So, in case it’s not obvious by now, I’m officially an Indie Author; I have the books on Amazon and the mild sense of desperation to prove it.

My first novel, Your Name, In Fire, launched yesterday on a bunch of retail sites. It was very exciting and also intensely nerve-wracking. I sold about four times as many copies as I expected to, given that no one knows who the eff I am and I have a social media footprint the size of a gnat. So, win! Right?! I think!

Now I just have to face the next burning question: how long before enough people have had time to read so that one or two of them writes me a review?

Another fun part of self-publishing: stats! You can, and will, drive yourself crazy watching your sales rank rise and fall, and your number of books sold inch slowly upwards (or not).

But this was a cool stat to wake up to this morning:

#8 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations
#82 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Supernatural
#180 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Paranormal > Vampires

The first category is questionable–as I’ve probably mentioned, the book isn’t a video game adaptation. But the next two are legit, and getting anywhere near the top 100 in the final category is pretty challenging considering that Bella Forrest dominates about 50 of those slots by herself. Woot!

I’m running some more promotions in the coming days. That’s the easy part. (You put money in, and clicks come out.) The hard part is waiting to find out whether people will engage, read the whole thing, review, sign up for my mailing list, etc. This business is not for the faint of heart.

Also on deck: Closing in on finishing a novella called The Weight. I’m going to experiment with Kindle Unlimited and shirtless men for that one.

And: The sequel (spinoff?) to Your Name, In Fire is about 70% complete. Right now it has a crap title. STILL waiting for a lightbulb on that one. I have a tendency to only write when I’m really ‘feeling it’; research has indicated that this is not a viable business model. We’ll see. I could probably get the spinoff finished in … 60 days or so. If there’s indication that people are finishing YNIF and actually want the sequel, that’ll almost certainly drive me to move faster. If not, I may have some mild depression and crippling self-doubt to grapple with first. (I bounce back from things, but there’s usually a certain amount of sulking first.)

Overall: things went much better than I might have feared. Trying is better than not trying.

(In case it’s not obvious, I’m not good at pithy, inspirational blog posts. Work your ass off and good stuff might happen.)

If you feel like following me on Twitter, I can promise that I only promo my own stuff when something new happens, I won’t be tweeting review text (because you can read any eventual reviews on Amazon if you really want to), and I try to tweet real stuff, not just constant retweets. That said, so far I mostly tweet about television. I always forget to take a picture of my food before I eat it, so that cuts into a lot of potential material. 🙂

https://twitter.com/KeraEmory