Tattoo man

Four Things I Learned About Self-Publishing on Day One

I published my first two novels to Amazon yesterday!  That was December 19, 2014.

Today is December 20, 2014, and it’s not even noon yet.  I can tell you that I’ve already made plenty of mistakes that I’m learning from.  Here’s a list of four of them that I hope you can learn from, too.

1.  I should have bought my paid promotions a month (or two) ago.

I just paid for a book promotion with Kindle Nation Daily (owner of BookGorilla.com, which I subscribe to and use).  My promotion is scheduled for February 7 — almost two months away!

Why I didn’t do it sooner:  Two reasons.  First, for some reason I didn’t think I could schedule it without an existing book.  In reality, I probably could have.  Second, a month or two ago, I was thinking, “I need to focus on finishing my book before I start thinking about marketing my book.  Let’s not start counting chickens before they hatch.”  It made sense in theory — don’t get distracted by anything that’s not writing.  But hindsight is 20/20; in the future I will schedule book promotions in advance.

2.  I bought an automatic submission credit from BookMarketingTools.com, but I should’ve done that sooner, too.

I also just paid $15 for a service that will automatically submit my free ebook to more than 30 sites.  That’s great and I look forward to using it.  However, my first free day (I’m enrolled with KDP Select / Kindle Unlimited) is tomorrow, and it’s too late to submit it for tomorrow.  My next free day is scheduled for the aforementioned February 7.  So now I need to either wait until February to use my credit or I need to use up another free day before then.  I’m torn about which I should do.

Why I didn’t do it sooner:  See reasons above.

3.  Turns out CreateSpace is easy to set up.

I should have already set up the CreateSpace version of the book so that I could launch the print book and the Kindle version the same day.

Why I didn’t do it sooner:  I thought it would be a time-consuming pain.  Actually, it wasn’t at all.  Plus it created an ISBN for my book — for free! — which it turns out I need for certain paid and free promotions.  (CreateSpace is easy.  It’s OpenOffice that’s giving me headaches.)

4.  I ain’t got no reviews.

Reviews, reviews, reviews!  These are of the utmost importance!  And I launched my book with precisely 0.  Not only are reviews important for purchases, reviews are important because some paid promotions won’t consider your book without at least a handful of positive reviews.  I don’t think they really care if your reviews are by your Grandma; the main point is that you HAVE reviews.

Why I didn’t do it sooner:  I have, right now, sitting in my inbox, some advice from Tim Grahl about how to launch your book with multiple reviews.  I read this advice.  I thought I should follow this advice.  And I didn’t.

Dumb.  Instead of giving friends and family advanced warning of when my book would be coming out and asking them in advance to write a review for me, I launched first and asked for reviews second.  Next time, I will not do that.

That’s it.  I’ll tell you what else I learn as I go along.

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