When I published my first novella, Work Experience, on Smashwords almost a year ago, I would sit in front of my
computer and click Refresh every ten minutes. I had put the book on free for 24
hours and when the promotion was over I had my champagne glass ready to
celebrate the hundreds of books I would sell. Guess what? No sales, not the
first hour, not the first day, and not the first month. Devastated and highly
questioning my ability to write I sat down and made lists of things I wanted to
find out. Then I did my research, and what I found was that most people who
sell decent amounts of books have several books on sale be it a series or stand
alone.
“Everyone knows that”, you might
say. I didn’t, but I am a quick learner. I locked my doors, and made a large
pot of tea, and then I went to work. I wrote several more books in the Nat
Smiley series, and I did some research on Amazon’s KDP. It was more complicated
to set up and account on Amazon, but I did it and when it was done, so was my
new novellas. I unpublished on Smashwords, because Amazon doesn’t let you have
your books on other sites if you are enrolled in KDP.
On an early morning I uploaded
three novellas to KDP and put them for free for 24 hours. This time I did not
sit and click refresh every ten minutes. I went to work. When I came home, I
had several hundreds free download, and the next morning I actually had some
sales too. I was a happy camper!
So, what does this have to do with
the subject of this article? Sadly, to be able to write fast enough to be able
to publish a new novella every month, some things have to be put on the side,
or don half assed. Editing comes to mind. Yes, I am aware that the reader
expects the highest quality in editing when they buy a book from us Indie
writers, we should be on par with the traditionally published authors. But,
there is one big difference; most of us don’t have hundreds or thousands of
dollars to invest in an editor. We have friends or family that reads our books
and help us. They take the time to do it because they believe in us, but they
are not professionals. I would love to be able to e-mail my manuscript and get
it back perfectly edited, but sadly I don’t have the cash to do it, yet.
Where does that leave us, the
author and the reader? The author does the best he or she can do, and the
reader buys a book with a story they like (hopefully) but with some grammatical
errors. We price our books much lower than the traditionally published authors
because we know, or at least I know, my novellas don’t have the same standard
as the others. But, I believe in my stories and I hope that the reader will
enjoy them and forgive me for my errors.
