Wow, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been self-publishing for ten months now! I hit a big milestone this month: I sold my 1,000th ebook! This is a huge deal to me, since most self-published books never sell more than a couple hundred copies. I’ve also had my best sales month to date.

As far as marketing this month, I’ve been plugging a little bit on Google+ and Twitter, which I know has generated a few sales. And I had a couple of new reviews on Amazon (if you’ve read either of the books and feel like leaving a review, I really do appreciate them!), some of which were really favorable. One of my favorite quotes from a review of The Great Healion Race:

This is not Edward and Bella, living in perfection for all eternity. These are two adults with overwhelming baggage as the ballast for their journey. I especially appreciated how Ms. Chapman allowed her protaganists to be messy, angry and human.

Seriously, that’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my books. Because that’s exactly what I was going for: complicated people who have messy, screwed-up lives, and find a way to love each other anyway.

Below are my sales numbers for this month. I saw a drop in sales for the second book, but a big jump in the first book. Hopefully that will translate to more sales for the second book in the next couple of months. Read the rest of this entry »

This is going to be short and sweet.

I recently came across someone on a forum talking about how they wouldn’t recommend self-publishing ebooks via Amazon because then you only get the Kindle crowd. And my eyes bugged out of my head.

When you self-publish your own ebooks, you can distribute through as many platforms as you like. That means you can publish on Amazon for the Kindle via KDP, on Barnes & Noble for Nook via PubIt!, and on Smashwords for everywhere else. You can also self-publish on your own site or other sites you find (so long as it doesn’t interfere with their terms of service, and if it does, I’d run away from that site as quickly as I could). Let me repeat:

You can publish on Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and elsewhere, simultaneously.

You don’t have to pick just one. These are not publishers who expect you to turn over your rights. They’re distributors. They allow you to publish to particular platforms, nothing more, nothing less.

Do yourself a favor and publish to as many platforms you can manage if you’re self-publishing. Don’t limit yourself!

So this is a few days late because I’ve been dealing with some family stuff for the past 10 days or so (father in law ended up in the hospital and had to have emergency surgery last week, but he’s coming home today). I’ve also decided that I’m only going to do these posts through the 12-month mark, though I may do occasional sales updates after that. This is partially because I see next year being very, very busy for me, and also because I’m trying to be less obsessed with my sales numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

So, here we are at the end of month seven! Not much in the way of promotion this month, other than discounting the second novella in The Steam and Steel Chronicles to $.99 through Labor Day. I’m honestly considering leaving it at that price, though I haven’t made up my mind for sure yet. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been just about three months since I first published Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris, and a little over a month since The Great Healion Race was released (both are novellas in The Steam and Steel Chronicles, which has six novellas planned in total). And this is the first month that I’ve exceeded my (admittedly low) sales goals.

I had a minor freakout earlier in the month when it looked like someone on Goodreads had given The Great Healion Race a 1-star rating, but then found out that was actually a glitch in their system which has since been fixed. So the lowest rating for either book has remained as 3 stars (out of 5). I’m okay with that, and I’m happy that a few people have given it 5-star ratings. My average is holding steadily at around 4 stars on each book.

As far as marketing this month, I’ve done next to nothing. A few tweets, a few updates on the Facebook page, and that’s about it. I gave away five copies of ATUAF through Smashwords on my birthday. I sent out no review requests, I had no new reviews, and I was generally slacking the whole month. So the fact that my sales increased despite all that makes me really happy, and gives me hope that when I can start actively promoting again I’ll see a bigger jump in sales.

I reached a high of around 75 on the Historical Fantasy list on the Kindle US site (with ATUAF), which was pretty cool. I’m also showing up around the 3rd page of results if you search for “steampunk” in the Kindle Store (again with ATUAF). So my rankings are steadily increasing on Amazon. Sales on Barnes & Noble went up a little bit, and Smashwords stayed exactly the same as last month.

So, here are the numbers for this month:

Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris

• Amazon US: 32
• Amazon UK: 5
• Barnes & Noble: 9
• Smashwords: 3
• TOTAL: 49

The Great Healion Race

• Amazon US: 15
• Amazon UK: 1
• Barnes & Noble: 3
• Smashwords: 0
• TOTAL: 19

So that means 68 books sold during the month, which is higher than my goal of 60. I had a couple of days where nothing sold, and a couple of days were I sold upwards of 7-8 books. My goal from this point on is to double my sales each month. The third book should be out by the first week in July, so hopefully I’ll see another big jump then.

