T.B. Carter's Blog
October 22, 2018
How NOT to launch a book
Deciding to release my book into the wilds of Kindle was a bit of a spur of the moment thing. I didn’t have anything the various blogs say you need, no advertising budget, no website or email list and I’ve just one solitarily book to sell. On the other hand I was sick and tired of editing, couldn’t be arsed to send it off to any more agents and I wanted to get on with writing the sequel.
I didn’t even have a decent name for the book, something that irritated me as I knew the working title 'The Trafalgar Conspiracy' would never set the world on fire. Then, in the first few minutes of loading up Kindle Create, Kindle’s ebook creator I accidentally highlighted a sentence as the Book Title and I knew I had found The One.
A quick poll of my family resulted in sniggering, and, when I revealed the title to my work colleagues there was disbelieving laughter and more than one person asking. “Are you really going to call it that?” My customer research a success, my book now found itself renamed 'A Minefield Full of Penguins' despite there being a distinct lack of minefields and the only appearance a penguin makes is when one gatecrashes a sex scene.
I grappled with the infuriatingly inflexible Kindle Create, before realising I needed a copyright page, a dedication page and I’d also need something at the end where my reader (I wasn’t being ambitious) could contact me. So it was back to Word to make hyperlinks and then a re-edit in CreateSpace. This done I suddenly had an ebook, a Facebook group and an author gmail account. The cover design, however proved a bit more problematic.
I’d already had artwork for the cover created by a colleague’s daughter which I uploaded to Amazon’s Cover Creator hoping to get a professional finish. If you can resize and move text I never found out how to do it so was left with a slightly dodgy cover, but it was stupid o’clock on a Thursday night so I pushed the publish and be damned button.
The next day I was at work. All day. A little hint, when you publish your first book, take a few days off. Learning how to book is a massive time sink.
Unsurprisingly I didn’t sell a sausage. That evening I worked out how to give the book away free so my friends and family could get themselves a copy and rather cheekily mentioned on a Terry Pratchett Facebook group that I’d published my book and it was free, something I thought the admins would delete within minutes.
Not only was the post not deleted, people started downloading the book. Then, even stranger, they actually started to read and enjoy it. A few of them even gave me reviews. 5 star reviews! By the end of the free period I had given away 442 books, I’d got into the top ten free bestsellers in Fantasy and Sci Fi (not to mention number 1 in Contemporary Fantasy).
Reality hit with a bump when the free giveaway ended. I went from giving away 100 copies a day to, if I was lucky, selling one or two copies a day. As I originally estimated I’d probably give away twenty books I’m more than happy with this and I’m not even mentioning my Kindle Unlimited page reads are hovering around 1000 pages a day.
So that’s my first week and a bit as a published author. Now I’m off to write the sequel before my fan gets restless.
I didn’t even have a decent name for the book, something that irritated me as I knew the working title 'The Trafalgar Conspiracy' would never set the world on fire. Then, in the first few minutes of loading up Kindle Create, Kindle’s ebook creator I accidentally highlighted a sentence as the Book Title and I knew I had found The One.
A quick poll of my family resulted in sniggering, and, when I revealed the title to my work colleagues there was disbelieving laughter and more than one person asking. “Are you really going to call it that?” My customer research a success, my book now found itself renamed 'A Minefield Full of Penguins' despite there being a distinct lack of minefields and the only appearance a penguin makes is when one gatecrashes a sex scene.
I grappled with the infuriatingly inflexible Kindle Create, before realising I needed a copyright page, a dedication page and I’d also need something at the end where my reader (I wasn’t being ambitious) could contact me. So it was back to Word to make hyperlinks and then a re-edit in CreateSpace. This done I suddenly had an ebook, a Facebook group and an author gmail account. The cover design, however proved a bit more problematic.
I’d already had artwork for the cover created by a colleague’s daughter which I uploaded to Amazon’s Cover Creator hoping to get a professional finish. If you can resize and move text I never found out how to do it so was left with a slightly dodgy cover, but it was stupid o’clock on a Thursday night so I pushed the publish and be damned button.
The next day I was at work. All day. A little hint, when you publish your first book, take a few days off. Learning how to book is a massive time sink.
Unsurprisingly I didn’t sell a sausage. That evening I worked out how to give the book away free so my friends and family could get themselves a copy and rather cheekily mentioned on a Terry Pratchett Facebook group that I’d published my book and it was free, something I thought the admins would delete within minutes.
Not only was the post not deleted, people started downloading the book. Then, even stranger, they actually started to read and enjoy it. A few of them even gave me reviews. 5 star reviews! By the end of the free period I had given away 442 books, I’d got into the top ten free bestsellers in Fantasy and Sci Fi (not to mention number 1 in Contemporary Fantasy).
Reality hit with a bump when the free giveaway ended. I went from giving away 100 copies a day to, if I was lucky, selling one or two copies a day. As I originally estimated I’d probably give away twenty books I’m more than happy with this and I’m not even mentioning my Kindle Unlimited page reads are hovering around 1000 pages a day.
So that’s my first week and a bit as a published author. Now I’m off to write the sequel before my fan gets restless.
