Self publishing and self promotion.

Those of you who are following my experiment in self-publishing here on my blog will know that in my last post I revealed that I would be buying some digital promotion over in the USA. Some research revealed that doing so had worked well for other authors writing in a similar genre to me, so I thought it was worth a shot as although Eden was already doing very well I wanted to give it a boost if I could.

For the frankly meagre sum of $99 I bought a one day Kindle Fire advert in a digital publication across the pond and crossed my fingers. The result was hugely impressive - I awoke the next morning to find that Eden had leaped in the Amazon.com overall chart from the 1,051 position to the 585 position, an immense leap in sales! Eden has since slipped back a little but the experiment effectively paid for itself several times over in the next few days.

Would I do it again? Yes, definitely, but only at launch day, to get the title high into the charts as quickly as possible in conjunction with other promotional efforts. The exposure definitely works well and has a bit of a "tail", in that when the promotion ends sales don't plummet back but decrease only slowly. The new exposure not only means more sales but also hopefully more reviews - if they're positive it increases the confidence of other potential readers that your book is worth a go, keeping the title's momentum going.

In the UK, things are holding steady with the book selling around 60 copies per day ( and around 130 per day in the USA ). The important thing to remember is that these sales happen seven days per week, so Eden is selling well over 1,000 copies each week, a very respectable figure at this early stage just seven weeks after publication. I'm hoping that this will gradually grow over time now as there is clearly an appetite for this kind of novel. However, all of the advice I've received tells me that there is one thing I can do that will definitely increase sales of Eden, one thing that is more effective than any amount of advertising, blogging, Tweeting etc and that's to write the sequel! Doing so is now a priority for me, to bolster the first book's sales and to build a series of full-length novels that are instantly available to readers 24/7 at reasonable prices. It's a business model that has very few flaws, and I'm eager to build upon that now that my first attempt has been so successful.

Onward and upward!