So, it’s been nearly two months since I started self-publishing The Steam and Steel Chronicles. Sales for March were pretty much on par with sales of February, but the good news is that the past two days, since publishing The Great Healion Race, I’ve seen a good increase in sales. And not just for The Great Healion Race, but also for Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris.

Everyone I’ve talked to who has read the book has liked it (or loved it). I’ve had a couple of good reviews (and am still waiting for a couple more to come out). I had a really positive review from Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf, which resulted in a few Kindle UK sales. Read the rest of this entry »

I got impatient yesterday morning and decided to just go ahead and make The Great Healion Race live rather than wait until Monday. You can buy it for $2.99 at the following links:

Barnes & Noble | Kindle/Amazon US | Kindle/Amazon UK | Smashwords | Goodreads

If you haven’t read Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris yet, you may want to do that before reading The Great Healion Race. It’s available here for only $.99:

Barnes & Noble | Kindle/Amazon US | Kindle/Amazon UK | Smashwords | Goodreads

And of course, if you have a book review blog and would like a copy to review, please let me know!

Also, I’ve created a page specifically for my books, with the blurb for each and where to purchase them (as well as reviews and press coverage for each). Feel free to send your friends to that page if you think they might be interested in The Steam and Steel Chronicles (or send them the links to buy directly, of course).

One of the biggest questions a lot of authors have when it comes to indie publishing is “Can you really make any money at it?” We’ve all heard the stories about people like JA Konrath, who already had a mainstream publishing career prior to going indie. And we’ve heard about people like Amanda Hocking, who has shot up the charts and has sold more than a million books on Kindle in about a year (not to mention her sales on Smashwords and elsewhere). But can the average person make a decent living by indie publishing?

Well, I don’t know. I have friends who have self-published and are making a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. I have other friends who have self-published and are probably lucky to make a hundred dollars a month. A lot of it depends on how appealing your book is, and how hard you market it.

I’ll say that so far, 19 days into self-publishing my first novella, sales are right about where I expected. There’s still a few more days left in the month, and I have at least one more blog appearance lined up for this weekend, so here’s to hoping that I get a nice little up-tick in sales this week and exceed my expectations! (If you want to help out with that, you can purchase Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris on Smashwords, Nook, and Kindle in both the US and UK.)

In an effort to help get more data out there, so that people can decide for themselves whether indie publishing is the right thing for them, I plan to publicize my sales numbers and marketing efforts each month. I’ll include the number of books I’ve sold (including the outlets they sold through), as well as the blog appearances and other marketing I did during the month. I’ll draw conclusions as I can, but I’ll try to share as much raw data as possible.

On that note, is there anything in particular all of you would like to know in these monthly reports? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll try to share the information that’s important to you guys!

I’m still waiting for Amazon and Barnes & Noble to finish adding Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris to their catalogs, but in the meantime, you can buy it in a variety of formats (including EPub, which can be read on the iPad and Nook, and .mobi, which can be read on Kindle) on Smashwords!

If you go looking for it on Amazon, you’ll see that it’s there, but the version up there now has some minor formatting issues (mainly that the “Go to” menu isn’t working properly). I have the corrected version all set to upload, but the way that Amazon’s KDP system works, it’s still in the “Publishing” stage in the dashboard, and so I can’t make any changes. Once it goes out of the “Publishing” stage, I’ll upload the new copy. As far as I know, if you want to buy it for your Kindle right away, you’ll be able to re-download the new version once it goes live, but I’m not positive about that (if anyone knows for sure, please comment). So if you don’t mind the “Go to” menu not working properly, go ahead and buy it. The rest of the formatting is fine.

I’ll post once it’s live other places.

The Steam and Steel Chronicles finally has a Facebook page! I’ve actually been working on it for a few days now, and had hoped to wait until the cover was ready, but got impatient and decided to make it live last night. So feel free to “Like” the page here. I’ll be making announcements related to the series there, and may use it to announce things prior to announcing them elsewhere. I’ve also posted an excerpt from the first book (the same one that’s available on this site).

The book cover should be finished today or tomorrow, and then once that happens, I’ll get everything posted to Kindle and elsewhere. I’ll also be relaunching the Untime Press website this week, so stay tuned for that, too.