It has been a little over a year since I decided to write and self-publish a novel. At the time, I decided on writing my story idea as a novel instead of a screenplay, because I knew that self-publishing had leveled the playing field for aspiring authors, while getting a screenplay read or pitched was still a daunting option. Writing the story well was my main goal. I was not focused on how I would promote this work, but my years of working in publicity for a major entertainment company did teach me one thing – good promotion can get a creative work an initial audience, but it is up to the work itself to keep and expand that audience.
After subjecting my first and subsequent drafts to an “edit focus group” of several friends, I went to CreateSpace to self-publish the novel. CreateSpace, an Amazon company, had a very reasonably-priced package that included a professional once-over by an editor and exterior/interior design packages for the book. However, the two major pluses I saw was the immediate access the book would have on the Amazon.com book and Kindle distribution system and the wide release of a professionally written press release announcing the book’s publication. I wasn’t expecting the journalistic world to come pounding on my door, but I did feel that I would get a few requests which would probably get me a few good reviews to tout on the Facebook page I had set up for Legacy Discovered. Some Facebook word of mouth, some Twitter posts and some impulse buying on Amazon would produce enough royalty payments to earn a year’s pay at the least. What I learned is that the ease of self-publishing had caused an onslaught of new publications on the market, about a thousand new books a month. Not only did major publications and local newspapers not have room or time to even consider the self-published wave, but a few outlets, some respectable, were able to charge sponsorships for their reviews. This meant the playing field was not as level as I imagined as an aspiring writer cannot match the resources the major publishers have to promote their releases.
Realizing the limits of my resources, I knew I had to be creative and patient with what I had. What I had was social media in the form of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Some of my friends had supported my efforts by actually buying the book from Amazon. I asked a couple of them to honestly review the book on Amazon. This helped show purchase activity on the page. I posted and tweeted the links to the Amazon book pages. I received a lot of congrats on writing and publishing, but no sales beyond the few. One of the promotional tools that Amazon’s Kindle Publishing provided was the ability to schedule up to five free promo days within a 90 day period. With the Olympics drawing the attention of television audiences in August, I decided to schedule my first two promo days on the final weekend as a post-Olympic blues free Kindle e-book download weekend. I posted the promotion to my Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. I tweeted the promotion and got @kindle_promo to retweet my posting. I had a fairly successful number of downloads, fifty times more than my current sales total. I instantly thought that if I could get this many downloads on a mid-August weekend, imagine what I could get by scheduling the other three days for the Labor Day weekend. The total of downloads over the three day weekend was one fifth the total of the post-Olympic blues weekend. One could say I had reached all I could reach that first weekend, but I have another theory – the post-Olympic promo was not only more creative, but had less competition than the promo heavy Labor Day weekend.
