Do I know how to do that? I'm not so sure, but I am trying. I've spent years writing the five novels I now have available on Amazon---The Aledan Series and a slightly related romance novel The Price of Love. I'm beginning to see why it's so hard to get a publisher to take a chance on a new writer. Just because you publish a book, doesn't necessarily mean people will buy it and read it.
Like almost every other writers of fiction, I believe that what I have written will be interesting and entertaining to at least some people. After all, I wrote the kind of books I like to read---science fiction space opera and romance combined. This year I decided to get serious about my writing after learning of a couple local authors that self published.
As I researched self publishing options, I discovered that I could publish my novels as ebooks at no cost on Amazon. I sold a few and gave away about 100 as a special introductory offer. The Aledan, Book One of the series is now available on Amazon, Kobo, and Nook for $.99. Two of the three sequels are still committed exclusively to Kindle Select for a few more weeks and are available for $1.99 each. I decided to keep the price low because, while the goal is to make money for my work, I can't do that if nobody buys it.
To promote them, I created a website, a Facebook page and a blog for my books. I embellished my Google profile and spent hours figuring out how to link up my website to Google. I joined communities in Google+ of both readers and writers of similar genres. I even Twittered and pinned them on Pinterest.
Once I published The Aledan on kobo, I created a virtual book tour with Google Tour builder based on "Indies4indies - An Online Tour Guide 4 Book Publishing". I just finished that project and put the link up on my Facebook page and Google+ profile. I've done my best to tell the whole world about them on my shoestring budget.
Am I making money on my novels? Not yet, not enough to pay for my website and the boosts to my Facebook page. It's disappointing after the hundreds, even thousands of hours I put into writing the novels that the books are barely selling. Do I give up? Do I quit?
Nope! I still have more stories to tell. I have to believe that I will find an audience willing to take the journey into the worlds I've created and get to know the characters there. In any case, The Aledan Saga will continue.
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