This week
marked the one-year anniversary of the digital publication of my first mystery
novel, The McHenry Inheritance. I’ve
had quite a year promoting the book, getting feedback on it, and working on the
next Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt
Away, which I hope to release in early 2014.
Anniversaries
are always a good time to celebrate and take stock. The celebration takes the
form of a free giveaway today (7/26) on Kindle. This essay will be the
inventory, as it were, of what has happened and what I’ve come to understand
about self-publishing in the digital age.
The first
big lesson I learned was about the power of free, as in free book. I decided to
do a promotional giveaway within a couple of days of when the book went up, and
on that first free day moved 250 copies. As I hadn’t yet notified most of my
friends, those “sales” represented new readers who were willing to take a
chance on the book if it cost them nothing. The strategy is that if they like
it, they’ll be willing to pay a modest amount for the next one. I hope.
Building the Fan Base
Based on
the response to free-book giveaways, my understanding of how to market the book
underwent a seismic change over the next few months. Before the book came out,
I was thinking mostly about maximizing revenue from it, but I quickly came to
realize that for an unknown writer, that’s a pipe dream. There are so many
books out there that it’s a rare first novel indeed that will rack up an
impressive number of paid sales.
Instead, I
came to think of it as a way of
establishing some sort of base of followers for the books that I hope will
follow. Simply put, I see it as the acorn, from which a solid oak tree may some
day grow.
More than
3,000 people have acquired the book, and about 90 percent of them got it as a
free promotion. For a first book, that’s a decent acorn, and if a reasonable
number of those folks review the book, tell a friend, or come back for the next
one, I may be on to something. I don’t need John Grisham numbers to consider
the Quill Gordon series a success. A half-dozen books, each generating a few
hundred paid sales a month, could produce a steady stream of income over the
years.
Finding an Audience Takes Time
Realistically,
building a fan base takes time. Most authors do it in increments, one book at a
time, until they finally get a breakout book (if they do) that hits the
bestseller lists. Keep writing; keep promoting; hope for a break; and maybe
good things will happen.
For
instance, I was wondering for nine months why no reviews were forthcoming from
people who’d picked the book up earlier. In the past three months, those
reviews, mostly positive, have been showing up on Kindle, and I now have a
respectable 15 reviews. That starts to make it look like a book that people are
actually reading, which I hope they are.
And it’s
been a lot of fun along the way: Book signings, newspaper interviews, learning
to use Facebook and Twitter for promotional purposes, talking to classes at
schools, blogging. These days, writing the book is only part of the author’s
job description, and I consider myself fortunate indeed that I enjoy the rest
of the package as much as I do. Onward to book number two.
