If at first you don't succeed - Persistence is the way to glory

 

As the summer is going by, we had a holiday to relax after all the excitement of publishing our debut novel. As a side-effect (or more like collateral damage), this blog has sunken into a slumber, but we’re set on reviving it! If you want to know more about certain topics related to mythology, legends and different medical conditions feel free to contact us! We already have a few bits and pieces but always need more.

Until then I’d like to share our experience with being published authors for one and a half months. My feelings are mixed. I think I was waiting for something big, something life-changing, but nothing happened really. I joined a discord server lately for indie authors who are published or close to publishing, and they told me, that although we are stressed on the day of the debut, nothing will happen and they were right. They also told me to be patient, patience and persistence is the key to success in this industry and from our current position, I guess they are right in this too.

But let’s see some concrete things!

1. Ingram and Amazon are a mess

After watching a ton of authortube videos about self-publishing, we decided to publish our ebooks through Draft2Digital, GooglePlay, and of course Amazon, and publish the paperback version through IngramSpark and Amazon. The thing I didn’t know was that Amazon stocks a few copies from Ingram. I was overjoyed when I saw that we had sales from Ingram just to find out, that it was just Amazon hoarding books. But because I already got my royalties from Ingram, when some of my friends ordered paperback copies I didn’t see them among my KDP sales, and I just didn’t know what the hell happened, why I don’t see these when my friends showed their freshly bought books. It also takes a few days to see anything on the KDP reports, if they show anything at all. I’m still not sure about my numbers, or how and when will they report what’s happening.

2. Advertising is like a roulette game

I’ve always wanted to go to a big, elegant casino once, just to get that feeling. My father taught me how to play poker (2 different ways, classic and Texas hold’em), blackjack and roulette, but I’ve never been to a real place playing with real money. Amazon advertising is the closest thing to this that I can imagine. They said that the algorithm helps me to be more visible in the first 3 months, so I thought that this is the best time to play with it. First I started an automated keyword campaign. Just a few clicks, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone. The algorithm is not smart enough to give you good keywords, so no clicks and no sales came from them. 

Since it went to nowhere, I turned it off in favor of a personal campaign. After a kiss from the muses one morning before my dayjob, I put together  around 60 or so keywords and started gambling. It has been up there for a month now, my the word list grew to 199, complete with a few ‘negative keywords’. These as I’ve learned are search terms you don’t want your book to appear to. At first it sounded bullshit, why wouldn’t I want advertising from anything? Well, if someone’s looking for erotic fantasy books, romance fantasy books and these kind of things, and Amazon directs them to our book, they’ll click, cost us ad money, then won’t buy because it’s not their genre.

The results of this campaign aren’t things to write home about yet: I got clicks, people checked out the book, but we only had one sale which is… bad. I’m not sure what’s wrong with our product page, I think our cover is beautiful, our blurb is also fine – and it is written on the back of our paperback, we can’t change it – but I think I’ll put some quotes from reviews there too, maybe it will improve something, I don’t know. More importantly, I found out that I enjoy this gambling game. I might launch this campaign in the UK too, we have more reviews there, so maybe it’ll work better. 

3. Book tour endorphin bombs

When we decided to publish our book we’ve decided to push through this even if we won’t sell a single copy. We are doing this out of love for the writing process and all the enjoyment we get out of it, like writing our characters and cool scenes. If other like the results, fantastic, if not, well, it’s only a monetary loss, since all the time spent on writing was fun. 

Yet, we can’t do anything half-assed, so we tried everything we could find to help our book to succeed. That’s why we contacted a book tour organizer and sent our book baby to several book bloggers and bookstagrammers. Every little review and every praise was a mini endorphin bomb that kept us going for a whole day. I cried, I screamed, I had a lot of emotions at once. It was awesome. There were also some funny things, when it showed that the reviewer didn’t pay attention while reading… but it’s fine. The tour didn’t lead to sales either, but it was worth it from an emotional point of view.

All in all, patience and persistence. We can never know when Shackles of the Storm will start selling. A lot of people say that it will be around the second and third book when a series will take off. Dar says that if it won’t sell at all, we will pull a Brandon Sanderson (who wrote 15 books before Ellantris, and only got famous after Mistborn) and write books until one of them blows up, generating fame for its predecessors. The bigger backlist we have, the better. So we just keep going, keep growing our platform and something will happen. Or won’t, but at least we’ll have fun.

Take care, and if you don’t want to miss anything be sure to subscribe to our newsletter! The title and cover reveal for our next book are on the way!

Cheers,

Lory