One of the biggest struggles for an indie author is getting people to review your books on Amazon and other book retailers (I even have trouble getting people I know personally, and who have given my novel extremely positive feedback, to leave reviews). Without reviews (positive, negative, or indifferent), it’s nearly impossible to get strangers interested in your book because it gets lost in an endless sea of unreviewed, self-published books available to the masses.
As indie authors, we take steps to try and remedy this situation: launching giveaway contests, making our books available for free with coupon codes or by reducing the price to zero for a period of time, promoting the books on blogs and social media, and so on. For most unknown authors, I imagine the results are as middling as mine have been, so last month I decided to try something new.
My search for reviews led me to a few sites that offer authors the chance to give their books away for free in exchange for honest reviews. Some of these sites are more expensive than others and, as I was unwilling to risk spending a lot of money on something that was not guaranteed to work, I chose the site with the cheapest rate: Story Cartel.
For $25, you can post your novel on Story Cartel in various formats for three weeks. Anyone can download it during this time for free. As added incentive, those who leave reviews are entered into giveaways for prizes such as Kindle eReaders, Amazon and Barnes & Noble gift cards, and bestselling print books. I figured that for $25 I didn’t have much to lose, and if it helped me get a few reviews, all the better. After all, I’d read articles in which people had claimed to get 50+ reviews out of it.
My results, I’m afraid to say, were not quite so amazing. In fact, I’d have to label the entire experiment a failure, for in the end, I only got one solitary review for my $25. It was a very nice, 5-star review (for a total of two reviews on my novel’s Amazon page), but overall it was not worth it for me. Does that mean it won’t work for you? Perhaps, perhaps not. I think the success rate might be higher for an author with more of an established following than one like myself who is still trying to build one. The reason for this is that the onus is on you to promote the giveaway. I did my best to feature it on both social media and this blog but, again, I believe it comes down to how big (and dedicated) your following is.
As for the publishing process at Story Cartel, the interface was easy enough to use, though I would like to have seen a longer description field, as well as a place for me to enter a list of searchable tags (I feel that being limited to just two genres did not make the book searchable enough). It also might have helped if I could have made the book available for longer than three weeks.
I could have opted for Story Cartel’s more expensive option that features the book more prominently, but there’s no guarantee that would have helped get me more reviews. At least $25 wasn’t a huge amount to spend on a failed experiment–I’m just glad I didn’t try one of the more expensive sites that would have taken more than $100 out of my pocket.
I think the lesson from all this is that there is only so much you can do to drum up sales as an unknown author. A lot of it comes down to luck–you can have a great novel that never gets read by anyone, or a lousy novel that becomes a best seller [cough 50 Shades cough]. Most of us fall somewhere in between. That doesn’t mean I will stop trying (see below), it just means I’m being realistic. I was never under any illusion that I was going to become a best seller and have my novel turned into a movie. I’m just gratified that I was able to get it out in the world and that those who have read it have really enjoyed it.
In other news, you can now download the entire first half of my novel for free from Smashwords, and it’s only 99 cents to read the rest. I believe this 50% sample size may also apply to some of the other booksellers in the Smashwords distribution network, such as Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Oyster, Scribd, Inktera, Apple, and OverDrive (though not Amazon). I also intend to make more of my novel available for reading on this blog.
And stay tuned for a series of upcoming new releases: free short stories excerpted from my novel, which will be downloadable at booksellers and also posted here. The series of stories will live under the title, The Eyes of Mictlan: Origins. I hope you will enjoy them, and as always, I thank you for your support!
When you join Smashwords as an author, you can post an interview based on auto-generated questions to help your readers get to know you a little better. I thought it might be a good idea to post the interview here as well.
And don’t forget that there’s still time to enter my Amazon Giveaway to win a free copy of my novel.
Interview with Michael Rappa
Who are your favorite authors?
Stephen King, Frank Herbert, J. R. R. Tolkien, Richard Matheson, Edgar Allan Poe, George R.R. Martin, Douglas Adams
What are your five favorite books, and why?
Dune – Frank Herbert’s masterpiece is my all-time favorite novel. It has often been called science fiction’s answer to Tolkien’s Middle Earth books and for good reason. I’ve read the entire Dune series as well as most of Herbert’s standalone novels. I was fascinated as a child by his use of journal entries and quotes for chapter heads, as well as the glossary he included in Dune for his numerous invented words. He was a brilliant writer and a huge influence, not so much on my first novel, but much of my writing owes a great debt to Herbert.
The Shining – My favorite Stephen King novel and the greatest ghost story I’ve ever read. My next novel is going to be a haunted house story and to say that ‘The Shining’ is an influence is a major understatement.
