The Black Dawn Wars: Book 1...

[Shenku]

[Mandu]

Advice from somebody who practically lives on Amazon.  Your book isn't going to sell at that price.  Virtually all new authors price their book at the $2.99 break point and any unknown who prices their book in the range you did is generally just snickered at and pitied.  That's about the price point that professionally published authors are releasing their self published work at.  They might release it at the $9 price point if it's part of a popular series but within a year it will be around the $6 point.  The really big names like Terry Goodkind can get away with keeping their book price around $9 but that's only because their popular series keep getting new fans due to being fanatically recommended by old fans.  Or else it's the publishers who own the ebook rights keeping the price artificially high because they don't want the ebook versions undercutting their print market.

Second.  You aren't going to make enough from the book to work part time.  The best selling categories on Amazon are romance and erotica.  The popular self published books in those categories sell 200-500 a month.  200 for popular 500 for very popular.  A $2.99 book nets the author $2.09.  At 200 sales a month that comes to  only $418 per month.  If that kind of money makes a significant impact on your lifestyle then you need a new job anyway.  Yes you can find examples of people who are selling hundreds of thousands of copies per year.  But you can also find stories of people who won a lottery jackpot and the odds are about the same.

My advice is to join the KDP program and lower the price of the books to $2.99.  Promote your book on your facebook page and then go overboard and promote the book to any forums you hang out in on the days when you are going to have the free giveaways.  Unless you manage to write another 50 shades of gray that somehow catches on as a cult favorite then the entire purpose of your first book is to get people interested in your writing so that they will buy the follow up books.  You don't have a publishing house printing up posters of your book cover.  You don't have book stores putting copies of your book right next to popular authors.  You don't have professional reviews in newspapers and magazines.  You don't have book signing tours.  Your book doesn't have advertising.  Your book is advertising.

You have to think of current publishing in this way.  Walk into a regular bookstore and think about just how intimidating (or exciting) all those shelves filled with books are.  Now realize that there are only about 100,000 total new fiction books published per year by all the publishing houses put together and many of them only make it into specialty shops.  The number of self published books on Amazon goes up by about 2000 per day.  That's over 7 times the rate of all the major publishing houses put together.  And the shelf space isn't limited to just what the store thinks will sell or what it specializes in.  Any bit of self published drek can wind up there.  Plus there is another feature to book stores and publishing houses.  It doesn't take very long for a book to go out of print.  Unless a book is by a popular author or is a big hit for some reason then it will have a shelf life of about 3 months before it is pulled out of stores.  Think of all the times you have considered buying a book, or have looked for an earlier book in a series only to find out that it's only available at a used book store.  None of the ebooks ever go out of print so the number of books you are competing against keeps growing every day.

So your hopes for making a living at self publishing consist of basically three possibilities. 

First you can do like the romance and erotica authors and write about a book per month or less.  Seriously, the ones who are making money talk about how they publish a new books every month and the erotica authors turn out a new one every week or so since they are more novella length.  Selling 30 copies of a book per month will only get you $60.  But if you have 100 books published that's $6000.  And the readers of those genre don't tend to be picky.  As long as the story contains the elements they enjoy then the depth of character and quality of story line don't matter much at all.

Second you can hope that your book becomes another Wool by Hugh Howey.  That was one of those winning the lottery type of deals.  Who knows, it could happen.  But don't place any bets.

Third you can keep writing and hope to build a fan base.  If enough people decide they like your work then word will spread among their friends and you will develop a regular group of followers who buy all your books.  But this means you have to get your work out there and noticed.  That means giving it away to people who will tell their friends about it.  Most importantly it means giving it away to people who others might listen to.  Like people who have a popular blog that talks about fantasy books.


Whatever you do don't try and publicize your book in the Amazon forums.  That is against Amazon policy plus it really pisses off readers and gets them to put you on their "do not buy" list.  The Amazon forums are pretty much like the forums here.  People hang out and talk about different things.  The big difference though is that about 2 years ago 3 out of 4 messages in the forum were people dropping into every thread and spamming a link to their book.  Amazon finally put a stop to that a while back but that doesn't stop most of the forum regulars from passionately hating any authors who do the same thing.  Now on the other hand if you just have a link to your authors page in your profile (not in your messages, in your profile) and you just drop into various topics and chat just like you would do here it's not unusual to have other forum goers click on your profile and buy your book out of curiosity.  Or even recommend it to others.

