How I Am Stunning the World (Not!) with a Self-Published Book!

By Si Dunn

Online sites such as Lulu, CreateSpace and Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for Kindle now make it easy to publish your own book at affordable prices.

What is not easy is figuring out how to sell what you self-publish, particularly if it is fiction, without paying hundreds of dollars—and up--to marketing services.

Case in point: my newest book, Jump, a 110-page novella set in the 1960s and 1970s. Brief summary: "Gage Roberts, ex-sailor, is a man having problems in every port of his life as he jumps from job to job, place to place and relationship to relationship. Can he find love and happiness?"

More specifically, Jump is about a job-hopping newspaper reporter who suffers from bad war flashbacks and is not having much luck at love. The book is set in Denton and Dallas, Texas, as well as Hattiesburg, Miss., Atlanta, Georgia, and the Tonkin Gulf and South China Sea during the Vietnam War. This is not a book that Oprah or Random House or the New York Review of Books likely would leap on.

Indeed, only a few dozen readers so far have jumped on Jump, even though it is now available as a downloadable e-book, a Kindle book and a print-on-demand (POD) paperback book, and I regularly promote it on Twitter and in emails. (Here are links to the various editions: Paperback: http://bit.ly/3cxln / e-book: http://bit.ly/wml2M / Kindle: http://bit.ly/iF8Wo . The paperback edition is $9.95. The e-book PDF version is $1.99, and the Kindle version is about as cheap as a Dunkin Donut: $0.99.)

Jump sprang up from a creative writing assignment that I completed for English E-175, a Southern literature class offered online in spring 2009 by Harvard University’s Extension School. After the course was completed, I spent about a month expanding the 7,500-word short story into a 20,000-word novella.

I then made a few online searches for publishers seeking novellas and got no encouraging responses to queries. So I decided to make Jump my first foray into the world of online self-publishing. Specifically, I wanted to have online books and a paperback edition, but I did not want to carry and keep track of an inventory.

With online books such as PDF files and Kindle editions, there are no physical copies (although copies can be printed.) With a print-on-demand (POD) paperback, there also is no physical book until someone orders a copy or several copies. Then the book is printed and shipped to the purchaser. POD books are very handy, because you can buy one copy to hold and show off and a few extras to give away to friends or potential reviewers.

With my previous books, publishers always have taken care of the editing and printing details, as well as the marketing efforts. So, with Jump, I had to start from scratch. First, I copyrighted my manuscript online for $35 at the U.S. Copyright Office and purchased a single International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for $125 at R.R. Bowker’s isbn.org website. Most bookstores and online sales sites such as Amazon require an ISBN before they will list a book for sale. Some online book-publication sites will issue a “free” ISBN if you do not have one, but I prefer to own the number so I can maintain maximum control over what happens to my book. Jump’s ISBN is 978-0-615-31261-3.

Online book-publishing sites now typically offer free tools for creating and selling a self-published work. They take a percentage of each online sale, and they are more than happy to sell you printing and book marketing services, as well. I used Lulu.com’s free U.S. trade book template (6 inches by 9 inches) to format Jump in Microsoft Word. Then I converted the formatted and (this is vital: carefully proof-read) file into a PDF. I picked a generic cover file available on Lulu and uploaded the materials. Immediately, Jump was available to the world as a $1.99 e-book readable on computers and other devices that can display PDF documents. Each time someone buys it, I earn part of the price and Lulu keeps part of it.

I used a very similar PDF file of the book’s interior to set up a $9.95 paperback version of Jump at Amazon’s CreateSpace.com. Again, I picked a generic, free book cover from the choices online and uploaded my file. That same day, a proof copy of my book was available to order. I paid a small fee and postage and received the book a few days later. According to the return address, it had been printed in North Charleston, S.C.

While proofing the printed copy, I decided to make a few small changes, so I uploaded a new interior file and ordered another proof copy. A few days later, I received it, checked it and approved the book’s publication.

The presses did not immediately roll, of course. A print-on-demand book is only printed when someone orders one or more copies. I bought a few copies at an author’s discount off the cover price and received them a week later. Then I sent them out to some friends, bookstore owners, and possible reviewers.

Next, I used Amazon’s online self-publishing tools to try to generate a Kindle version of Jump. All I got, at first, was a discouraging jumble. Jump is not just straight text. It includes some poetry and a few abstract choices of typography. But things improved after I uploaded an HTML version of the Microsoft Word file. Then I spent a few hours downloading, proofing, correcting and uploading the Kindle file. I never got all of the formatting glitches cleaned up, but I finally decided it was good enough and approved the Kindle edition. It became immediately available.

Visions of a modest but steady trickle of sales quickly evaporated once my book was available at these three different different outlets. Indeed, nothing happened until I started sending out dozens of emails to friends and contacts letting them know how to find and buy my book. A few of them bought it—fewer than I thought.

Social media is supposed to be the hot new way to market books, but Twitter so far has been colder than a frozen mackerel as a marketing tool. Each new “tweet” about the book is like throwing an advertising flyer into a fast-moving river of data. It is quickly swept away and hardly seen by anyone. Meanwhile, post too many messages about your new book, and you will start getting complaints and losing some of your all-important “followers.” For example, someone in Australia recently chewed me out for posting information about Jump too many times, in her view. Then she “unfollowed” me.

Marketing via email also creates the risk of being branded as a spammer. When I have sent out updated emails about my book, I have gotten a few complaints and requests to be removed from email lists. Some of those complaining lately have been friends and professional contacts. Not good.

I have been told by many people that I should get my book information posted on Facebook. However, I do not want my face and details on Facebook. I recently got rid of MySpace and stopped using several other social media sites, because it is just too much work to try to keep up with them all and also keep updating and correcting my information. I would much rather spend the time writing and editing new materials.

Another bit of advice from web marketers is to create a video “trailer” for a new book and post it on YouTube. Allegedly, this is another hot way to sell books. It took a bit of work to slip together some of my old photographs and a few title cards in a manner that seems reasonably coherent. Then, using Windows Movie Maker, I created a movie file and posted it on YouTube. Here is the link. I have not recorded any spike in sales since posting it.

Finally, I keep seeing online messages and blog posts touting novellas as "the new novel” for busy readers. And I keep seeing book publishers setting up e-book divisions and posting e-book versions of hot sellers. At least one of my previous books, published by a conventional publisher, is now online as an e-book, and I do not get a penny from the sales.

About two months after self-publishing my book and entering this brave new, no-inventory world, I have not yet turned a profit on Jump. Numerous people have promised to purchase it, but the sales figures so far do not show much follow-through. A few friends quietly have admitted that the recession is still hurting them and causing them to watch every discretionary cent. That is one of the reasons I made the e-book version of Jump available for just $1.99 and priced the Kindle edition at only 99 cents.

(An amazing number of authors with online books apparently are so desperate to be read that they price their works at $0.00 – free. This, of course, makes it much harder for writers who need income from their works to set any kind of profitable, yet competitive, price. After Amazon’s commissions for the Kindle edition, for example, I would have to sell three million copies of Jump to hit the magic million-dollar mark. Dan Brown might be able to do it, but not Si Dunn.)

Short of hiring Lulu’s or Amazon’s book marketing services and going deeper in the hole, my only recourses are to start sending out news releases and review copies of the book and start buying advertising space, just like the old days of book publicity. Maybe I can even give myself some book-signing parties and offer free chips and dip.

Hey, anybody know Oprah?


Si Dunn is a book author, screenwriter, script doctor, book reviewer and editor.

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