Vellichor Ink

It’s officially been over a month since In the Light of the Moon released! My original goal (which I thought was lofty…) was to sell 100 copies. Maybe that’s too small a goal, but it felt attainable and I am nothing if not pragmatic. Actually, that’s not true. I’m not terribly pragmatic. What I am is someone who tends to have unattainable expectations for things which leads to immense disappointment. 100 books felt like a lot and somewhat attainable at the same time. And I hit it. And surpassed it. And, as of today I’m sitting at 197 books sold. I’m THREE away from doubling my original goal. Absolutely surreal!

Being an Indie Author is rewarding but it’s hard as hell. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Not only am I dealing with the nuance of marketing my own book, being a parent, training a puppy, getting book 2 ready for the editor, and doing normal, every day life stuff, my grandfather passed away a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been going through the motions of grief and saying goodbye. To say that creativity has ground to a screeching halt would be an understatement.

I’m not going to dwell too much on the sadness of the last few weeks. He wouldn’t want me to, anyway.

What I am going to do is pass on some little pearls of wisdom to my fellow indie authors out there. Some lessons I’ve learned in the last couple of months of this journey that I think are worth passing on.

• If you are writing/releasing a series, go back and double (and triple) check your manuscripts/outlines/notebooks/etc for notes your past self left you just to make sure you don’t need to make any important changes to books before they’re published. Yes, dear reader, when going through Pathfinder (book 2 in the God’s Wife Trilogy) I found a note at the end of Chapter 22 that said I needed to go back and change something in book 1 for what I’d just written to make sense. Did I see that prior to June 25th? Nope. Did that change get made? Nope. Did I wallow in self-pity for a day and then bust my ass trying to figure out a fix that wasn’t too Gandalf-y? Yep.
• Make sure you are up to date on market pricing. I don’t know what I was thinking when I originally chose the price of the book ($12.99) but it wasn’t enough. It was priced so low that I couldn’t offer the market standard wholesale discount for bookstores to stock it. I went to a big bookstore and checked the prices on all the books that were comparable in size to mine in my genre and sure enough, they were all priced any where from $17.99-$22 or so. So after a week, I raised the price.
• Speaking of price… this is not a money making scheme. In fact, it’s costing me a hell of a lot more than what I’m making. I’m going to do a post on breakdown of cost–it’s something I was curious about when I was starting out. But I’ve spent right around $1000 for Book 1 and so far I’m still massively in the red.
• Speaking of money… everyone everywhere will want money from you for something. If you decide to do an LLC like I did and you’re filing government paperwork, make sure you’re using actual .gov websites and not scammy websites who file the same exact paperwork but charge a fee (looking at you EIN websites and legal zoom). I’ve learned some costly and annoying lessons this summer.
• The one thing that costs money that is absolutely WORTH IT is an editor. Mine is amazing and worth her weight in gold!
• Despite having an editor, there are going to be a couple of typos. It is inevitable. Just smile and roll with it and hope people aren’t too judgy for them. It is what it is.

I know there’s loads more to learn and I will probably have enough lessons learned the hard way to fill an entire blog by the time the year mark rolls around. But that’s what it’s all about, right? Learning things and figuring them out and not letting the mistakes get you too down.