KDP Select - My (modest) Self Publishing success

As soneone who is trying to navigate the self-publishing landscape, I read a lot of articles by other authors on what works and what doesn't. I can't say I've found instant success, I may have hoped I would but deep down I didn't expect to, especially because if I had, it would have been the first time in my life. One thing I hear a lot is people's distaste for Amazon's KDP Select program. If you aren't familiar, it's a program that allow independent authors to list their books in Amazon's lending library where members of the Amazon Prime program can download it for free. Amazon then pays you for each download. The big benefit though is that you are also allowed to list your book for free, up to 5 days a quarter. The big deterrent though is that you aren't allowed to sell your book anywhere else but on Amazon.

I would agree that if you have built a following and have a presence then it might not make sense but my question was, if nobody knows you exist and aren't finding your work, who cares if you are on 8 different platforms? The answer is of course, it's 8 different ways for people to find you....which is great but are enough people going to find you so you build that success, can move up various rankings and starting getting the exposure? I don't know.

I used KDP Select twice with modest results. First in February and then in June. At the end of June I published my second novel so in early July I decided to do it again and this time I got lucky. I put my first novel free on a Sunday and by 9pm it was 64 overall on the free site so I quickly went in and put it free for the next day and it climbed all the way to 16th overall. My mistake was I didn't do it for a third day and take advantage of being on the first page of the free site but that's ok. Immediately I started selling books. Just like everyone says, it's a 3 or 4 day jump and then it falls off but because of the success I had, the 4 days were huge and the fall off wasn't total. Even after my first two tries at Select I would go three or four days without selling a book, sell one then another few days, repeat. It's been almost a month since I put The Trinity Murders free and I've sold books every day since, not just one, usually a few. It's modest but I think it's a great start. KDP Select gave me exposure that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. My second novel, in a little over a month has already sold more copies than my first one did in the first 7 months. My first novel took 11 months to be profitable, paying for the cover and editing and there is an outside shot that my second novel could be profitable after two months.

One of the reasons I am posting this is because I'm trying something else, hopefully this week. I posted yesterday about a short story I am going to release later this week. It's part of a collection I came up with a while ago and I was going to wait until they were all done to publish them. Instead, I will put the first one out this week and each other one as I write them, I also hope to write other short stories too. My plan, I'm going to immediately put it free for three days. What I've learned is that there are lots of sites that report when books go free and I'm hoping I will get a lot of downloads. From there, people will hopefully like the story and go on to buy my books or when they download it they will be alerted to my books and may decide to give them a try. After that, the price will settle in at $.99 and at that point, it's another path for people to find me. I can't really find any holes in the plan. The only hole would be if the writing is bad, which I'm positive it isn't. So I'll check back in afterwards to report on how it went but I stand by my original comment that for an author that doesn't have a following outside of his family and friends, KDP Select is an invaluable tool.

Hope on a Paige (Tales from the Dead Letter Office)

I had to go back and add a new first paragraph so I can speak about the cover. I created it myself. It's not near the quality of my other kick ass covers which were created by my old High School friend Adam McCarthy but at this stage of the game, I can't pay to have a cover created for a short story that I'm going to sell for $.99. It just doesn't make sense. Someday I'll have it professional redone but for now, it is what it is. Ok...

I'm publishing a new short story this week, assuming my editor has time to edit it this week....actually it's my first short story. It's called Hope on a Paige and it is the first in what will be a collection of 8-12 short stories all centering around the Dead Letter Office. What is the Dead Letter Office you ask, besides being a kick ass phrase that is? The Dead Letter Office is where undeliverable mail for the US Post Office goes, although they no longer call it that, which is truly a shame. The first time I heard that phrase was the title of a 1987 REM album. Where I actually came up with this story and collection idea is a little more random. I was sitting at my desk, reading during a break...ironically I was reading Just After Sunset which is a collection of Stephen King short stories and he used the phrase in the first story. I stopped reading and wrote the phrase down on a post-it and went back to reading. Later, I went back to that post-it and started thinking about the Dead Letter Office and came up with this story. How I decided to turn it into a collection is a lot more random but I'll tell that story later. Especially since nobody reads my blog right now anyway. I would be telling the story to myself and I already lived it. So this story uses the backdrop of the Dead Letter Office, as will all the stories.

This first one is about a woman in her early 30s who has lived a life that has come completely off track. So much so, that once a week she comes home and writes a letter to her imaginary husband who is away on business. She supplies it with a fake address and it ends up at the Dead Letter Office in Georgia. Unbeknownst to her, somebody on the other end is getting these letters and that is the impetus for the story. Out of everything I have written, this is what I am most proud of so far. I love the story and what it has to say. Not just about the characters but about life and I love the writing. I think it's my strongest yet and I'm thrilled with some of the phrases I've turned in this story. If you read it, I hope you find the same.