1984 – George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has proven to be eerily prescient. The ending still haunts me. Unfortunately, what he originally intended as a cautionary tale seems more often these days to be used as a “how-to” manual. One of the stories I’m working on is a Negative Utopian tale in the vein of 1984–I even named the main character George in tribute.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Hands down the funniest book ever written. Douglas Adams was a genius.
The Dark Tower – This Stephen King series was the biggest influence on my first novel. Its blending of horror, fantasy, western, and sci-elements while seamlessly jumping between our world and Mid-World was masterful. My favorite individual books in the series are ‘Wizard and Glass’ and ‘The Gunslinger.’
Do you remember the first story you ever read, and the impact it had on you?
It was probably Call of the Wild, which I read repeatedly as a child. Besides contributing to my lifelong love of dogs, it made me want to read more and to create stories of my own.
Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
I wrote a haunted house story with a couple of my childhood friends. It was quite macabre for the minds of second graders, as I recall.
What’s the story behind your latest book?
I first put pen to paper (yes, pen and paper) back in 1997 when I wrote the first chapter and outlined the rest of the novel. The idea for the novel originally sprung from a text-based online role-playing game I was considering playing on AOL back in the days of dial-up modems (kids, ask your parents). As part of creating a character for the game, you were supposed to come up with a back story for your character. I never ended up playing the game, but I liked the character I created, so I decided to turn his story into a novel.
My original intention was to write it as an experimental serial novel, in which I would post a new chapter at regular intervals. In fact, the first chapter has been available online in one form or another since 1998. However, when I realized that there was enough material for a full-blown novel, I altered my plans. It took many years to complete—as any aspiring writer will tell you, one of the biggest obstacles to completing a novel is finding the time between your job, housework, and various other adult responsibilities—but eventually (and with the help of a period of unemployment) I finished the first draft in early 2009. Subsequent drafts followed and I finally had a draft that I deemed worthy of submission in the winter of 2012.
I do NOT plan to take 18 years to publish my next novel. 🙂
What motivated you to become an indie author?
I tried the traditional publishing route first, submitting queries to agents, but then I began to notice that more and more people were self-publishing and that the self-publishing industry was growing at an astronomical rate, with even established authors beginning to self-publish. I like the idea of maintaining full control over my property and earning higher royalties on each sale, not that I’m expecting to earn much (you don’t really make any money on a book unless it becomes a best-seller). It’s more about the work itself, getting it out there into the world, and self-publishing seemed like the best way for me to accomplish that. The traditional querying process did have its benefits, though—it helped me to hone the marketing of my book, specifically the synopsis I eventually used for the back cover—but I am happy with my decision to go the indie route.
What is your writing process?
I tend to edit heavily as I’m writing. Conventional wisdom says you should plow through your first draft and then go back later to edit, but I guess I’m too obsessive to work that way. Consequently, it takes me longer to complete a first draft, but on the bright side my first draft is more complete and thus needs fewer revisions than the average first draft.
How do you approach cover design?
I designed the cover for my first novel myself. I am not even close to being an artist but I have enough Photoshop experience that I was able to make a cover that looks professional. I had first tried one of Amazon’s online cover templates, but these were too plain and I didn’t want my cover to look like everyone else’s, so I spent a lot of time getting the look I wanted. The front art includes a real photo of mine that I manipulated via Photoshop to depict a scene from the novel. For the back cover (of the paperback) I chose to use an author photo rather than create another image. For future novels I may continue to design them myself or explore the possibility of employing a professional.
Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I’ve spent almost my entire life in New Jersey. I grew up in a small town in South Jersey that was essentially a suburb of Philadelphia, as did the character Sam in my first novel. Most of my stories take place in New Jersey. I’ve even created a fictional South Jersey town which I plan to weave into my stories in a sort of shared universe, a la Stephen King’s Derry and Castle Rock.
When you’re not writing, how do you spend your time?
I enjoy reading, traveling, photography, and cooking. I also play tennis and chess, and once every few years I pick up my saxophone. I spend most of my evenings feeding my TV/Film addiction, with the occasional video game mixed in.
What is your e-reading device of choice?
I own a Kindle but do most of my e-book reading via the kindle app on my phone. I still read physical books more frequently than e-books, especially for my favorite authors, whose books I like to collect.
To learn more, you can visit my Author Page at Smashwords.
To celebrate the one-month anniversary of my novel’s publication, I have made the eBook version of The Eyes of Mictlan available for 99 cents this week at Amazon (regularly $2.99). The sale price, available in both the U.S. and U.K., runs through Sunday, July 12th.
If you don’t own a Kindle you can still read The Eyes of Mictlan by installing Amazon’s free kindle reading software on your computer or mobile device. You also have the option of borrowing the book for free if you belong to Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has read the book for your kind words; it means a lot to hear that you enjoyed it. When you have a few minutes, I would be most grateful if you could leave a review on Amazon and spread the word to your friends and followers. Thank you so much for your support!
