iTunes and Amazon, Facebook, and theturnpikebythomsibbitt.com, press release, the OM center, cover prints and very modest marketing: The last month has been a flurry of work to get the novel online, spread the word, put a polish on everything and brace myself.
Everything in my immediate power and budget (though I overdrew my checking account this month & and have some shiny new credit debt) has been done to put my novel out there. I am officially self published and will mark the occasion with a public reading and reception at the OM Center for Healing Arts on January 27th. A perfect venue to have a send off, after a pretty harrowing couple of months.
So what i have I learned? Self publishing is scary! It is very doable, if you are the kind of person who is not afraid to dive into something that is both completely foreign to you and completely over your head. It took 3 days to figure out to transfer the manuscript into ePub format. This format is used to layout books for e-readers. Now that it is formatted however, every online book distributor seems to use it. It took me all of 30 minutes to upload my book to Amazon and it was online the following day!
I am currently researching the Barnes & Noble process and it is quite a bit more corporate and lengthy but I should be able to make it available for Nook readers in the next few months.
What really remains, is marketing the book and selling 'units'. At 9.99 a copy, my goal is to break even in 6 months. I can tell right now however, that it isn't going to be easy.
It has become clear that the single most important tool I have at my disposal is my Facebook network. This is of course an embarrassing, frustrating, and obnoxious discovery. I made a page for the novel, and have about 150 likes, have reached about 1500 fb users with at least the title of my book and maybe 6 of my friends have reposted (pimped) my novel on their own page.
The result has been the sale a 20 books, which is awesome, but it does leave me a little short of reaching my 6 month goal and after all my family and friends who have e-readers buy my book what then? It feels a little weird, to be seriously considering FB advertising, but that seems like the first, easiest and cheapest way to get my title out past my network.
I have yet to get any local copy about the book release, but there is one week to go. Hoping there is a little buzz generated that I can build on... a press clip, a local review. Hmm. Going to puzzle over this for a bit. The journey of an indie publisher continues...!
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