I am proud to announce that, finally, since I was fourteen years old, the first book in the Embraced by Darkness series is complete and published! I did it through Createspace and it is now for sale as a paperback (Link – $15.00) and an ebook (Kindle Link – $1.99) and I kind of feel like dancing and throwing up all at the same time. I’m freaking out lol, easy enough to admit but this really is terrifying and it really is very hard. I have set myself up to expect no sales (or very few) because I am well aware that that is the most realistic outcome. I have been in the book industry for a decade and I have chosen not to buy the book from a thousand hopeful authors at a thousand different book fairs. Because I don’t care and I expect their books to not be my kind of books anyway and that is fair. But I also know that to them it means everything, just as this book means everything to me. But I am a very typical writer, I am not good at promoting myself, nor do I even want to, just pushing it and telling everyone I know on Facebook was hard for me. I’m very much the type to be, “Don’t worry about, just ignore the fact that this decade of work and my entire heart was just published. Please, I don’t mean to bother you, ignore this post.” Even though I am very well aware that that kind of attitude does not sell anything, let alone books.

Why I chose Createspace

So I picked Createspace entirely over Lulu. I’m just done with Lulu, their marketing has been spotty according to everything I read online but my biggest problem with them is that their books cost a fortune. I bought my first copy of this book through Lulu and it cost me over $14 the same book published through Createspace cost me just over $4. Its a no brainer for me. On top of all of that, my book (and ebook) were for sale on Amazon.com within just a couple of days. Sweet and very cool. Also, they automatically added the bar code to the back of my book after I entered in my ISBN for the paperback edition. Lulu does not do this, you have to buy and add your own bar code unless you want to use one of their awful free covers. I also published through Barnes and Noble on the Nook (Link – $1.99) and plan on working with Smashwords a little bit. And why haven’t I pushed through Smashwords yet? I hate their converter process, hate it, hate it, hate it. I use Open Office for all of my writing, Smashwords requires a .doc file (A Word file) so I’m already pissed. I can’t really make a perfect .doc file (even though Open Office does its best) so all of my files on Smashwords are just screwed up and I haven’t really come up with any way around this crappiness, but I’m working on it and do plan to publish there to some extent. And there is also the Apple store I’m going to be looking into.

Lots of ISBNs

The first horrible (and far larger expense than I expected) was the ISBN purchase. I had to buy 10 of them because I knew I needed a different ISBN for every version of my book that I was going to make available. I’ve used four so far, one for the kindle, one for the nook, one for the smashwords edition and one for the paperback edition. The cost for a package of ten ISBNs? $250! If you just purchase one it’s $150 per ISBN number. Crazy cost but I felt it necessary for at least the attempt of making my book look as “real” as possible.

So, What’s Next?

And here comes the hard part. Yes, I’ve done all I can to milk my Facebook account for a few book sales. Not much but, hey, at least everyone knows about it whether they give a rat’s ass or not. From here on out I’m begging strangers to buy my book. I only have so much money so where do I put it? Advertising? Local Newspapers? Press Releases? Google keywords? Facebook Ads? Local Advertising? Do I just suck it up and start buying Reviews? How do we know as Indy publishers of our own books how to get them to our target audience? You just can’t expect people to buy your book is they don’t know about it. Hence begins the arduous and expensive part of my journey, yes the “release” of my book was great fun but that is only the very very tip of the ice berg.

Comments »