So You Want to Self Publish: Stage Ten

STAGE EIGHT: 80% WRITING / 20% PROMOTION

After you write your first book, you are going to want to spread the word about it to the world, am I right? Makes sense. What is important is that you do not lose focus on your writing. In the beginning, while you are building your “back-list” (Library of books you wrote), you want to spend the majority of the time moving on by writing a new book. It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Release a book and then forget about it? I’m not necessarily saying forget about it, I’m just letting you know what has worked for most us Indies in the past.

It was a huge struggle for me after releasing my first two books not to try to promote and shout from the rooftops. But what I learned is that especially for a debut novel, pre-release promotion is the most important step. I will go further into detail on that next chapter, but what I am getting at is that you would do promotion for your debut novel release, it just would not be something that you continually do after the release.

There is a rumor among the indie world that after you have about five books published is when readers start to take notice of you; when your back-list normally begins selling. My sales did jump quite a bit after I reached my first five books, but when you get there – your time frame on promotion and writing, the numbers change, as they should.