I just published a guide for indie authors called A Practical Guide to Self-Publishing , also known as TitlesToMarket.com .
For years now, I’ve been hearing the same questions from new indie authors:
To Hell with Johnny Manic is on sale this week on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Johnny Manic combines the old-school crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson with the multi-layered deceptions of Gone Girl.
“A truly riveting tale of deception, murder and psychological suspense. One of the year’s best thrillers.” - BestThrillers.com
Impala won first place for genre fiction in the 24th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards . They announced it in the March/April issue of the magazine.
My new book, Impala, was finished in May–not just the writing, but the editing, proofreading, design, and layout. I decided to have it ready four months before release so I could do some of the promotional work that traditional publishers do: get the book into the hands of reviewers, talk to bookstores and news outlets. The ebook market is quite competitive, and like the app market for smart phones, it often seems like a race to the bottom. The writers and app developers who appear to be winning are the ones who are working really hard to sell their product for 99 cents, or to give it away for free in hopes of drawing attention to their paid works.
Are you a self-published indie author by choice, or are you one of those losers who couldn’t get a book deal?
Yes.
What’s the process like? What happens between conceiving a book and getting it into the marketplace?
You get an idea, and you turn it over in your head for a while. You write a draft, and you think it’s great, so you show it to some friends. Then you think it sucks.
I got an email from a fellow author who is considering raising the price of his Amazon Kindle title. At $2.99, his e-book is so much cheaper than his paperback that people aren’t buying the paperback.
I’ve seen this same phenomenon with my book . The electronic version sells about 10 times as many copies as the paperback. Amazon’s more voracious readers tend to go for e-books, because they consume so many of them. When self-published authors advertise through any of the promo sites that send out email blasts to their subscribers, we’re reaching mostly those voracious Kindle readers.
I changed the e-book price on Warren Lane from $4.99 to $0.99 on all platforms, from Saturday, Sept. 19 through Sunday, Sept. 27. I posted a link to the book on my Facebook page, and friends shared it. That resulted in 2 sales before the promotional sites started pushing the book on Monday. (Most people in my FB network who wanted the book already had a copy. Hence the low sales.)
The aim of the sale was to increase readership, not to make a profit. I knew I’d be taking a loss here. I spent about $600 to promote through a number of sites, which are listed below. I was going to post the actual sales figures for the book, because I like openness and transparency (I’m an open source developer by day). But I learned that publishing sales numbers violates the terms of service for both Amazon and Kobo. So the most I can do here is talk about how the promotions affected my sales rank.
Warren Lane is finally out there, available for purchase as both a paperback and an electronic book. You can get it at Amazon , or you can order a copy through your local bookstore.
You can also read a sample chapter right here.