The 27th of April 2022 will mark the end of my seventh year in self-publishing. I will, as usual, be reporting how my publishing efforts fared during the past year and post the sales numbers for the year and lifetime figures early in May. I usually speculate on what the next year will bring in that post as well. While I may do that as well, I’ve already been already thinking about my future adventures in self publishing, and I thought I might share some of my thoughts early.
The truth is that I’m feeling a bit restless when it comes to self publishing. I set out to see if I could find a readership for my work -- without putting either my money or much effort into doing so. I opted to rely on the frictionless nature of “free” to tempt potential readers into giving my work a try. I’m thinking that seven years is a sufficient amount of time to judge how well my plan worked, or didn’t.
I have reached a fair number of readers, though I can’t put any solid number to it. My best selling work has been downloaded over 14,000 times. But most other titles sales numbers run in the 4,000 to 1,000 range, Clearly a only few thousand people at most read all of my books. But that is fair enough, since I try to make each book different so as to perhaps appeal to different people. Given my very modest efforts at promoting my work, I am quite happy with the number of people I have entertained. It is a good number, but not so many that I’m feeling any pressure to produce more work. Though I am. The big upside, as far as I am concerned, is that I did it my way. And though I could’ve afforded to spend money promoting my work, I am convinced that it would not have made much of a difference, since I am not writing mainstream Amazon ebooks. So in that respect I am not only happy, and richer as well.
While I think my approach worked initially, but as time has gone by, it no longer works all that well, due to the way the ebook market has evolved over these last seven years. The free price that brought me several thousand readers does not work as well as it once did on Amazon because no one is likely find non-promoted books on that site. Not spending a dime to promote my work will not work today for the same reason. And if I really want lots of readers, not only would I have to spend folding money to promote them, but I would have to write the type of books that most Amazon ebook readers want to read in their genre. So, what can I do?
The first thing I am going to do differently, is to shop around my next novel around to agents and publishers instead of self publishing it out of the gate. I expect to allocate six months after I finish it for this project. If, by ill chance, it should not happen to sell, then… Well, then I don’t know. I might look into launching it on kickstarter. I hear you can make millions doing that. Or I could self publish it, though this time, with little to lose, I am leaning towards putting a price on it right from the start. However if I went this route, I would still offer a limited number of free ARC (advanced readers’ copies) to my loyal fans via this blog site. But that is likely a year in the future, so nothing is set in stone.
I’m also thinking of trying to get my paper books into select SF bookshops, perhaps with a free $100 worth of books to prime the pump, and selling additional copies at my printing cost afterwards. There are a lot of SF stores that I could approach with this offer. However, I will wait until the Draft2Digital merger is complete and use their print on demand service, rather than Amazon's, for this project, should I decide to go down this road.
As I said, I’m restless. I’m willing to explore new options. That said, being an old dog, learning new tricks might prove to be either too hard, or too much trouble. So who knows? I don’t expect anything to change anytime too soon. But things might change someday.
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