My reaction to today's Kindle Direct Publishing report
For those of you who are interested in learning more about how things might unfold for a new independent author in the initial days after publication, I thought I’d share a little bit about what’s happened so far.
On Dec. 17th, I set up a facebook page and website for Noelle Ryan.
On Dec. 18th, the book went live. I opted for the Kindle select program (which involves my promising to make Mirror available as an ebook only on Amazon for 3 months) to see if my book being available to Amazon Prime members might help draw more traffic to it (and because I figured it couldn’t hurt to wait 3 months before releasing it on another platform–I could use the time for investigating epub options anyway).
On Dec. 19th, after reading a few discussion threads on the kdp boards about how having your book go up for free could increase traffic, I decided to test out one day of free status on Dec 20th. I set this up, and then had to step away from the whole project while I went out of town (I just got back last night).
This afternoon, I popped over to my kdp reports page just to see how many copies had gone out. My jaw literally fell open to see that it was 578 (with 2 returns).
I’m in shock because I’ve done virtually no marketing. Around 3 or 4 of the friends I told about the book posted something about it on facebook; to my knowledge no-one else has been talking it up.
Granted, since most of these copies were obtained for free, I’m not making money on them (at this point I think my royalties come in just under $60). but still–the thought that 576 people might be reading my book, and hopefully enjoying it, is a tremendous thrill in and of itself. For those of you reading this who are among those 576: thank you. Writers thrive off readers, and I’d love to hear what you think (and if you’d care to post a review on amazon, that would be extra fab!)
Next steps: look into some other marketing strategies, figure out the formatting for publishing Mirror as a physical book.
Noelle Ryan 