Sherri Cornelius

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?