My Amazon Kindle Publishing Experience: November 2011

I must say, this little Amazon Kindle experiment of mine has turned out to be one of the best writing decisions I have ever made. As they did in October, sales of my novel JIMMY continued to grow, each week’s total topping the previous week’s total. The only exception to this was during the final week of November, which saw sales matching the previous week’s sales (I’d like to think Thanksgiving played a part, but really have no way of knowing why). Making this outcome even more satisfying was that I did raise the price of the novel from $0.99 to $1.99 on November first, a decision that came after several days of careful thought and calculation. Fear that such an increase in price would kill the upward momentum of sales the novel was experiencing was present during this decision making process, but it didn’t last very long once November got started. Not only did sales continue to grow, they actually doubled. This in turn kept JIMMY near the 5,000 sales ranking for most of the month. Every now and then it would even dip down into the 3,000 rankings, which, needless to say, always brought excitement to my mind. Now I can’t help but wonder if the novel will not only dip lower than the 3,000 ranking at some point, but have a monthly average ranking that stays below 5,000. Only time will tell.

November also saw the release of my second novel TEXT MESSAGE. Originally when publishing JIMMY on the Amazon Kindle I wasn’t sure if this would be something I did with future novels or if JIMMY would be a one time thing. The reason for publishing JIMMY was simple; I was tired of submitting it to publishers that told me they loved it but never ended up publishing it due to the subject matter (a years worth of time usually having gone by during this process). The final straw (kind of) was my experience with Dorchester Publishing. Not only did they love it, they wanted it; though only after having me rewrite over a third of the novel (which, in hindsight, was the right thing to do). By the time these rewrites were finished Dorchester’s editing staff had been let go and the company looked like it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Had JIMMY not been my first novel I might have been able to shift publishing companies easily, but once again JIMMY started to get the ‘we love it but can’t publish it responses’, so, after nearly another year of this, I decided to upload it myself just to see what would happen. INSTANT BESTSELLER! Well, no. JIMMY didn’t meet with immediate success; however, it didn’t take a nose dive either. Instead it just sold a few copies everyday, the number steadily increasing as one month turned into two months and then into three months. Once October came around it was up to about 80 to 90 sales a week, and the feedback was mostly positive (every now and then a negative review would be posted somewhere, but that is always bound to happen). Because of this I decided my next novel TEXT MESSAGE, which was finished in late September, would go straight to Kindle. I also started to toy around with the idea of releasing a short story collection of previously published and original stories, but didn’t want to seriously focus on that until I had everything ready to go on TEXT MESSAGE (book cover, layout, editors feedback, first reader feedback, etc).

Now, given the success that JIMMY has been experiencing I thought TEXT MESSAGE might start off a little better, but like with JIMMY, its first few weeks were slow, but steady. The feedback, however, has been pretty impressive -- it even got a 5 star customer review its first weekend, which blew me away -- so I’m pretty confident the novel will succeed. I’m also pretty confident that keeping the novels as e-books only, and not printing paperback versions myself for purchase is the right things to do because it keeps the possibility of a future printing deal with a traditional publisher intact. Making such a deal is my ultimate goal and something I am going to start looking into once the short story collection is released.