My Self-Publishing Experience: I Thought I Had Set My Goal Low Enough That I Couldn’t Fail …

I was wrong!

After publishing my first novel earlier this year (about a man who tries to save the traveling circus and discovers a secret world of corruption, sex, and intrigue) I wrote a blog post about how my goal was to sell one copy of it every week.

Here’s a quote:

I’ve decided to pull out all the stops and sell one copy of my novel per week. I realize that this may sound like a completely unrealistic and “pie in the sky” sort of a goal, but I’ve never been one to back away from the difficult things. It’s like JFK said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

I did all the math, and figured that if I could sell a single copy of my book each week, I’d earn at least $52 per year. At that rate I’d be “Dan Brown successful” in 1.5 million years. It’s far off, yes, but it’s a finite amount of time!

My plan was totally working for the first few weeks. I pestered all my friends on Facebook, I did readings at open mic nights and I practically begged the audience to buy the book, I gave away copies in hopes that someone would appreciate it enough to buy a copy for someone else, and I even bought a copy myself during a week when I wasn’t able to sell one — just to keep the streak going.

After I ran out of the relatively low-hanging fruit, however, I starting missing my sales goal every other week. Shortly thereafter, sales dried up completely. I was so disheartened by my failure as a marketer and sales person that I couldn’t even bring myself to buy more copies myself just to maintain an illusion that my book wasn’t in free fall to the vast wasteland of the bottom half of the Amazon rankings where books might sell a copy per year if they’re lucky — the infinitely long tail, as I call it.

This blog post is the first step in my new plan to keep my book from descending down into that literary graveyard before it’s even a year old.

Here’s what the infinitely long tail looks like on the report Amazon makes available to authors (this is from one of my technical books, which was first published in 2000):

Each dramatic peak on this report represents a single book sold. When a book enters the infinitely long tail, a single book sold momentarily causes its rank to jump by millions, as the rest of the books in the pile on the floor gasp and grow jealous of this book’s sudden success. But, the success is short-lived and eventually the once high-flying celebrity in the top 50,000 books falls below 4,000,000 and is put into one of those warehouses with the ark of the covenant.

My parents like to tell the story about how I used to mix together household chemicals to make “potions” when I was very young. One day, after having combined some dish soap, cold coffee, and who knows what else, I announced that “the last one didn’t work, but this one will.” I don’t remember ever drinking these potions, so I’m not exactly sure how it was supposed to work (or what it was supposed to do, come to think of it). But, that’s beside the point. My last plan for self-publishing success didn’t work, but this one will!

And so, I present to you my new and improved plan for self-publishing success:

1. Keep writing.
2. Write some more.
3. Write something else.
4. Think up a 4th bullet point.
5. Write another thing.
6. Repeat.

Nowhere on this list is “tweet more often” or “go to networking events” or even “ask people to buy my book.” These things are completely unnatural to me, and just the thought of doing anything that resembles marketing makes me a little queasy.

In a recent blog post that I wrote about how to be a professional writer, I listed three strategies and said that every professional writer has to pick two of them. These strategies were:

1. Write everything, all the time.
2. Be good at self-promotion
3. Be the best writer in your niche.

I’ve officially chosen #1 and #3, and I’m no longer going to even attempt #2 (beyond the tweet that automatically happens when I click “publish” here).

So, what does it look like to choose to write and not to worry about self-promotion in this age of endless marketing and branding? I’m not sure, but you can read about it here as I figure it out!