Guest Blogger: How I made $23,500 in 4 months self-publishing my novel ‘Forged in Fire’ by Trish McCallan

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How I made $23,500 in 4 months self-publishing my novel ‘Forged in Fire’

By Trish McCallan

On Sept 7^th, of 2011 I self-published Forged in Fire, a high octane romantic thriller. By the end of December of 2011 I had sold over 10,000 copies and earned $19,500 in royalties enabling me to quit my day job and write full time. As of January 20^th, the book has sold over 12,000 copies, earned somewhere around $23,500 in royalties and attracted the attention of a BIG NAME publisher.

There’s no question a good share of FIF’s success is due to its sub-genre. Romantic thrillers are among the hottest books within the eBook industry. But there were several steps I took prior to publication and upon publication that were equally important to the book’s success.

I’m on several readers’ loops and I lurk on Amazon’s Romance Forum. From listening to reader chatter, I knew there was still a lot of resistance toward self-published work. Indie books were described as unedited with sloppy presentation. Dozens of readers claimed they could tell a self-published book just by its cover, or by the number of errors in its blurb. So from the beginning my objective was to mimic as closely as possible New York standards of production. This meant a professional cover, professional copy/line editing, professional proofing and professional formatting.

The cover is critical to a book’s success. It’s the first impression a reader is given, it’s the main reason a reader will click to learn more or pass with barely a glance. The perfect cover will capture the eye and convey the book’s sub-genre immediately, and all from a thumbnail size picture. It will impel the browser to check the blurb out. Before I started searching out cover artists, I studied the covers of the top selling romantic thrillers. Once I had a clear sense of what a special ops thriller cover should look like, I started checking out cover artists. When I found an artist who consistently produced work I liked, I contacted her and sent her examples of my sub-genre’s covers to give her an idea of what I was looking for.

Once you hook the reader with the cover, the blurb has got to sell the book, or encourage the reader to sample the first chapter. At this point editing becomes crucial. If there is one typo, one word usage error, or one miss-spelling most readers will quit right there. If the blurb is unfocused and doesn’t give a good sense of the story, you can lose the sale too. A good blurb intrigues the reader into either buying or sampling. But if they sample the chapter and find any errors you will lose the sale too. You don’t want to give the reader a reason to turn away.

Since I wanted to mimic New York publishing standards as closely as possible, I sent it to a professional copy/line editor, a professional proofreader, and a professional formatter.

I considered the expenses associated with the production of Forged in Fire an investment in my career. Besides, as investments go, production costs can be minimal. My cover was $105, the line/copy editor $600.00, the Proofing $129, and formatting was $35. (Which included all formats) Total production costs came to $866.00. In my case, Forged earned these expenses back within six weeks.

In the end, my strategy paid off, 95% of the readers who have contacted me have no clue the book was self-published.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how perfect a book is packaged, if nobody knows about it. I was lucky in this respect. A friend of mine, Denise Grover Swank, had self-published her first book two months prior to mine. Denise had put her book on a month long blog tour. I tracked her book’s Amazon ranking and noticed that as the blog tour progressed, her ranking dropped rapidly which indicated sales were escalating. By the end of the tour Denise’s book had hit the Kindle Store’s romantic suspense bestsellers’ list and started selling up a storm. Since Denise had done no other form of promo on this book, it was good evidence that a blog tour could push a book onto the bestsellers’ list. Since quite a few readers buy off this list, hitting the list can have a huge effect on a book’s sales.

In the hopes a blog tour would have a similar effect on Forged in Fire, I signed it up for a month long virtual tour through Bewitching Blog Tours. But my tour didn’t start until the middle of October. So from September 7^th to the middle of October, I arranged guest posts through various author friends. My first guest blog actually took place a month before the FIF’s release. The post was about how the Black Dagger Brotherhood had influenced the characters and it drew a big crowd of BDB fans and led to a waiting list of 25 people.

A couple of days before FIF’s release, I sent a complimentary copy to everyone who was on my waiting list and asked them to recommend the book—if they liked it—to their friends and on their reading loops and forums. Within days several readers had recommended Forged on JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood loop. A week later I guest blogged at Joan Swan’s Romance Giveaways. This time I drew a Goodreads crowd, which led to several readers recommending it to the romantic suspense group over at Goodreads.

Still, September’s sales were modest. I sold 199 books and made somewhere around $400.00. At the time I was experimenting on Wattpad, seeing if posting periodic scenes would encourage people to buy the book. This actually led to quite a few sales. My first Amazon and Goodreads reviews, came from readers who had bought the book after reading the first few scenes on Wattpad.

My original goal when signing up for the month long blog tour was to push Forged onto the Kindle Store’s bestselling romantic suspense list, in the hopes of riding that list through November and December, all the while collecting sales from readers who bought off the list. What I didn’t expect was that the guest blogs I’d set up myself would have such a powerful effect. By the time my tour started, Forged had already hit the bestsellers’ list, and from that point on the sales accelerated, doubling every week. By the end of October Forged had hit the top twenty in bestselling romantic suspense and had sold 1567 books. By the end of November it was in the top five and selling between 170-240 books a day. I sold over 5000 books and made almost $10,000 dollars in November alone.

But Thanksgiving threw a wrench in the book’s acceleration. Up until then, FIF showed no sign of slowing down. But after Thanksgiving, Amazon launched a week long black Thursday sale as well as well as a three day Cyber Monday sale. They bombarded their customer base with emails promoting books with heavily slashed prices that had been written by big name traditional authors. They also tweaked the Kindle Store’s algorithms. Forged in Fire’s acceleration stopped in its tracks. All the books that had dominated the top of the bestsellers’ chart, including Forged, suddenly dropped in sales and fell out of the top twenty. By the end of December Forged had fallen onto the second page of the bestsellers’ list (From #5 to #30) and was selling half of what it had been selling at its height. Still- it sold 3300 copies through December and earned around $6500.00.

Since Jan first, Forged has been selling between 70-100 books a day. Since I haven’t done any promo since the blog tour ended in mid- November, I wanted to see whether another blog tour would have the same effect the first one had. This time, however, I signed up with two different blog tours companies, to target two separate pools of readers.

While there is ample proof that launching a blog tour immediately upon a book’s release can accelerate a new book’s sales, nobody has tested what a blog tour can do for a book that has peaked and is starting to slip in sales. Will an additional blog tour increase such a book’s sales again? Can it push it back up the bestsellers’ list?

These are questions I hope to answer in the coming months.

About Trish McCallan

Trish McCallan has been writing for as long as she can remember.

In grade school she wrote children’s stories, illustrated them with crayons and bound the sheets together with pencil-punched holes and red yarn. She used to sell these masterpieces at her lemonade stand for a nickel a book. Surprisingly, people actually bought them. Like, all of them. Every night she’d write a new batch for her basket.

As she got older her interest shifted to boys and horses. The focus of her literary masterpieces followed this shift. Her first full length novel was written in seventh grade and featured a girl, a horse and a boy. At the end of the book the teenage heroine rode off into the sunset . . . with the horse.

These days she sticks to romantic suspense with hot alpha heroes and roller-coaster plots. Since she is a fan of all things bizarre, paranormal elements always find a way into her fiction. Her current release, Forged in Fire, was the result of a Black Dagger Brotherhood reading binge, a cold, a bottle of NyQuil and a vivid dream.

You can find Trish at www.trishmccallan.com.

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How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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