Sherri Cornelius

The first two stories I e-published, I didn’t do any promotion aside from tweeting and facebooking and blogging. And really, not a lot of that. They were short stories, and I intended them to be free from the beginning. This in itself ensured they would be downloaded. People like free stuff.

With SKIN AND SCALES I decided to go a different way. First of all, I decided to charge a book price for it and see what happened. (Very little, of course.) Second, I put it straight into KDP Select instead of offering it on Smashwords first. The benefit of KDP Select is that Amazon Prime members are able to borrow the book for free, but the author still gets a small royalty. I had no borrows on the short stories while they were enrolled, but I thought people would be more likely to borrow a book. (Apparently not my book.) Third, I intended to publish it quietly and just let it sit unpromoted, but I got caught up in the excitement, especially when my mom virtually shoved a couple of twenties in my hand for a Facebook ad. So I tried it, expecting nothing but an education and receiving what I expected. It was an interesting and enlightening experience. The results were definitive, and I quit before I hit $20.

So now I think what I need is some reviews. My theory is that any review is good for business. Even a solid 3-star review would indicate that people were reading it and it isn’t completely awful. A 1-star review would keep people engaged and on the page, though I presume I would need a couple of higher stars to counteract it.

TOMORROW only, April 10, SKIN AND SCALES will be free for download on Kindle. This serves a two-fold purpose: to allow the folks in my acknowledgements to get a free copy and to garner a few reviews. I hope everyone who reads it will at least throw a couple of anonymous stars up there. Don’t be shy! If one person breaks the ice, others will follow.

If you don’t read weird stuff but still want to support me, you can recommend the book to your weird-loving friends. If you don’t have a Kindle but still want to read it, you can download a reader for your computer or smart phone here.

Thanks for all your support!

It wasn't supposed supposed to be scary, self-publishing a book on Kindle. I wasn't particularly excited about it. I saw self-publishing as a way to get Black Veil Angel out of my hair for good. It worked so well with the two shorts I published, after all, and I wasn't really nervous about those two. It was really no big deal, and once they were published, even if by myself, they were finalized in my mind. I had struggled so long with BVA--and even after deciding to publish, the process dragged on and on.

But then it just stopped dragging.The instant I saw the image on iStockPhoto I knew it was THE ONE. I had been looking for months, but I'm glad now I didn't try to force it with another image. As the final cover started to come together I got more and more excited.

I'm really happy about the title change. "Black Veil Angel" had a couple of things about it that I thought didn't represent the book. First of all, if you've googled it, you know that the term black veil angel is a common name for a type of angelfish. It wouldn't be a huge leap for a reader to expect at least some symbolism involving a fish tank. Another is that confounding word "angel." It's used in the Christian angel way so freakin' much that I thought it would give potential readers the wrong idea. Especially with the Light on the cover.

Skin and Scales is more descriptive, fits the tone of the story, and plus I think it sounds pretty cool.

I wasn't going to do any promotion beyond a quiet link here on the blog. But once the cover was finished and I started the actual publishing process, I found myself making author pages on Goodreads and Amazon, almost like sleepwalking. I wrote a blurb and all the front matter of the book in a single afternoon. No major problems formatting the manuscript. It was just time, I guess.

I had planned not to care, based on my previous self-pub experiences. What I didn't take into consideration is the fact that this is a full-length novel. A novel I worked on for several years. A novel which ushered me through the hardest time of my writing life thus far. (Hopefully forever.) Maybe I do care, a little.

Skin and Scales will be available exclusively on the Kindle for three months. Woo!

 

I can feel the weather change right between my eyes. It’s been a spring-like few days—I wore shorts yesterday and today we’ll have a chance for thunderstorms. Not that it’s unusual to have ups and downs through the winter here in Oklahoma, but this year I have whiplash from our quick-change weather pattern. Whiplash and migraines.

But anyway, yesterday was awesome weather, a day not to be wasted by sitting indoors, a day to frolic in grass and flowers (of which there are neither, but our Bradford pear trees did start to bud). Gorgeous day. So what did I do? I sat indoors and got a new li'l shorty* ready to put on Smashwords.

I CAN FLY: Warren’s pickup line gets him nowhere—until he meets Edith. When he confides his power of flight, they know they’re meant to be together. Too bad not everyone sees it that way, but whatevs.

Since I only uploaded it yesterday it’s still not in the Premium Catalog in Smashwords, which only means it won’t be distributed to other online retailers yet. I manually uploaded it to Amazon this morning, but they also have a review process. So for now it’s only available on Smashwords.

This is an old story, but then again all my stories are old. I haven’t written with any kind of purpose for a couple of years. I feel like getting these old stories out there, for good or for bad, is a turning point for me. A slow awakening of my creativity, long dormant. Clearing the cobwebs. Of course it would be lovely if I got a ton of reviews and shared a million times, but that’s not why I’m self-publishing. Once I have Black Veil Angel on there, that will be the last of the work I would feel comfortable having online. It’s like I can feel new stories waiting for the older ones to be put to bed, and the only way I’ve found to do that is to publish them.

So look for Black Veil Angel to be published soon!

 

*I’ve been calling my short stories “li'l shorties” lately, and the novels are “wordy bastards”. Who knows why, but I like it.

I’m taking this publishing thing sloooooowly. Don’t know if you noticed. I first published Mon Petit Ami in October of last year, distributing through Smashwords. I learned the ropes, trying out the coupons and reviews and changing the price. It was free through nearly every retailer—B&N, Kobo, Sony, Smashwords—and racked up about 400 views over the next 6 or 7 months.

