Golden Mane, Book One of The Adventures of Sarah Coppernick is now online at Amazon and at Smashwords. From the experience of self-pubbing my short The Department, I'm guessing it will be a little while before Golden Mane is up on Amazon's competitors like B&N.
I noticed a couple of little blips this time round:
The formatting - as much as I tried to get it all beautiful and clean, and it does look beautiful and clean in pdf format, snatches text following dialogue are indented in an odd way in both the epub and mobi versions. I'm working on that and if I have to re-release it, I will.
Amazon's draft status. I had to upload to Amazon twice. Something went wrong with the first upload. It seems as though all of the file didn't quite make it to its destination. So, I had to un-publish the first draft and upload it a second time. For some reason, I can't delete the first attempt, so it's stuck there as a permanent draft.
I priced Golden Mane at $5.99. That may sound high for a self-pubbed, debut novel with bunches of $.99 and free releases out there. But, I have a plan!
As I mentioned in a few of my earlier posts, I'll be releasing a free pdf format to any school, library (and now reviewers are added to this list) who wants one. I'm working on that and should have it ready in about a week.
I've also got a bunch of shorts as WIPs that will be released as freebies. These shorts are spin-offs/background little snippets for many of the supporting cast in Golden Mane and the following five tales. They should all be between 10k-25k words long and I hope they'll capture the imagination of enough readers to encourage them to buy the main ebooks. Advertising in the form of small press ads and letter-box drops is also an option I'm considering.
There's also the online thing. I'll be sending off the obligatory emails, tweets, DM's & other social media PR where I can, as well as hitting up as many reviewers as I can find, as I find them. The thing I've noticed about the online thing though is this; some writers seem to be spending a helluva lot of time on social media, contacting other writerly people. Their resulting sales are low. Greater sales & followers seems to come from general media interest. It's long been my retail practice to spend advertising $ only (and time spent online equates to $ spent too) where I get the biggest bang for my buck.
I'm not doing this in the hope that I'll sell so many books that I'll be able to give up the day job, even though that would be sooo cool. I just want to... Nah, screw it. I do want to earn so much that I can give up my day job. That said, I may never do it, even if I find myself driving to work on a gazillion dollar supercar. There's a joke about family businesses like the one I'm in: it's kinda like the mafia - you're born into it and the only way out is in a box.
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