Me and my publishing ‘empire’

(Or, what do you mean, editing?)

NOTE: this narrative is a summary of the way I started out in epublishing – I thought it might be of interest to anyone who wants to try it out. Please feel free to ignore this page if the topic doesn’t interest you! (this is a cat-free zone)

I built my publishing ‘empire’ in the following way. Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily recommend that you do the same, or at least not if you want to be recognised as a professional writer. The timescale of the process has been nearly 2 years so far.

 Step 1 Good price point for a beginner

I suppose I fell into epublishing sort of by accident. I had been writing for years, on and off, and in a more organised way for the past few years since I started taking part in NaNoWriMo and producing novels every November. One of my NaNoNovels was a sort of cosy mystery/thriller. I wrote a short story late in 2009, using the same characters and entered it in a competition run by Alibi (the cable tv channel which specialised in mystery and crime dramas. I was actually very pleased with the short story and quite cross when it didn’t get to the final. At around the same time, someone on a writer’s website I frequented (authonomy) mentioned Smashwords (www.smashwords.com) as a way of self-publishing ebooks. I discovered you could  publish short stories there and either charge people for them or give them away for free. I decided to give this a try with my short story to see how many free downloads I could get. Smashwords doesn’t just sell ebooks on its own site but it distributes them to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and I think a few other sites including iTunes and Amazon.

I was soon logging on to the site every day to see what my ‘sales’ graph looked like – although I wasn’t actually selling the story. It was quite exciting to see it climb, although I admit it took some time to reach 1,000 downloads (I realised later this figure was only from the basic Smashwords site, and in fact B&N seem to have recorded over 4,000 downloads for this first story and the next one).

After a while there was a favourable review by a reader as well! I had hit the big time.

 Step 2 Let’s try a whole novel this time

My cosy mystery/thriller was then more or less ready to go. By now it was the first in a series as I had written a sequel during NaNo 2009. I debated with myself whether to try and sell this one, but decided to make it available for free too.

I uploaded it to Smashwords and was pleased to find people starting to download it before I had even written the blurb!

That reminds me to mention that there is a very well-defined format required for Smashwords, and some people find it difficult to cope with. Basically you shouldn’t have any extraneous tab characters or page breaks. But there’s a guide on the Smashwords site that leads you through the whole thing, including what to put at the start and how to cope with chapter headings.

This one was quicker to get going than the short story had been. After a while I was pleased to see a 5 star review for it on the B&N site, although there were also some terrible reviews! The worst comment was that it was boring, from which I deduced that someone outside the target audience had accidentally got hold of it.

Note: I didn’t do any promotion at all of either of these ebooks – just being available for free seemed to be enough. One of my reviews said the reader would look out for more books by ‘this author’ which was encouraging.

 Step 3 Swimming with the big fish

Soon after that I found out more about Kindle Direct Publishing and decided to give it a try. I chose (perhaps this was the wrong decision) to start with my sci-fi novel (NaNo 2006) but because it was published under my real name and the others were all under a pen-name, this caused a bit of confusion with Amazon at a later stage, and I would advise anyone else to stick to one name for their writing if possible. I published it in December 2010. [I had already tried submitting this novel to a few publishers but it met with instant rejection everywhere.] Kindle formatting is also quite specific but in a different way from Smashwords (of course). Again there are guidelines, on the Kindle Direct Publishing website.

I did get some sales, mostly in the UK, of my sci-fi novel, but they more or less fizzled out after the first few months, partly because I had a terribly busy spell at my day job and had to go and give a presentation at a conference in Germany in March 2011, which took a lot of extra preparation work and left no time for any promotional efforts. But I wasn’t down-hearted! I was just happy to have got it ‘out there’. I still sell a copy every now and then.

By that time I had worked out that the best way to get a good readership on Amazon was to publish a series, and fortunately this also fitted in with my strategy on Smashwords, where I was already planning to sell the cosy mystery sequel. I published the second in the cosy mystery series in June 2011 on both Smashwords and Amazon, charging 99 cents. Results on Amazon were reasonable for a new author (not sure what they are for Smashwords and its other channels yet as they haven’t all reported back since about July), but it was when I decided to add the first in the series to Amazon that something odd happened.

 Step 4 Riding the cosy wave

I hadn’t wanted to put the first novel in the mystery series up for sale on Amazon, because I was giving it away for free on Smashwords and that didn’t seem to be fair on readers. However, I realised it would be better to have both on Amazon to get the benefits of the ‘series’ effect, so eventually at the start of August I added it to Kindle at a price of 99 cents, the same as the other one. This is the minimum price you can set on Kindle, but now read on.

Within days, Amazon had ‘price-matched’ it and made it available for free but only on amazon.com, not on co.uk. I was absolutely amazed by the number of downloads – about 1,000 a day for the first week. This had a bit of a knock-on effect on the second one in the series, not that I’m getting thousands of sales of it, but it has kept selling at about 1 every 2 days since the start of August, which is quite reasonable by my own standards although might be disappointing to someone with higher expectations. I’ve also had 3 reviews of the first one on amazon.com (two 4 stars and a 2 star) and these have kept the momentum going.

[this paragraph edited October 29th]  On amazon.co.uk things have improved vastly during the month of October. After waiting so long, I was thrilled to see my first novel becoming available for free on the site, and this has given a massive boost to both my sales and my confidence. Readers in the UK have generally been much more enthusiastic in their response to the novel and its sequels (I released the third in the series a couple of months ago) than these in the USA. This isn’t surprising as they are in many ways archetypal ‘British’ mysteries.

 Step 5 What more can I do?

I don’t think I’ve done nearly enough to promote my writing but here are a few things I have done:

1. Set up 3 interconnected blogs which talk about writing as well as other stuff
2. Become active on Kindleboards (USA) and Kindle Users Forum (UK) – in many ways a waste of time! But you can learn a lot there from other writers
3. Try to contribute to appropriate threads on Amazon discussions – this is fraught with difficulty as some readers don’t like writers! Incredible, isn’t it?
4. Give printed copies of some of the novels to friends and work colleagues to read – again fraught with difficulty, especially when you’ve spent years hiding the fact that you write! [printed copies obtained in small numbers via Lulu.com] Great fun to discuss the novels with friends – the sci-fi one is particularly popular.
5. Have some tiny cards printed with information/pictures – moo.co.uk – not enough confidence to hand them out yet though…
6. Offer to write a guest post on some complete stranger’s blog – scary!

I’ve tried hard not to do these things:

1. Annoy people on Twitter by going on and on about my novels
2. Ditto on Facebook – have probably carried this too far, ie tried too hard to keep my writing secret!

I would still like to do some of the following:

1. Get a real-world audience locally
2. Sell printed books, for people without ereaders
3. Increase my web ‘presence’ somehow but without having to do any pushy selling.
4. WRITE MORE BOOKS! This one is actually the easiest for me – publishing some novels has given me a huge incentive to write more, and at the moment I have one novel in the editing process (thanks to Camp NaNoWriMo in July) and another in the planning stages for this year’s NaNoWrMo in November.