Self-Publishing Part 12: the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers: from a Tournament to a Marathon
With marathons: as long as you cross the line, you win, no matter how long it takes.
Self-Publishing Part 12: How the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers, a Real Time Break
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
So far, this path to publication has relied mostly on an extended flashback, with occasional forays into general truths. Today will be a break into present time, with a quick step back a couple of weeks to prepare for what is happening now. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 12: the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers or A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Speaking of marathons, A Perfect Blindness has been out for about 6 months.
Sales?
Not nearly what I wanted, hoped, nor planned for. I’m creaking along with about half of what I need for the first milestone (with an asterisk explained later).
Likely owing to that I’ve avoided doing what’s important. By which I mean the hard parts. Been busy as hell. But not getting what I need to get done: outreach. The letting people know the book exists part. The scary part. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: Amazon Lists, Best of This, That, or the Other Thing
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Amazon lists appear at first flush to be the Holy Grail of big-data sales accuracy. Amazon knows what was sold, when, by whom, to whom, and for some Kindle versions, even how many pages have been read: Finally, the El Dorado of sales accuracy.
Except it’s not. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: Bestseller, best of and Other lists. Who makes them matters.
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
The last member of the list making quadrangle are the list makers themselves. No one does this as a public service. They are trying to attract people to their publication/business, be that a newspaper, periodical, blog, bookseller or what-have-you. Now, if all the list maker did was get raw numbers, rank the top X titles and publish it, all the bestseller lists would be essentially the same, differing—if at all—only by how the numbers were grouped: broadly as fiction vs. nonfiction or more narrowly into genres like mysteries, or subgenres like drawing-room whodunits. But if this were all a list maker did, it wouldn’t matter much if a reader went to the NYT or WSJ, or this blog, or that column: Same number of books sold. Same titles. Same ranking, same old same old.
How would that attract readership? Why buy XYZ newspaper if I can find the same thing in that one, or some other one or free in a blog? Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: Bestsellers, Best-Ofs, and Other lists. Who cares?
each of which is further broken down into “Bestsellers,” “Most gifted,” “Hot new releases,” “Most wished for” and “Top rated”
Self-Publishing Part 11: How Many Books are You Selling Anyway?
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness When talking book sales, the recording industry analogy provides a last insight: regional sales. Each of the three most important recording industry bodies handles international sales differently, sometimes giving some hint to that in their name: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) handles, unsurprisingly “recorded […]
Self-Publishing Part 11: What Selling 250 Copies Really Means
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Returning to the idea that the average self-published book sells fewer than 250 copies: What does this say about the average author of the self-published book? That he or she knows fewer than the average number of people, or that the people they know aren’t the kind that supports writers? Or that only a few close personal friends and some family ever buy self-published books?
Nope. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: the Book Hunts for 500 Buyers
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
Why only 500 books? Why not 5,000? Ten thousand?
The 500 copies sold is a first mile-marker, not an end goal, which also happens to come with serious benefits for books on iUniverse’s Traditional Publishing Path like A Perfect Blindness. Read More
Self-Publishing Part 11: A Wobbly Platform Starts Taking Aim
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
All manner of plans still not enacted aside my site was live.
Further, I was trying out the ideas from the books I’d chosen as models albeit in a piecemeal, disorderly, catch-as-catch-can fashion.
One of my first active actions was to take every one of the early fans from the FB group and put them into the email list program, make a fancy-looking (imagine quite busy with far too many images) email announcing the book’s publication, which I then sent to all eleven of them. The results: One recipient confirmed buying my book because she got this email. That’s nearly 10% conversion, which is quite high I’ve read. More importantly, it’s proof of concept, suggesting that I’m NOT wasting my time.
Certainly, with such a tiny sample, this single email proves nothing, but it WORKED damn it!
Then, I emailed a few friends and much of my immediate family. Why not all my friends and family? Read More
