I self-published my second book, “The Garden of Abel” back in late March. Since then, there have been very few sales and little buzz.
In a previous post, I detailed why I was interested in self-publishing this one. Basically it boils down to the fact that it was previously published through my site already, and is too short for most traditional publishers to accept.
A big lesson I took from this is not to trust people’s word on their support. I have a decent network of friends and family, and 40+ people on social media who said they would buy a copy. The book has sold less than 20 copies so most of those people did not follow through.
This is important to know before I tried self-publishing one of the books I am more emotionally attached to. I can consider this an experiment that speaks to the level of engagement I can bank on from my close network, and my more distant social media network.
Engagement is too poor on accounts such as X for me to get any real traction with posts. Which is tough to swallow since, even if I do get a traditional book deal, so many publishers expect authors to do a great deal of the marketing themselves.
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