My Own Self-Publishing Journey — Part Two — One Honest Indie
This one is called “Exaggerated Success: Part One.” After I published my second book under my newly formed publishing imprint, I continued to be astonished at how well the book managed to sell throughout the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. In fact, both books were selling like hotcakes.
After I hit The New York Times bestseller list with my first novel Identity Crisis, I made a few pathetic attempts to spread the word by emailing out a few press releases I created. I was a journalism major. I can’t read my own writing, sorry. I was a journalism major and in various positions had seen enough press releases to have a sense of what should go in one.
But really since effort was not kept up or adequately targeted or followed through on or anything, that might have been a good thing to do, but my choice was to keep blogging. I think what I’m saying here is that I didn’t really adequately do a good job of spreading the word to important publications. I guess. It was like it never happened in terms of what was out there in the world. If I’m honest. I have to admit, the blog itself may have been more interesting to other writers than to readers of my books. But what I wanted to do was write honestly about the weirdness of having dystonia and managing to write novels and even make a living from them. However, unless you are developing an actual fan base of actual people who actually read your work, you’re not going to do well at all in terms of sales, I failed to realize that the only reason my books were doing so well was not necessarily that I had a rabid group of readers I could rely upon.
In fact, I didn’t. What I had were sales at 99 cents a pop. It was early days for ebooks and indie authors, and my books were cheap. I’m sure a great many Kindle owners downloaded the things and never bothered to read them. As for reaching the Amazon Top 100 bestsellers, that’s nice and all, but relying on that measure for success is like relying on stock market trading to make a living and like the stock market, Amazon rank is highly variable and sensitive to the least little sale here and there. Plus, it’s all about the algorithms. Anyone who claims to understand Amazon’s algorithms fully is just blowing smoke up your ass.
That’s that one. Part one. I’ve written part two. I don’t think there is a part two actually. It just says “Getting Started”, so I’m not sure what that’s about, but I’ll read that next. Whatever it is, I’m just gonna read from my journals because really you wanna know what’s going on. This is what’s going on, and this harkens back to the day in a way when people would keep blogs as daily journals. I don’t intend to do this on a daily basis. I just can’t. It’s just too much work. There is work involved in putting these videos together and there are applications that don’t always cooperate. In any case <laugh>, I won’t rant about that. Take care, and I’ll talk to you later.
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Originally published at https://debbimackblogs.com on December 20, 2022.
