In May of 2010 I was attending the local writers’ conference in Tallahassee, Florida, and got into a conversation with a woman about publishing. She told me about how people were self publishing and racking up huge numbers in sales. She sent me an email later that week with some links to articles about the self publishing boom. I immediately forgot about those articles and kept doing what I had been doing the fourteen previous years, sending my work to traditional publishers and agents. The replies I got were the same I had been getting as well. While they liked my ideas, settings, characters, titles and storylines, they all said it was not for their market, list, or whatever other catchword they were using. The worst were the ones that looked like they hadn’t even looked at my baby, especially from those houses that required I send a hundred pages or more of printed material that had found its way into their circular file. In November of 2011, after receiving a group of these replies, I decided I had had enough, and pulled up the email to look at the articles. Over December I established this blog, worked on my website, and learned everything I could about self publishing. I downloaded Paintnet, a free graphics program, and went to work on my first two covers, which were fairly hideous, but looked good to this first time cover creator. On December 31, 2011, I released my first two offerings on Smashwords and Amazon. Those were The Deep Dark Well and The Hunger. I thought I had it made, that the sales would rack up and the money would just come rolling in. How wrong I was.
I sold some books, not many, on both Amazon and Smashwords. And I got my first review for The Deep Dark Well on Amazon and was amazed. It went on about how good the novel was, then gave me three stars. The reason: my formatting. I had assumed that if I delivered a good looking word doc to Amazon’s conversion machine I would get a well formatted book. After going through some trials and tribulations I finally figured it out, and now format to Mobi on my on computer before upload to Amazon.
There was a lot of learning along the way, and I think if I had come into the process knowing everything I know now I would have saved several hundred hours of work. The first nine months were brutal as far as sales. I would get a $30 payment from Amazon here, $19 from Smashwords there, a nice little addition to my paycheck, but nothing to celebrate. Then I bit the bullet and signed several books up for KDP Select, allowing me to promote them on Amazon, and things began to take off. The Deep Dark Well was my first promotion, and I ended up giving away 4,000 copies, and later sold 1,300. In August I made my usual $30 check, but in September things started to get much more interesting. For that month I made $480, in October $980, in November $2,860, and for December its looking like over $9,000. That’s doubling or more every month. I have some more books coming out soon, including the first sequel to The Deep Dark Well. If things keep going the way they are I will give up my daytime job and start writing full time. And that is the dream realized.