Starting Out

I'm starting this blog with a view to encouraging debate among people who want to self-publish or perhaps are already self-publishing on the internet. In my case I am a total newbie - no previous publications with publishing houses, no agent, no contacts in the industry - nothing. For these reasons my experiences on the path to successful, or unsuccessful self-publication are probably going to be much more similar to the majority of writers out there compared to those writers who are coming to KDP with established careers in publishing houses.

I recently started self-publishing on Amazon using the Kindle Direct Publishing, my first publication being Razed 1: Into the Night, a tale of a zombie apocalypse. It can be found here and its cover looks like this:

I published it in January 2013 and I'm very pleased with the results. So far it has sold a lot more copies than I expected considering I am not really promoting it. I have no Facebook page, although I did recently start a Twitter account but I'm not sure of the efficacy of that. The only thing I did in terms of pro-active promotion was make use of the "freebie" facility on Kindle Select. I made it free for two days and it pushed the book to #31 in the free Kindle list for its category, which was either horror or science fiction, I can't remember now. I did notice a rise in sales after this, and they grew more recently until it hit the paid bestseller list in the Occult section and reached #37. It might have gone higher but I wasn't watching it all the time. I was very pleased with this performance, though I have noticed an immediate stop in sales starting Monday 18 Feb, so I am keeping an eye on that. Perhaps I'll write more about that later.

So, first blog post done. I hope others out there who are interested will share their experiences on this blog, whether they are writers or readers.