, I just bought a cover, generated an e-book, and put it up there.” What did I do wrong?

A Scent of Roses

Copyediting – I don’t know how people can afford this, but I recognize 100% the value of it. I have another novel that will be copyedited (Chrysalis, the novel I wrote earlier this year), but that’s largely thanks to a special program at work. I know even more now how badly this is needed because I’ve received some feedback from friends that found problems a copyeditor would have caught that I completely missed despite a half dozen runs through the novel.

Cover tease and lead up talk – I had none of this, and I think it hurt me. The book came out of the blue, there was no preamble, and if folks missed my initial post about it going live, they likely didn’t know about it.

Turns out, they won’t all laugh at you. Before publishing, a fear I have always harbored is the classic, “What will people think?” And not just people – friends and family. I can honestly say that is no longer a fear. My sales indicate that there are too few readers to worry about that. But all of that changed when I made the book free for a few days – and even that I did wrong. Why? Because there are mailing lists dedicated to helping you promote your book while its free, and I didn’t plan far enough in advance to get on any of them. What I did see, though, was a dramatic increase in sales. They were all free sales, but I went from 1 or 2 max a day to an average of 40 a day while it was free. My pages read in Kindle Unlimited also skyrocketed during this time.

Categorization. I also learned a lot about categorization during the sale. I thought my book fit one or two niche genres, but it turned out it was really, really popular in the Suspense/Paranormal subgenre. This wasn’t a complete surprise – the book certainly fits – but what was a shocker was that at its peak, it was #18 in the free Paranormal books. When my free sale ended, I saw a return to 0 sales and 0 pages read – so I’ve recategorized my book (based on its success during the free sale). While I haven’t seen an increase in sales yet (yay 0), I have seen an increase in Kindle Unlimited pages since the change, to the tune of @200 pages a day being read.

Reviews are everything. While making the book free certainly had an impact, my biggest uptick was when the book was free and had a review. I admit, I’m desperate for reviews right now, and I don’t know how to get them. Good reviews, bad reviews, mediocre 3 stars, it doesn’t matter. Without any reviews, nobody wants to take a risk. I so far have earned 1 review, a 5 star review, and I’m very grateful for that. What I should have done is put the book up for pre-release and then gotten some people lined up for some unbiased reviews ahead of time. I do not advocate poisoning the well here – I really do want unbiased reviews, no matter how bad or good, because reviews tells the reader someone else read this book and finished it. They didn’t stop part way through, didn’t get a chapter in and decide they’d rather scrub the toilet than continue on. They took the time to read it all the way to the end.

Where to from here? Well, obviously I’m still writing. I haven’t given up on trying to be traditionally published with other books, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that self publishing has changed in the last 5 years, and that some books might sell OK that way when they wouldn’t be able to find a publisher at all. Right now I have one book I’m doing edits on before sending to a copyeditor (another paranormal suspense, the first in a series) and an epic fantasy based on some short stories I wrote. The thing, slumbering in my trunk are some other books, books I finished and set aside that might need to be revisited.

To anyone thinking about taking this plunge, this is the question I asked myself after years of sending the same books around and either getting no response, or kindly “not a good fit now” rejections:

If you don’t think you’re going to find a publisher for your book, is it going to earn you more money sitting in the trunk or sitting on Amazon? At least with the latter it might earn back some coffee money.