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The Trend is Your Friend — Succeeding in Self-Publishing by Staying the Course

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November marked my sixth month since my legal thriller FOLLOW THE MONEY (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) went live on Amazon.  Although I have not yet had an explosive bestseller along the lines of Debbi Mack or Chris Culver’s new books, there is still time for that. I think the foundation is there to break out if I can just get the right kind of luck at the right time.

But before I get to what that might be, let me talk about the success I have had. I got FOLLOW THE MONEY (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) out during the last few as of May. I gave a bunch of copies away and started this blog and really just waited. Nothing much happened except that in June I started getting reviews. Every couple of days a copy might sell, and I turned to the next book.

My goal was to get my four backlist titles out by the end of the year, which is going to happen.  THE FLAMING MOTEL (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) came out at the end of August. By then, sales of FOLLOW THE MONEY (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) had picked up and it was selling an average of 1.5 copes per day. What I noticed was that once THE FLAMING MOTEL (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) came out, the two books together averaged about 3 copies a day.   And by late-November, when $200 AND A CADILLAC (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) came out, I was averaging 7-8 books a day.  Since then, the trend has continued, right into December.  It’s not making me rich, but the royalties are no longer just pocket change.

I’ve studied the sales trends of lots of other successful indies and it seems to take about six months for them to build enough of a base so that people start recommending them to friends in sufficient quantities to cause real sales growth.  We’ll see if that happens here.  We’re now entering the holiday shopping season and my hope is that I can encourage readers to give my books as gifts, especially to anyone they know who is receiving a Kindle this season.

So now some talk about getting lucky.  FOLLOW THE MONEY (UK) (Germany) (France) (Italy) (Spain) (Nook) will be the Kindle Nation eBook of the Day on Christmas.  That’s a gamble that could pay off.  A lot of new Kindles will be hitting the market that day, but most people are focused on family and may not be buying a lot of books.  In a perfect world, I could convince a few thousand of them to test out their new device with my legal thriller.

I will also have a fourth book out, hopefully before Christmas, called EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS A LIE.  You can preview the cover and the opening section of it here.  I’ve become a firm believer that having as many good books up as possible helps all of your books sell.  And I think EVERYTHING I TELL YOU S A LIE is the best thing I’ve ever done.  Even though it’s a novella, I’m hoping I can get it to catch on.

Finally, after six months of focusing on my back catalogue, I now turn to new material.  My goal is to finish one of the several partially written novels I have and get it out next year.  It’s a modest goal, and if I was a real rock star, I’d say I would get two more books done.  But I want to set goals I can be confident in.  I have a new Ollie book with about 100 pages written, plus a new stand-alone with around the same amount completed.  The next book will be one of those two. 

If the trend of the current books continues, who knows how well they’ll be selling by the time the next one comes out?  I’m convinced that a slow and steady commitment to this will pay off in the long run.  After all, the only thing I have real control over is how much work I do and how committed I am.  If I can add a high quality book or two to my catalogue, I could have twenty books published before I’m fifty years old.  How incredible would that be?  All I need is for one of those to get lucky and break out and it will drag all the others up with it.  In fact, all things being equal, a writer would probably rather get lucky on his tenth book, instead of his first.

But the most important thing I’ve learned since I nervously uploaded my first nook back in May is that I really can do this.  Seems simple enough, but sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to learn.


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