Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

A lot went right with the release of Beneath a Wounded Sky and the completion of The Fallen Cloud Saga. Overall, I’m very pleased with the product, inside and out. Don’t kid yourself, people do judge a book by its cover…and by its font, and even by the quality of its title page. A good product, a quality product, will sell better than something that looks like it was put together by a grade-schooler.

But I did not do everything right; far from it. And there was one Big Item that I actually ignored purposefully, and it bears mentioning for any of you out there who are taking notes.

So, where can I improve for next time?

First, the little marketing things: I really needed to spend more time developing my ad copy. That’s the wording that goes on websites, the description that goes with my book, even the categories and the “tags” that are associated with it. All this helps distribution and optimizes search engine results, helping to get the book noticed by customers. Luckily, these are not locked in like the physical product is, and I’m still working on this, with an eye of upgrading all that marketing content when I release the Kindle versions. Again, this is a place where CreateSpace surpasses Lulu, as the former allows multiple changes to these marketing elements without disturbing the project as a whole. Lulu, on the other hand, makes any change sound like you need an entirely new ISBN (which you don’t). I’ll discuss this in further detail in another post.

And then there’s the Big Item I actively ignored: Reviews.

By “reviews” I do not mean posts made by readers on the Amazon website. To be sure, those are helpful to a book’s performance, but aside from slipping a fiver to every friend and relative in exchange for a four-star review, there’s little an author can do without seeming desperate.

No, by “reviews” I mean the Big Reviews: Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Kliatt, Library Journal. These are pre-publication reviews, and can drastically affect a book’s sales. A starred review in Booklist can mean the difference between a couple dozen copies sold and a couple thousand, so it’s no joke, and it’s worth the effort.

Now, why did I ignore this Big Item? The same reason any other self-published author is likely to ignore it: Time.

Booklist insists that submissions are received 15 weeks prior to publication or, failing that, that they receive the materials at the same times as the other Big Reviewers. 15 weeks.That’s a looong time, and at the end of it, there’s no guarantee they’ll even review your book. Even if you shaved it down to three months, that’s a long time in a wanna-be-self-published author’s life.

Next time, I will not be ignoring this aspect, because I realize how important it can be and to be honest, if a book is good now, it’ll be good in three months. Holiday shoppers can just as easily be Spring Break or Summer Beach Reading shoppers, right.

So understand my reasons for ignoring this Big Item.

1. I had already decided that my goal was to simply make enough sales to pay for my costs (hence my work at keeping costs low). I did not intend for this book to make money. This was a major factor.
2. I had a small but loyal cadre of readers who had been so patient and so encouraging to me in difficult times, that I didn’t want to make them wait any longer than necessary.
3. I wanted to make the books available to this cadre for holiday shopping, even if their purchase was only a gift of one book for themselves.
4. I knew that my next book was going to be in a different genre, so the crossover was going to be reduced.

In short, I decided that the compressed timeline was more important than any possible increase in sales of this book, or increase in readership would make to future sales. This is likely not going to be your reasoning, so do not ignore Big Reviews.

Of course, next time, I’ll also be going through a search for an agent and/or a publisher before I hit the self-publishing route. If you want to talk lag-time, that can take years. Literally, years.

k