A worthwhile risk is always worth taking, in my opinion.
I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old. Over the years, I made a lot of attempts to go the traditional route with publishing.
For a brief time, I had an agent – but he wasn’t the right fit for me (sci-fi fantasy wasn’t entirely his thing).
After my first professional edit – my fantasy novel, Seeker – I queried lots and lots of agents. One in 5 sent a personal rejection – the rest just sent a form letter wishing me the best of luck at finding someone.
This is the way of traditional publishing. Query, get rejected, query again. Many well-known authors were rejected dozens of times before someone took a chance on them. What’s more, for every one of them that had wild success – probably another dozen or so, though they got representation, may have had success or not. It’s a total and complete crap shoot.
But then the tools for self-publishing became increasingly available and user-friendly. With the proliferation of eBooks and Amazon, self-publishing has become a worthwhile option.
But it’s not completely clear, nor cut and dried, either.
Self-publishing via KDP and Amazon
Amazon and KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) make it very, very easy to self-publish both Kindle books and paperbacks.
Formerly, KDP was CreateSpace – and they offered a Word doc template you could employ to produce your publishable book. KDP has taken that over, and in some respects made the process even easier.
They also offer tools to create a clean Kindle formatted template and book covers for both Kindle and paperback.
Using these tools straight-up, however, can neglect important matters when it comes to publishing.
Just because you wrote and finished a book doesn’t mean that it’s fit to print.
First – you need to edit your work. Even when I write these blogs, they get edited so that I don’t miss sentence structure, typos get fixed, and the like. The same goes for my books. It’s amazing how often “they” is “the” and “the” is “they” and the like.
THEN – it’s imperative to have your book edited by a professional. This is not a step to be neglected or half-assed. Trust me – unedited works are glaring in their lack of professionalism.
Unless you’re a graphic designer – or making use of new AI tools – the cover options via KDP are insufficient. Like it or not – people DO judge a book by its cover. A crappy cover doesn’t get your book attention and thus doesn’t sell copies to the world at large.
After some trial and error on my part, I’ve gotten fairly skilled at using KDP to self-publish. Hence, I have a dozen sci-fi and fantasy titles for sale – and from my earlier attempts at self-publishing, a half-dozen nonfiction titles.
Amazon and KDP offer some exclusive bits that make for expanded reach and sales/promotional officers. But – that means you remain exclusive to Amazon.
And here is where I’m taking a risk.
Taking a risk to expand my reach
I started self-publishing my sci-fi and fantasy via Amazon and KDP in 2014. Almost 10 years later, I’ve remained exclusive to Amazon.
While this has been an amazing experience – I feel the time has come to seek out other avenues to put my work into the world at large.
The catch is that, presently, I’m exclusive to Amazon via the KDP Select program for another two months (automatic 90-day renewals, FYI, are the norm if you don’t check that off).
Via an ongoing conversation with another excellent indie sci-fi author, however, I have decided it’s time to move beyond Amazon. Thus, I’ve started the process of sharing one of my series to multiple sites beyond Amazon.
The series I chose to start with is Forgotten Fodder. I feel my clone and conspiracy sci-fi series is both super-approachable and worthy of a wider distribution (and hopefully a wider audience, too). Also – it’s my only completed series, as Void Incursion awaits me getting the fifth and final novel edited.
Because it’s not similarly applicable, the audiobook version of the Forgotten Fodder novels – narrated by me – is now available beyond Audible (which is also directly related to Amazon). They are slowly appearing on other resources (such as Libro.FM, Chirp, BingeBooks, and more soon).
As of September 12 – the Forgotten Fodder novels will be available across lots of ebook platforms. They’ll also be available for print outside Amazon, too.
Giving up the exclusivity tools of Amazon might be risky. But taking a risk feels right, as I’m actively working to put more books out and expand my reach (and sales).
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. This new venture feels right. So – onwards and forwards.
Taking a risk and future works
As I am deep into writing my new Savagespace series, I was already considering several different ways to approach its publishing when it’s done.
First, I’m hoping to get art made of the characters, ships, and races beforehand. I want to share it early to hype it before it’s published.
Secondly, I’m planning to offer the book to multiple Beta readers. Likely I’ll do this after I edit them, but before I send them to the editor.
Thirdly, I’m planning to set everything up ahead of time for advanced sales. I will likely release more than one of them to start, though I’m still debating if they should be a 6, 5, or 3 books series. (Why so vague? Because I’m either going with the original plan for 6 books about 200 pages (50,000 +/- words) each, doing 3 books about 400 pages (100,000 +/- words) each, or 5 books, the first 4 being about 200 pages each and the last likely 350 or so. I think book 6 by itself might be only about 40,000 words, but book 5 might be 60,000 – it’s underway now). But I’ll decide once all the books are done.
Will I do wide distribution with Savagespace? Some of that will depend on how things go with Forgotten Fodder. Once I complete Void Incursion, it, too, might go wide.
Self-publishing in and of itself is taking a risk. Marketing, distribution, and the rest of what goes into it is equally risky. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. I intend to earn my living via writing – and this is just another rung on the latter I’m climbing to that goal.
As I share my creative journey with you, I conclude with this – how are you inspired to be your own creator – whatever form that takes?
Please take a moment to check out the collection of my published works, which can be found here.
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