To help spread the word about my novel, I’ve decided to begin sharing selected quotes on a weekly basis. Most of these will be in the form of small snippets on my social media feeds, but from time to time I will share graphical passages like the one below, especially for longer quotes that won’t fit in a Twitter post. When I do create a visual passage, I will also share it here, but the smaller snippets will only be posted to my Twitter feed and Facebook page so that I can keep my book-related posts on this blog to a minimum. So, while there will be an uptick in posts about my book, I won’t be neglecting my travel stories and photos. In fact, I am currently working on a post about my visit to the Scottish Highlands.
I’m pleased to announce that my debut novel The Eyes of Mictlan is now available for purchase at Amazon in both Kindle (eBook) and paperback formats. The Kindle version is $2.99. If you do not own a Kindle, Amazon has free Kindle reading software for almost any computer or mobile device, as well as a free online reader. The eBook is also available for free to Amazon Prime members (via the lending library) and Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
For those of you who prefer the tactile feel of a book in your hands, the paperback version is $9.99. If you would like both versions, you can buy the Kindle version for 99 cents after purchasing the paperback. You can also order either version by clicking on the cover image to the left.
Well, that takes care of the promo portion of this post. The rest, should you choose to keep reading, is the story of my journey from concept to publication.
To quote the infamous theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise: “It’s been a long road, getting from there to here.” I first put pen to paper (yes, pen and paper) back in 1997 when I wrote the first chapter and outlined the rest of the novel. The idea for the novel originally sprung from a text-based online role-playing game I was considering playing on AOL back in the days of dial-up modems (kids, ask your parents). As part of creating a character for the game, you were supposed to come up with a back story for your character. I never ended up playing the game, but I liked the character I created, so I decided to turn his story into a novel.
My original intention was to write it as an experimental serial novel, in which I would post a new chapter at regular intervals. In fact, the first chapter has been available online in one form or another since 1998.
An early online version of my novel under its original title, circa 2006.
However, when I realized that there was enough material for a full-blown novel, I altered my plans. It took many years to complete—as any aspiring writer will tell you, one of the biggest obstacles to completing a novel is finding the time between your job, housework, and various other adult responsibilities—but eventually (and with the help of a period of unemployment) I finished the first draft in early 2009. Subsequent drafts followed and I finally had a draft that I deemed worthy of submission in the winter of 2012.
I tried the traditional publishing route first, submitting queries to agents, but then I began to notice that more and more people were self-publishing and that the self-publishing industry was growing at an astronomical rate, with even established authors beginning to self-publish. I like the idea of maintaining full control over my property and earning higher royalties on each sale, not that I’m expecting to earn much (you don’t really make any money on a book unless it becomes a best-seller). It’s more about the work itself, getting it out there into the world, and self-publishing seemed like the best way for me to accomplish that. The traditional querying process did have its benefits, though—it helped me to hone the marketing of my book, specifically the synopsis I eventually used for the back cover—but I am happy with my decision to go the indie route.
Self-publishing is a lot of work, especially if you choose to do everything yourself as I did. I broke a couple of self-publishing rules of thumb: don’t be your own editor and don’t design your own cover. Handling everything myself was like having a second job. My wife, who has an editorial background, was a big help in proofing an early draft, but I performed all subsequent editorial passes of the manuscript myself. The big danger in editing your own manuscript, even if you have an editorial background as I do, is that you are too close to the material to make the cuts that are necessary—and there is a lot of truth to that—but I revisited the manuscript a couple of years later when I made the decision to self-publish, and by then I was far enough removed from the material that I was able to make some ruthless cuts that I had resisted making in earlier drafts.
One major thing you need to keep an eye on when self-publishing is whether you are using any material that might be subject to copyright (such as song lyrics) because you will not have a publisher to handle obtaining the necessary permissions. You could try to obtain the rights yourself, but in my case I found it easier to go back through the entire manuscript and remove any such references either through deletion or by altering the prose to make the references non-explicit. I don’t think these edits had any negative impact on the story anyway—in fact they forced me to be a bit more inventive—so I’d say it’s best for self-publishing authors to just avoid copyrightable references altogether.
The Back Cover
As for the cover, I am not even close to being an artist, but I have enough Photoshop experience that I was able to make a cover that looks decently professional. I had first tried one of Amazon’s online cover templates, but these were too plain and I didn’t want my cover to look like everyone else’s, so I spent a lot of time getting the look I wanted. The front art includes a real photo of mine that I manipulated via Photoshop to depict a scene from the novel. For the back cover (of the paperback) I chose to use an author photo rather than create another image. A professional designer probably could have created a better cover in half the time it took me, but I am pleased with it overall.
