On Self Publishing So Far

I promised that this blog would partly be a running account of what it's like to be an indie writer, trying to build an audience and get to a point where I can live from the income from my self published books. I'm not going into this with my eyes closed. I know it's going to take a long time and a lot of work to manage it, but for everyone out there who writes as a hobby, let me say a few things.

I'm getting some encouraging signs. My zombie blog, Living With the Dead, is doing fairly well as far as readership goes. At least, as I personally judge it, she's doing well. I get between fifty and two hundred or so page views a day, usually spread among twenty to fifty readers. Those are averages, of course, but come pretty close to what I can expect any given day. I have a link to the first six months of the blog in eBook form on the amazon Kindle store at the upper right of LWtD's page, and I think this is helping me sell some of that collection, titled Living With the Dead: With Spring comes The Fall.

I'm certainly not making a living from these sales. As of today, I have sold thirty copies of this collection this month, and I am pretty happy about that. Remember that I published it at the end of October, and that on the first day of it being live I sold eleven, mostly to friends and family. I saw a bit of a pickup the first few days of November, selling about two copies a day. From then, though, sales became erratic. I would sell two in one day, then none for a day. Interestingly, I have sold three each of the last two days. I think this has to do with how Amazon ranks and connects sales.

It's pretty neat, really. If someone looks at my book, Amazon tracks that. If they buy it, they obviously track that too. About 88% of the people that look at this collection on amazon end up purchasing it, which is a pretty high rate. I expect it to go down eventually, but now that enough people have bought my book, it will start getting a little more exposure. Now it shows up in the nifty little bar in the middle of other people's amazon pages as a suggested read. See, when people buy one book and then another, it starts to build the suggested reading bar. So when a person buys "World War Z" by Max Brooks along with my blog collection, both pages will start to recommend the other work for sale.

If you have something you are thinking about putting on the Kindle store, I say go for it, with one or two provisos. One is that you need a good cover, or at least not a bad one. I made my own for the six month collection as well as the 99 cent march collection, but they are obviously not that complex. I think they look good, and I have some graphics experience. Not to mention that I can't afford what it costs to hire a cover artist. So keep that in mind.

Two, make sure your formatting is consistent if not professional. Having to pull everything from the blog and reformat it took a long time, and the process wasn't perfect, but it worked. Make sure that you search around for some formatting guides to make sure that what you are uploading for conversion will end up looking good on a screen.

Third, and last...

Keep in mind that you probably won't be making big money right off the bat. If the pattern of the last few days holds through to the end of this month, I will make about seventy bucks. Of course, I won't get paid that money until the beginning of February, keep that delay in mind as well...but it's seventy dollars that I don't have to do anything for. Nor will I next month, or the month after that...

I work a full time job, and my wife does as well (plus a part time job) to try and save up some money. Any extra income I get is just bonus points right now, and the idea of making essentially free money every month is awesome. Yes, I spent a lot of time writing the blog. But I did that as writing practice, never expecting to make any money from it. If you discount the forty minutes or so a day I spent writing, the total amount of time I put into making the cover and formatting was about four hours. Seventy dollars this month for four hours of effort?

That's a win.

And as I write and publish more (including my debut fantasy novel sometime before the end of the year) I will hopefully make more each month. And hey-- Joe Konrath points out on his blog that sales of each new book he puts out increases sales for his other books. What it boils down to is that it can only get better from here.

So publish away!

An Introduction

Hi there.

My name is Joshua Guess, and man, do I like to write. I've had the bug to tell stories for as long as I can recall, but I reached a critical point about a year ago. That was when I buckled down and started working on a fantasy novel. The idea had been in my brain for a long time, and writing it was hard. Very hard.

So, to sort of loosen up my brain and for daily practice, I started writing a fictional blog, livingwiththedead.net. It's a serialized story, told in real time, set in the zombie apocalypse. Funny that what began as an experiment in writing evolved into an almost obsessive passion. Now, because of my experiences writing both my blog and my fantasy novel (which will be released next month), I write all the time. I have dozens of ideas for books.

I am not a full-time writer. I work a regular job, hoping that one day my hobby will become my full-time occupation. Toward that end, let me say a few things that are important...

I sell two collections of my happy little zombie blog on the Kindle store. This one is the first month, for 99 cents. I put it on there first, thinking that it would be a great idea to offer each month in the series so that people who wanted to help support my efforts could do so without too heavy an investment.

Not too long after, though, I started really studying the trends in eBook sales, and learning about the publishing industry. I truly believe that if I am to make a living doing this, electronic media will be the key. People like getting more bang for their buck, which led me to collect six months of story into one handy unit, for $2.99, which is half off. That one is located right here.

I am planning to donate 10% of all my royalties to charity, pretty much forever. Initially I was going to give that percentage from Oct. 31 of this year until Oct. 31 or next year to Patrick Rothfuss's Worldbuilders, which drives for donations to Heifer International. I am actually going to extend that. It looks something like this:

Oct 31 2010-Jan 15, 2011 (I think that's the last day of worldbuilders)--10% of all royalties during this time will go to this year's Worldbuilders.

Jan 16, 2011-Jan 15 2012--one full year of saving one penny in ten to go toward Mr. Rothfuss's wonderful charity drive for next year.

Now, that's for anything and everything I publish on ANY platform over that time. Ten percent of everything I make from writing will go to Heifer. After next year's drive is finished, I will donate money to different charities for each book or series I publish. For example--one novel that is in the outline stage right now has a major character named after and designed from a friend of mine. She is getting to pick what charity I donate to after this time time frame is over for that book.

I think it's a decent idea. Not only will buying what I write help me to get closer to my goal, but in the process you will be donating money to help people in need all over the world, both at home and abroad.

This blog is going to be a work in progress for a while. I have been fiddling with Living With the Dead for most of a year, tweaking this and that until I have it set up the way I want.

JoshuaGuess.com is going to eventually house many things, from my works in progress and published stories to actual numbers on sales and donations. Not to mention being a nice window into the world of the indie writer trying to make a living. I will be writing often about my successes and failures in e-publishing, and I hope that many of you will join me for the ride.

It's going to be interesting.