Self-Publishing Success and Failure: It's up to you.

Every person on the planet who can read and write has a story to tell. With the advances in desktop publishing, many people are now telling those stories and sharing them with the world. Anyone can write and self-publish a book, but not everyone can be a success at it.

In the short time I have been publishing, I have learned that the amount of success I achieve directly corresponds to the amount of work I do to ensure it. I don't keep regular hours like most working Americans. I work every day of the week, even if it only for a few hours a total on that day. I'm fortunate that I don't have to have a job outside of my writing. That is not the case for most self-published authors.

Many new writers believe that they can write a book and put it out there, and it's going to become a best seller. It probably won't. The key to success is knowing that it only comes with hard work. There is no such thing as an easy payday. Yes, you can write the book and sit back and wait to collect passive income while you go off and shop for that new drop-top or house on the hill. The only problem is that unless you market your book, no one will know that it exists.

By the time I wrote my third book,  What You Want, I had studied several manuals on how to make a butt load of money selling on Amazon. Through some miracle, I did something right, or maybe I did several things right. My sales went through the roof almost immediately. I was thrilled and thought that I was on my way to hitting the top 100 of Amazon's best sellers. I got all the way to 832 within sixteen days of hitting the publish button. Then the bottom started to fall out.

I had been so laser-focused on how to get the Amazon algorithm to push my book out to readers that I didn't focus on what was most important. My story was good, but not as good as it should be for that kind of status. It was also poorly edited, if at all. Refunds were being requested, and my sales fell and continued to fall. I kept my head up and worked to correct some of the story's issues, but by then, I had lost what could have been a huge built-in audience for future books.

I didn't let it stop me, though. I got serious about writing. While I couldn't afford an editor, I knew that I had to do better if I wanted to continue writing and build a following. I was also determined to publish more books. I set a goal of writing a forty thousand word book and a short story series every month. In 2018 I did that very thing, and while I made just under a thousand dollars each month, I knew that I could do better, but I suffered a significant setback that year.

My mother died, and I kept my depression at bay for nine months. She was my "Person". When I slowed down long enough to feel the pain of her loss, I spiraled down into the abyss, and I wasn't sure I could come back. I tell people that my characters talk to me and tell me their stories, and that's how I write. I hadn't heard from any of my fictitious friends for a while. It took a little more than a year. I wrote a few things, and they did okay. Then one day, I decided to reread What You Want. I pulled out my laptop and started making changes to the story. Before I knew it, I had taken an okay plot and made it better. I reloaded it on Amazon and started dropping the link into a few posts on Facebook. Suddenly my sales went from nearly nothing to a little bit of something. I felt good, but I felt even better when I started getting new reviews that said the book was great.

One day, as the fog lifted, someone I didn't know whispered in my ear, and I knew after listening to him that it was time to get back in front of my laptop. Plus One was born, and I loved the story, but I need some validation. I used to let LR, my bestie, read my books, but I stopped somewhere along the way. I emailed the book to her, told her to read it and let me know what she thought. We share a house, and one day a few days later, she sent me a text. (She was in the living room) I was working on the cover art on my computer in my bedroom. Her text said, "I hate you."

I jumped up and moved swiftly to the living room and asked what the hell had I done to make her hate me. She wiped her eyes, "You made me cry, bitch." I laughed and asked where she was in the story. We talked for a few minutes, and I apologized for making her cry. I went back to my room, smiling. She got it. She felt what I felt when I wrote it. I cried too. A few hours later, she came to my room and told me that she loved it and that it was now her new favorite book by me.

I knew then that I had to put some effort into promoting it and getting people to read it. I am the epitome of antisocial. I don't like making new friends. I don't want to do the many things that I should be doing to really put myself and my work out there. I decided to find my own way. I made a list of every reading and author group I joined on Facebook. I organized the list by the rules about posting and promoting your work and set about making up some visual imagery to put with the text about the story.

I chose nine categories carefully and submitted them to Amazon. I chose keyword phrases and wrote my description. Then I decided to allow people to read the first few chapters on my website during the presale duration. I began posting to the FB groups as soon as the presale was live on Amazon, and I did okay. I wasn't thrilled but, I set the price higher than I would typically because I wanted to see how well it would do.

A few days after the book was released on December 1, 2020, my Amazon rank started to change, and I see the kind of results I wanted. My goal was to make a few hundred dollars, and I did much better than that. I have maintained my daily sales, and I'm pleased, but I have had to work every day to do that. I post in several FB groups every afternoon, in addition to dropping the link in posts that show up in my feed related to books.

As with anything that warrants success, we must do the work. Writing it my joy, marketing, and promoting is work. It's that part that I don't want to do, but I must if I want to affect at least one life with a story I have written, and that is my goal. I want to affect one person with every story. I think I'm doing that, based on the reviews and messages I receive. I am a success!