What can I say? It’s been a great year for me as an author and for my book, Stealing Wishes. As many know, I’ve documented my publishing journey over the past year here as the POD Diary. From pulling my hair out while creating my own book cover over a year ago to recording every [...]
Today, like every day, I checked my Amazon.com sales rank and discovered it had bumped up quite a bit. I’m now at 101,491. Now as I’ve discussed in the past, this might very well mean I’ve sold just one copy over the weekend, or even up to 5 copies. And chances are the rank will fall fast unless another copy sells today.
I received $16.91 deposited today from Amazon, but this is not from Kindle sales. This is actually from Associate sales where people purchased my book through special links which I provided. I highly advise that you sign up for the Amazon Associates program because it’s like getting paid twice for your book. You’ll earn a commission from every thing they buy through the Amazon link, and you’ll also earn a royalty through Lulu for the distribution sales of your book. To join, scroll all the way to the bottom of any page on Amazon and click on Join Associates. They provide different tools to create your own bookstores, product links, etc.
Many of us are still boycotting Amazon due to the huge Booksurge/POD war that has been taking place this year. Many of us have moved forward and tried to find other venues for selling our books outside of Amazon. I hope it’s paying off for those of you out there pounding the pavement.
Loyal readers may notice The POD Diary tab has been removed from the top of the page. This is a detailed journal I’ve been keeping since earlier this year concerning my own recent self-publishing journey. If you have enjoyed the journal, don’t worry. It’s not gone completely. You can still find it under the list of Pages on the left column of the blog.
Mark Long of the TSTC Publishing’s Book Business Blog has written a very detailed article about my POD Diary. He calls it “the absolutely epic saga—equally fascinating and heartwrenching—of Shannon Yarbrough self publishing his novel Stealing Wishes through an online POD publisher.” Wow! What a compliment!
It’s hard to believe that this is the end of May, the third month since I started the Lulu Book Review site. The support of this site and the number of visitors to it has been overwhelming, reaching over 4,000 on the counter so far. Thanks to all the loyal readers, and to the wonderful authors we’ve discovered and reviewed because of it.
May 10th and 11th: So here we are. I’m still revising the inside, checking for errors, and marking up the sample copy with my red ink pens. I’ve read all of POD People and have begin looking into Jeremy’s suggestions for book cover help. Jeremy suggests a program called Gimp. I downloaded it for free and began toying around with it, but I didn’t find any options that were better than what I could do with Paint.
From May to August of 2007, I wrote a novel and edited it twice then had no idea what to do with it because I was already thinking of a new project to write next. It was part romance, part comedy, and I didn’t know which market to shop it to. So, I let it sit.
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