The most work, however, revolved around formatting both the paperback and Kindle versions. The easiest approach would have been to format the paperback version in Word and then convert it to an html file for the eBook version, but I did it backwards because I had not originally intended to do a paperback version. I started with a Word doc and converted it to an HTML file. However, I was not entirely pleased with the conversion, so I put on my Web Designer hat and began editing the HTML file (this would later come back to bite me when I began formatting the Word doc for paperback).
After uploading the HTML file and viewing it on Amazon’s previewer (a nifty feature that shows you how the eBook will display on various mobile devices), I had to make even further edits to account for display issues on certain devices. By this point, I had made so many tweaks to the HTML file directly that when I discovered new edits that needed to be made to the original manuscript during the paperback phase, I had to edit both the Word and HTML versions separately—I couldn’t simply re-convert from the Word file or I would have lost all of the extra work I had done on the HTML file. My advice: do not do it the way I did. 🙂
Once I finally got the eBook version looking good in all devices, it was time to format the paperback version. The paperback is created through a separate site called CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon. The nice thing about using this service is that it does not cost you any money upfront—the books are printed on demand and you make a percentage of the profits minus the manufacturing costs. If you already have a Kindle version of your book, Amazon will automatically link it to the paperback version once it goes live.
As with the Kindle version, it took a lot of work to get the paperback looking perfect (fonts, page headers/numbers, gutter/margin settings, etc.), but at least with the paperback version you only have to format it correctly once and then you’re done—no worrying about cross-device compatibility. After completing the paperback version it was then time to create author pages on Amazon and CreateSpace, as well as update my blog to help market the release.
The Paperback
Some of you may have noticed the new title. Life’s Blood had been the title of my novel since I wrote the first chapter all the way back in 1997, but when I began the self-publishing process, I noticed that there are roughly a dozen books on Amazon with either Life’s Blood or Life Blood in the title. I didn’t want my book to get lost in a sea of similar titles, so even though I did not relish the idea of making copy changes, redoing my cover, and editing all references on my blog to Life’s Blood, I decided that I needed to come up with a new title.
After brainstorming a bunch of ideas and scanning my novel for a line or phrase that might make for a good title, I settled on The Eyes of Mictlan. It is certainly unique, as I saw just one other book on Amazon with Mictlan in the title. It is also significant to the plot and has an aura of mystery about it, something that the more generic-sounding previous title did not, so I think it may end up being a blessing in disguise. Sometimes necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Whether it translates to more sales remains to be seen, but at least I’ve given it a fighting chance to stand out.
I decided to join Amazon’s KDP Select program for the Kindle version, which lets you earn up to 70% royalties as opposed to the normal 35% and also makes the book available in the lending library for Amazon Prime members (for which you can earn a small royalty each time it is read). The trade-off is that you must make the eBook exclusive to Amazon for three months and re-commit to additional three month-periods for as long as you remain in the program. Established authors may balk at the exclusivity requirement but overall it seems like a good deal for new authors. I decided to price the eBook at $2.99, which is the minimum price you can set under the rules of KDP Select, though I have the option of making it available for cheaper or free for short periods of time as part of promotions.
The design of the paperback is trade rather than mass market, so it has a good size to it, similar to a small hardcover. However, it is expensive to produce, so $9.99 was basically as cheap as I could make it while still earning a small profit (I will actually earn twice as much on sales of the eBook, despite it being $7 cheaper). In order to make the paperback $9.99, I had to decline the expanded distribution option, which would have made it available to libraries, book stores, and similar entities. The production costs would have skyrocketed under this option and I would have needed to set the price around $14 to make even a tiny profit. I just didn’t think that was worth it—who’s going to spend $14 on a paperback from a first-time author? I’m not concerned about missing out on extra distribution channels at this point since I don’t expect to sell many paperbacks anyway; I imagine most people will opt for the less-expensive Kindle version.
So anyway, that’s the story of my story. If nothing else ever happens with the novel, at least I finished it and it’s out there in the world. If you decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it. If you like it, please spread the word . . . and if you don’t like it—well, maybe don’t spread the word. 😉
One of the biggest struggles for an indie author is getting people to review your books on Amazon and other book retailers (I even have trouble getting people I know personally, and who have given my novel extremely positive feedback, to leave reviews). Without reviews (positive, negative, or indifferent), it’s nearly impossible to get strangers interested in your book because it gets lost in an endless sea of unreviewed, self-published books available to the masses.
To celebrate the one-month anniversary of my novel’s publication, I have made the eBook version of The Eyes of Mictlan available for 99 cents this week at Amazon (regularly $2.99). The sale price, available in both the U.S. and U.K., runs through Sunday, July 12th.
formats. The Kindle version is $2.99. If you do not own a Kindle, Amazon has free Kindle reading software for almost any computer or mobile device, as well as a free online reader. The eBook is also available for free to Amazon Prime members (via the lending library) and Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Michael Rappa 