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Sorry I have not been on the board more lately. I self-published my first book on 22 January and I have been devoting most of my free time since then to marketing and book review solicitation. I have had some sales so far but there has not been enough time for my review copies to get to reviewers, be read, and have reviews posted yet. The book is a quick reference survival guide in which I draw on my military experience and lifelong passion ffor hunting and camping. I hope to have some little success with it. To be honest, I will be tickled pink if I sell 2,000 copies although I obviously hope to sell more. I started writing it several years ago and took the opportunity of sick leave after my surgery in November to finish it and get it ready for publication. The link for the book is below:[html]
[/html]Well congratulations on getting the project completed. That must be nice to see your writing in print. Have you been sending copies out to survival-type blogs/websites?
I have sent out roughly 10 hardcopies so far and a few more ebooks. I am scheduled to do an author interview next week on DoomandBloom, the #13 survival site in terms of traffic. Marketing the dang book is much less fun than writing it was.
That's funny – I would think of author interviews as being somewhat fun for the authors. All your work writing is done, and now you just sit back and answer questions in an authoritative manner. I suppose, though, that it helps if the interviewer is really engaged with the interviewee. I listened to donroc's interview for his book a while back, and if I recall correctly, the interviewer sounded like he was checking off questions when he was talking to Donald. I realize that unless you've listened to the show before (or it's a major, national journalist asking you the questions) you might not know how the interview will go.
They actually had me send them a list of questions for them to ask. The interview is on the 11th so I will post an update then about how it goes. I am pretty curious myself. I tend to pass when authors ask me if I want to interview them when they solicit reviews on B&BR because I can;t think of anything an author can say that I would find remotely interesting. I am more interested in what the reviewer thinks when I read book reviews.
Good luck with the book. I have it on my Amazon shopping list and will be picking up a copy soon. Are there any chapters on snow survival? 🙂
I didn't cover sea survival because in a societal collapse situation if you are stuck at sea you are probably going to die anyway. Plus sea survival is probably a book all on its own. I also did not cover snow survival or weather survival in particular. I covered wilderness survival from a general , weather immaterial perspective.
That's a great achievement! Congratulations and all the best for your masterpiece. 🙂BTW as a member of WCF, do I have a kind of discount?? 😉
That's a great achievement! Congratulations and all the best for your masterpiece. 🙂 BTW as a member of WCF, do I have a kind of discount?? 😉
I tell you what, If you buy it straight from me I will discount the list price of 14.95 by 50%.
Congratulations Scout! I never marketed my book like I should have. I felt the publisher should have done those things, but they dump that responsibility on the author….unless you can afford a literary agent.
Marketing is a pain. So far, it seems to be paying off though. As more reviews get put up on survival sites I am seeing a steady uptick in sales that I assume will plateau at some point and from then on get a steady trickle of sales until I release the second edition.BTW, if any of you guys buy or have bought the book. Don't buy the Kindle version. There are serious issues with how the kindle is currently rendering the illustrations. The problems are so severe that i am considering pulling it from eBook availability a all. EBooks are OK for pure text but getting them to reliably display illustrations across platforms is a nightmare.
So tell me – would you say the income you're generating worth the time/effort you put into writing it? I see it's around 250 pages, so it must have taken a while to put all the information together. Also, did you plan on self-publishing at Amazon from the beginning, or did you start writing and then decide later on to self-publish?