[Shenku]

Thanks for your advice, and as you suggested I just dropped the price down to $2.99 for the Kindle version (I can't lower the Print version much more, as it's already just above cost for printing...), but it may take a few hours for the change to take effect.

I never had any delusions of actually being able to live solely on revenue from book sales (although that $400ish a month example you gave is about what I make currently... Not a realistic number to expect, I know, but anything's possible...), but it would be nice if the best case scenario played out and by some miracle my book's series became the next Harry Potter type franchise... Not likely, sure, especially with no real marketing strategy or money to afford to give away free copies to help promote it, but who's to say what may happen in the future?

Really, I'm just hoping it sells well enough that it encourages me to finish the series, as the story's origins are very personal to me. I started working on this story with my mother in October of 2004 with her helping me with initial edits to the first written bit which was essentially the ending to the first book. Over time, I continued working on the story and developing the world and events leading up to that ending, all the while not showing any of it to my mother again with the promise that I'd show it to her to read when I was finished with it. October of 2005, however, she passed away from breast cancer, so she never did get a chance to read it... After that, I made it a personal goal to finish the story and get it published (originally was intending on trying to go through a publishing house, but indie markets became more accessible and available since then). Beyond that, there was no real "plan" per-say on how to market it, I was focusing too much on just finishing the story, which was difficult since I had to scrap whole chapters and re-write several times...

As it stands, with no one reading it, that drive to finish the story is a little diminished... Hell, I still can't even get any of my friends to even buy a copy, let alone read one of the prototypes I'd printed out, and it took almost 6 months to get one of my teachers at school to buy one despite her, as a college writing teacher, pushing her students (including me) to publish something (I think I might be the only one out of that class that actually did, albeit independently...)...

[Mandu]

I bought it.  At $3 I'm willing to take a chance.  I certainly didn't expect you to lower the price of the print version.  Everybody knows that POD is expensive unless you are getting a few hundred copies printed off.

It will take me a while to get to it.  I've got a pretty heavy backlog of to be read books right now.  But I eventually will.

Did you get somebody to edit it or did you do it yourself?  If you did it yourself I guarantee you that there is going to be a large amount of errors in the book.  Mostly it will be missing words, homonyms, and character names that change partway through the book.  The problem with self editing is that your mind already knows what you meant to say so it automatically fills in or edits errors as you read.  So the sentence you read as "John sat down on the couch" could actually be "John sat down the couch" or "John down on the couch" that sort of thing.

Since you listened to my advice I'll give you some more.  Once you start getting reviews do not respond to them no matter how good or bad they are.  A bad review won't break you, a good review won't make you.  People tend to look at reviews and if one sounds overly enthusiastic or overly hostile then the average reader tends to ignore them anyway.  But an author who thanks somebody who gave them good reviews is seen as a bit of a suck up.  An author who disagrees with a bad review is seen as petty even if the arguments are valid.  Basically the only responses you want to give to reviews are factual answers to questions like "When is the next book coming out?"

If I think of any other tips I'll give them to you as they come to mind.

[Shenku]

Thanks for at least giving it a try, I'd love to hear an outsider's opinion on it.

And yes, I did the editing myself (took me months to do...), though I did give a copy to my sister-in-law and a friend to proof read the book post-initial-edts for me with explicit instructions to take a red pen and mark the heck out of any errors they found, but they both ignored that request and just read through everything without marking pages, chapters, exc. for me to be able to work from...

Basically, I was forced to go through the entire book to look for errors myself all over again, adding a few months more in editing time as a result because they didn't do what I had asked them to do to begin with... So yeah, there might still be some typos or grammar errors in there that I missed, but I think I found and fixed the majority of them already, or at least the really bad ones...

And yeah, wasn't planning on responding to general reviews, as that just seemed tacky and unprofessional to me... If anything, I'd take most of them with a grain of salt, random internet users being what they are sometimes, and maybe just adapt any future works based on reviews with actual merit to what they're saying...

[Shenku]

Bumping this thread up to announce (albeit belatedly, since I forgot to announce it earlier... Going back to the whole "I suck at marketing" thing...) that in honor of Independance Day (and to try and spurn lackluster{Non-existant} sales by increasing interest), I'm currently running a holiday giveaway on the ebook version of this, and you can get it for free from now until this Sunday evenening!

Go grab it now while it's free, and if you enjoy it, recommend it to a friend or family member, or maybe pick up a physical copy!

But hurry, after this Sunday (The 7th), the ebook goes back to being $2.99, so get it for free while you can!