Amazon, however, is the whiny, uncompromising kid on the playground who is ready to take his awesome toys and go home if the other kids don’t play his games. Ergo, Amazon doesn’t give you total control over your pricing when you self-publish and you have to like it or lump it. The lowest they’ll go on any publication is 99 cents, regardless of length, unless you cast some magical price-matching spell which I was never able to figure out. So my little 1500-ish word story languished with no sales, unsurprisingly.

So I started to wonder how the story would do on Amazon. I had a half a year’s data on Smashwords, et al, and several good reviews from complete strangers, so I thought it was time to play Amazon’s game. The only way I could get my story on Amazon for free was to give them exclusivity, so I did.

I found out a lot from my 3-day free promo. Before I did this, I’d thought the reader pool among my friends had already been exhausted. After all, MPA had been free and periodically promoted for many months. What I didn’t realize was how many of my friends have Kindles and would download my story once it was pretty much effortless. I ended up with 77 downloads over three days on Amazon, a number that took about a month to reach on all other platforms combined, maybe a bit longer.

How eye-opening is that? No wonder people play by Amazon’s rules. They have awesome toys.

Now that this promo’s over, I expect my new downloads to drop back to zero. A dollar is just too much for a story this short, especially since it’s my only publication and bears an ISBN from Smashwords—a bias I’ve seen in the Kindle forums that can’t be dismissed.

One anonymous person gave me my first review, for which I am grateful. Reviews are like currency, so every star, whether it be one or five, helps. This one happened to be a fiver.

The past couple of days have been pretty cool. Since I put my short story on Smashwords, it’s been downloaded over 60 times. I find it unbearable not knowing how many are friends and family, and how many are strangers. So far I’ve had a review on Smashwords from Allie, and several have supported me by sharing my link on Facebook and writing short reviews to go along with it. Thank you all! In a few days it’ll go into Smashwords’ Premium Catalog, which means it will be distributed to online retailers. It’s been a fun experiment.

So the next step is to get it on Kindle Direct. I uploaded it yesterday, but it’s still under review so it’s not available yet. While I’ve put it on Smashwords for free, Amazon makes you charge a dollar minimum. I’ve got to figure out if I want to charge for the Smashwords version as well, but I don’t think I want to do that yet--I might have to charge and then give a coupon to make it free, because of Amazon’s terms of service.

Even if I don’t make a dime from online publishing, I’m glad I did it once. I’m now more secure in my knowledge of how publishing works, and the thrill of having work out there has erased most of my concerns about imperfection. And the thing is, I’ve found you can’t truly understand epublishing from just studying it or reading blogs—you have to dig in. I’m surprised at how not scary it is on this side of clicking “publish,” and while I thought I would feel more pressure afterwards, it’s actually been quite freeing.

I have a couple of books that couldn’t find homes with traditional big publishers (and a couple of small presses), so I’d been considering going with a small-but-successful online publisher like Damnation Books and others.(You might remember I edited for DB’s sister company, Eternal Press.) After all, they have a customer base all ready, free editing and cover design (free for me), and they pay for the ISBN. On the other side, self-publishing lets me keep a bigger chunk of the profits, and while I can’t afford to buy ISBNs right now, I could probably trade editing services with some trusted friends. And after making the cover for Mon Petit Ami myself, I think I might enjoy making others.

But I don’t have to decide right now. I’m not very good at taking incremental steps—a stumbling block to my writing career up to this point—so it’s time I learned. I’m slowly making a plan.

So what’s your experience with self-publishing?

Or possibly just dipping a toe. I took one of my old, beloved stories and published it on Smashwords. For those who've never heard of it, Smashwords is a website that automates the self-epublishing process. You upload your story, and their machine converts your file into all the popular e-reading formats. Very easy.

I have lots of friends who’ve published with Smashwords, but I haven’t been interested in doing it. My writing career was up in the air, so far that I didn’t know where it would come down, or even if it would. I needed things to settle--in particular, my feelings about writing. I’ve been hiding from the world while I sort things out.

Then a lot of things happened all at once. I had a birthday (41). We ran out of money and had to eat beans and hamburger stew for a week, which put me in action mode real quick as I started looking for a job. Putting myself out there flipped the switch, and suddenly I’m ready to start blogging again, Facebooking with purpose, discussing writing and publishing.

Now as this switch was being flipped, my friend Allie had a pretty awesome experience. She’s been self-epublishing on Smashwords and Kindle, and I don’t know where else, and she’s much more prolific than I, so she has lots of titles available. One day, Amazon started offering one of her titles for free and downloads went through the roof--like, 10,000 in a couple of days. She didn’t get a penny for these downloads, but thousands of people were reading her work.

It was eye-opening for me, watching this unfold. I had thought of epublishing as another career direction, with all that entailed: marketing and money and business and blah, blah, blah. I knew I didn’t want to do all that stuff myself. Allie’s exhilarating experience reminded me that writing is also fun, with an element of chance. The wheel of fortune can’t turn if you’ve stuck a stick in the spokes. The past couple of weeks has unstuck the wheel.

So. The story’s not perfect, but I’ve been waiting for perfection to grace me and I can’t wait any longer. The story’s good; some have told me it’s funny and/or creepy. It’s also free, so you don’t have to have a Smashwords account to read it. If you do read it, I’d appreciate a short and honest review. I promise I’ll still love ya.

Cheers!