So, I've been meaning to write this post for at least two months now, but I kept procrastinating and life was pretty hectic the past couple of months, with finals for school and training at my new serving job. But now that school has disappeared from my life for three blissful months, I have more time on my hands and I'm running out of excuses, so here it goes.
Originally this blog was meant to chronicle my writing endeavors, and my attempts to query a literary agent and get my first novel, Euphoria, published. It's still going to chronicle my writing endeavors, but the difference now is that Euphoria is already published--at least, the first part of it is.
So, here it is. I'm coming out, and saying that I have self-published my novel. But before you scoff, or roll your eyes, I want to explain my decision and the reasoning behind it, because self-publishing is no longer as lame as you might think it is, and this definitely does not mark the end of my quest to obtain a literary agent and get published with a legitimate publishing house, one with the resources to market my book and put it into actual bookstores.
In mid-March, I made the decision to self-publish my book as an e-book with Amazon. Quite a few factors led me to this choice, and I want to start from the beginning. In the beginning, like most people, I scoffed at self-publishing too. Firstly, it costs money to print your book--your own money, since you don't have the resources of a publishing house behind you. You then have to market it and physically sell the books on your own, and in most cases, it's difficult to succeed that way. I never wanted to self-publish, because I knew I wouldn't be able to reach a wide enough audience, and I did want to go the traditional publishing route, because that's usually where the money is at.
Then, in January of this year, I read an article about a woman named Colleen Houck. I don't remember where I read it, but it basically said that she had self-published her novel, Tiger's Curse, on Amazon as an e-book--and it eventually sold so well that a real publishing house picked up the book to put into actual print. You may have already seen it in stores. The article I read said something about Colleen paying $17,000 dollars to get it published as an e-book. I looked at her story and said to myself, "Alright, well if I fail with every literary agent I query, I'll save up all my money or take out a loan or do whatever it takes to self-publish my novel as an e-book like Colleen did."
At that point, I'd been writing off and on (much more off than on) over the past year of 2010--that's why there's only about five posts that exist prior to this one. I started this blog when I was still going full steam ahead with my writing (as in I was writing every single day--this was around January 2010), but then shortly after that all my creative writing classes really took off and I found that I wrote a lot less on the novel. So, this January, inspired somewhat by Colleen's story, I went back to editing my novel, vowing to finish editing it by the end of the year.
Then, near the end of February, on one of my favorite literary agent's blog, I read about a young woman named Amanda Hocking. She self-published around 9 or 10 Young Adult novels as e-books on Amazon, and in the past year, she made millions off of them. Obviously hers is a very unique case, and I'm not saying that this is what convinced me to self-publish my novel as an e-book--however, learning about Amanda opened up many doors to lots of new information that I hadn't had the slightest clue about. Like, for instance, that it doesn't cost $17,000 dollars to publish your book as an e-book with Amazon. In fact, it's completely free.
Colleen Houck must have paid extra for specialized editing, or perhaps I read the article wrong. Either way, this was fascinating to me. With Amazon at the helm, self-publishing no longer seemed lame, or impossible to reach an audience with. Instead, it seemed incredibly awesome. For instance, if I was to print my books and try to sell them myself, my audience would be limited to those around me, and in my city. But with an e-book, on Amazon--essentially the world's biggest online department store and book store--I could reach millions of people, all over the world. I could also market it online, through book websites, or whatever. The internet is a powerful tool.
But I was still not convinced of anything, and I did a little more research. I started to actually look at the Kindle store, specifically the e-books that had been self-published. Most self-published e-books are priced low to entice the reader into buying them over the higher-priced e-books from traditional publishers that are usually around eight or ten dollars, so they're not hard to find--they usually run about 99 cents or $2.99. I investigated some of these novels, especially those that were self-published in the Young Adult category.
