The post-Olympic and Labor Day weekend free download promotions did not generate much in the way of new sales, although I was pleased to get a few more positive reviews on Amazon; however, some new connections would provide me with more avenues of promoting my novel. On Twitter, my paltry account got a new follower, Faydra Deon. One day, I checked out the links on her profile and discovered that she was the owner and developer of the Independent Author Index. Her site and the Independent Author Network are two sites where indie authors can join to promote their creative works and readers can go to search for uniquely new literary gems. Both networks maintained that every author needed an individual website and blog, which led me to invest the time and effort to learn how to create my site. As soon as I had a viable site ready, I joined the Independent Author Index.

At the same time, while going through my author’s page on Amazon, I noted a section recommending that I update the extras section of my book on Shelfari, Amazon’s social media site for book lovers. As an author on Amazon, I discovered a logon and account had already been created for me. I was guided to join the Book Promotion & Marketing group and discovered some postings about e-zine blog sites that freely promote daily free e-book promotions to their readers. Of course, the number of books these sites could promote daily was limited. I had just been given a new allotment of five promo days from Kindle Publishing to schedule, so I went over my options. The obvious choice would have been the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, but I heeded the lesson from my first five promo days and scheduled one free day for this past Saturday, one week before Thanksgiving, and labeled it the “try before you gift” promotion. Besides the Facebook postings and tweets, I now alerted the Index and registered the promo day with four e-reader sites. With less competition, two of the sites – The Digital Ink Spot and the Ereader News Today – added Legacy Discovered as one of the featured free e-books for Saturday. The results were amazing. This one day promotion netted nearly fifteen times more downloads than the two day post-Olympics promotion. Now as I await the judgment of these new readers, I consider the newest lesson of self-promotion – with limited resources, seek out and do not miss the opportunities to join the networks and groups of fellow independent authors for there is strength in numbers and cross-promotion is key.

There will be more lessons to be learned as I continue to introduce my debut novel to readers around the world and contemplate the next story to be told. I will also start to look at my fellow authors current works and give my honest opinion on their endeavors, which is all I would ever ask of anyone willing to read my work.

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.