Adventures in Self Publishing: August 2019

As promised – an update on my self-publishing adventure.

Back in April, I announced the publication of my permafree Reader Magnet, ‘Making Trouble’. It’s a prequel novella to my five-book YA dystopian series, Battle Ground, and it’s only available to readers who sign up to my mailing list. It’s important, because as an Indie author, I don’t have a traditional publisher behind me, marketing my books and organising publicity for my work. To make up for that, I need to connect directly with my readers  – and to do that, I need a mailing list.

Fast-forward to July, and ‘Battle Ground’, Book One in the series, goes live on Amazon. I’ve told my mailing list (100 people), my Facebook friends, my Instagram, Twitter, GoodReads, and Linked In contacts. I’ve trailed the book for weeks, and I’ve told everyone I can think of where and when to grab their copy.

The hard work

But that’s not enough. Between February and July, I’ve been working hard. I’ve started my own publishing house, Taller Books, to publish my novels. I’ve put together a website and a mailing list signup page, and I’ve built my social media presence. I’ve grown my social followers from nobody on day one, to thousands by July, simply by setting aside time to interact and follow people on all my social platforms.

And even that isn’t enough. Between April and June, I serialised ‘Battle Ground’ as a free book on Wattpad. I’m aiming for a Young Adult audience, and Wattpad is full of aspiring YA authors and readers. I picked up 9,000 chapter reads, and the book took the number one slot for Totalitarian fiction for five continuous weeks. Then I started a countdown, and informed my readers that the book would be moving from Wattpad to Amazon at the end of July. I’ve kept an information page on Wattpad, and posted some short stories to make sure I don’t lose my audience.

Keeping it real

This is still not enough for a successful Indie book launch, so I decided to take Taller Books to the Young Adult Literature Festival, part of London Film and Comic Con at Olympia. We booked a stall, and spent several months preparing to meet hundreds of YA readers in person, and to offer them free downloads of ‘Battle Ground’ and ‘Making Trouble’. My IT consultant and general assistant (AKA husband) came with me to man the stall and keep the IT working. I planned the stall, designed the backdrop, ordered thousands of flyers and 100 paperback copies of Book One, and even hemmed my own tablecloth to make sure we looked professional and interesting!

YALC was amazing. I was on my feet shouting and talking for nine hours, every day for three days. We must have spoken to 1,500 people, and given out download links to Book One to most of those. We were also offering the free novella download to people who signed up to the mailing list on the stand. We ran two Kindle Fire tablets and a phone to collect sign-ups, and we came away with more than 800 people on the mailing list.

Book One was free to download from Amazon for all three days of YALC, and we timed the launch to coincide with day one. We made sure everyone we spoke to knew that they had a limited time to grab their free download, and I made sure that my mailing list and social contacts knew this, too.

Results

The result of all this work? By the end of the final day of YALC, ‘Battle Ground’ was the number one free book on Amazon in three different categories, and that made Amazon sit up and take notice. The point of all this was to make sure the downloads of the book at the launch were as high as we could get them, so that Amazon would take over and start doing our marketing for us. On the way home from YALC, we noticed that ‘Battle Ground’ was already being pushed as a ‘Hot New Release’, and promoted to a wider audience thanks to Amazon’s marketing algorithms.

We switched to a paid download the day after YALC, so now the book is a 99p download. The good news is that Amazon remembers the huge number of free downloads, and keeps marketing it for me.

Not content with all this publicity, we sent ‘Battle Ground’ on a blog tour, starting on the day of publication. Over the course of a week, the book was mentioned or given an honest review on 21 book blogs, and the reviews were amazing. The book was described as ‘relevant’, ‘thrilling’, ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘scarily near the mark’. One reviewer called it ‘engaging, thrilling, intense, and wild’, and another called it ‘awesome’. We also promoted the free download on the Fussy Librarian mailing list on launch day, and paid for a small amount of Facebook advertising.

The next challenge

As much as I needed a break after YALC, that’s not how Indie publishing works! ‘False Flag’, Book Two of the Battle Ground series, will be published on September 5th. That gives me six weeks to do a final edit, get an ISBN, format the text for Kindle and paperback editions, finalise the cover, and plan the publicity for a second book launch. We’re using another Blog Tour, and we’re listing the book with the Fussy Librarian again. We’ll be making the Kindle editions of Books 1 and 2 free on launch day, and I’ll be trailing the book on my mailing list and all my social media platforms. I’m also putting Book 1 into a multi-author dystopian promotion with BookFunnel, and looking for new ways to promote the series.

Joining the adventure

Before I started this adventure, I did plenty of research into self-publishing. One of the things I learnt was that the marketing and promotion is a lot easier if you’re selling a series of books. This allows you to put the first book out for free on launch day, and to keep the permanent download price at 99p as a hook to tempt new readers to your books. You absolutely can self-publish standalone books, but that’s much easier if you already have a series out there, grabbing readers for your work.

The promotion and marketing for Book 1 have been a more-than-full-time job for the last six months. Publishing the remaining books will be a full-time job until January. At that point, I’m hoping I can start writing again!

This is a long game. I’m treating myself, Taller Books, and my novels as a start-up business. I don’t expect to make money yet (although Amazon does owe me a tiny royalty cheque for the downloads so far). The target for self-publishing is to have 20 books on Amazon. If you get the marketing right, that’s when you start to make a living wage. I have a way to go, but hopefully I can draw on the experiences of the first six months to make all the future books much easier to handle. At the moment I feel as if I’m making this up as I go, and learning new stuff every day. It’s exciting, it’s exhausting, and it’s terrifying.

It’s an adventure.

Let’s connect!

Thank you for reading this far! If you’re interested, my website is at tallerbooks.com. I’m happy to answer questions (although I can’t promise an immediate response!). For a self-pub, other authors are collaborators, not competitors. There are plenty of ways to boost another author’s signal – let’s help each other out!