My breaking point was when I read the reviews on one self-published novel that was priced at $2.99. The reviews were mostly low, and they said that the novel was riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. But still, despite all of that, there were seven reviews, which meant that at least seven people had paid for a novel that hadn't even been edited properly. However, when considering how few of people actually take the time to review a novel, I could guess that quite a few more than seven people had bought it. I also thought the cover looked like something I could have done in paint when I was in 4th grade. I thought to myself, If a book like this could sell, why wouldn't mine? I know that sounds mean, but it was true. I knew my book might have a few typing errors, but it certainly wasn't full of errors the way reviewers were saying this one was--and, most importantly, even though this one did have errors, it was still selling.
The problem was, I wouldn't be able to self-publish my book right away. My novel is 130,000 words long, and I had only finished editing the first half of it. And when I say editing, I don't mean simply looking for grammatical mistakes--I mean editing like re-writing, cleaning up bad writing, adding new scenes, getting rid of scenes that don't work, and tying in a new plot point that I had added into the first half of the novel. But then it hit me.
130,000 words is pretty long. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is about 107,000 words, if that's any indicator of the type of length we're talking about. While most Young Adult novels are getting bigger and 130,000 words is becoming a pretty average length, 65,000 words is still enough for a book to stand on its own. And, within my novel, I had two "Books"--like the first half was "Book. 1" and started with a quote, and the second half was "Book 2.". It was fully intended to all be in one physical book though--originally at least. But I thought that I could split it into two smaller books, and self-publish the first half right away, and publish the second once I finished.
I felt a tingling excitement in my veins. I was considering it--more than considering it. I had pretty much decided. I just had to get the opinion of one of my best friends and editor, Alana. She said that she thought I should do it, and a few weeks later, after re-editing the first book and checking it for mistakes, I uploaded it to Amazon.
The first thing I had to do then was market it. I sent e-mails to several book bloggers asking if they would review my novel on their blog. Amanda Hocking, the self-published millionaire that I mentioned earlier, attributed her success to book bloggers, so I thought it was a great place to start. I also joined a website called BookBlogs, a place where you can make posts asking for people to review your book.
The first month--which was really only half of March--I sold something like 37 copies. Most of those were people I knew that I had told about it, but a few of the sales were random readers. In the second month, April, a few book bloggers reviewed it and I sold around 70 copies. This month, as of May 31st, I've sold 170 copies, and to my knowledge, those are all random readers. I've only made around $100 so far, but that's because I'm selling it at 99 cents and I only make 35 cents off of each copy sold. If I was selling it at $2.99 I'd be making about 2 dollars off of each copy, but right now I think it's prudent to keep the price low to expand my readership. I'll likely sell Part 2 for $2.99 though.
So, that's pretty much my story. I neglected to come onto the blog and start it up again, or announce it on social networking, because I was a little conflicted about whether or not it had been a mistake to self-publish, and I was kind of embarrassed. But after this terrific month of May--where, on Amazon, I received two five star reviews from random readers, and sold 170 copies--I'm more at ease with my decision, and excited, because now I actually have legitimate fans awaiting the second part of the novel. Even if it's only a few people, it doesn't really matter to me. People are reading my writing, and that's all that matters in the end.
And, lastly, I must say that this in NO way marks the end of my endeavor to get traditionally published. I just realize now that this might not be the book that I do it with--or, maybe it will be. There's absolutely no legal restrictions stopping me from still trying to get a literary agent to represent the novel, as I retain all rights to the material--Amazon is simply the middle man. Time can only tell what kind of success I'll have, but for now I'm simply going to work on getting the second half of the novel out and seeing what that brings. So, without further adieu, here is the link to Euphoria (Part 1 of Book 1), in the Amazon US Kindle store:
Euphoria (Part 1 of Book 1)
Also, since there is a link to my blog in the acknowledgments section of the book, this means that I will be attempting to upkeep this blog regularly. I've never blogged consistently before, and I'm not even sure what I'll be blogging about--probably random things about writing, updates on my progress with Part 2, my own book reviews of other YA novels, and whatever else I suppose! Bear with me, as this is a new adventure and untraveled road. I'll try to write as often as possible! Thanks for reading, and happy Tuesday :)
