The first time I published a book, I published only on Amazon and did enough marketing to try it out. I made no money. I didn’t expect to make money. I wanted to publish. This time, I’m publishing wide or publishing on multiple publishing sites – including Amazon. To clarify, I love Amazon. I’m a proud Prime member and happy with their services. My fondness for Amazon, however doesn’t me from seeking other opportunities to publish my books.
I’ve republished Shadows of Victory as Midnight Victories , and I’m publishing a collection of short stories titled, Midnight Voices. The “experts” say I need a series of three books before I can make any money and/or market effectively. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. I intend to learn about marketing as I wrap up the next book for this series.
Midnight Voices is listed as book 0 in the series Midnight Whispers. These are stories I wrote ages ago when Mary Midnight was only a figment of my imagination. I will use this tiny book for promotional purposes.
Midnight Victories (previously published as Shadows of Victory) is the first novel length book I wrote involving Mary Midnight. The cast of characters are pulled from short stories and created new for the novel. Characters from both books appear in Midnight in Line and Form and in the next book. (No official title yet, still working on it.)
I’m documenting my adventure in publishing wide. It took two days of formatting and uploading before both books were loaded and published on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, and Google Play. It was a lot of work. Nothing difficult, but tedious and well deserving a slice of chocolate cake. I’ll devote a few hours over the weekend to make sure all links to the books are working, but that’s it. The rest of the time, it’s me and chocolate cake.
Marketing begins in earnest next week. I’ll take notes on the ease/difficulty of the process and what I am learning and pass those notes on to you here. Don’t know if I’ll post every week or stick to my bi-weekly post. Let’s see how it goes. The timer on the oven has beeped. The cake is ready.
Good luck with this. I’ll be watching and listening.