Getting Past the Sally Field Moment: Personal Reflections on selling over 10,000 copies of Maids of Misfortune

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You see, I had planned to make a big deal of it when I passed the 10,000 mark, you know, balloons, go out to dinner, celebrate. Then today, when I needed a break from writing, that thing writers do to procrastinate, I added up my sales to date and discovered I had passed the mark some days ago. I confess I had my sixty seconds when I thought, OMG, 10,000 people like me/ahem I mean 10,000 people like my book, but pretty quickly I realized this number had a much deeper meaning to me, as an indie author and as an educator. Not to say that what I call the Sally Field moment isn’t a natural one. I doubt there is an author out there that doesn’t react with joy and relief when they get proof the precious part of Read more…


Seven Tips on how to sell books on Kindle

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This post was originally a guest post over on Patty Henderson’s blog, The Henderson Files, entitled 7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle. I am reprinting it here. First of all, why should you listen to me, an unknown author, tell you how to sell your book on Kindle? A little more than a year ago, I was a semi-retired professor of U.S. Women’s history who, besides a few academic articles, had never published a thing. What I did have was a manuscript of an historical mystery I had written 20 years earlier, based on my doctoral research on working women in the late nineteenth century. In the 20 years after writing the first draft, while I pursued my teaching career, I found an agent, collected rejections, lost an agent, published briefly with a small Print on Demand (POD) Read more…


Numbers, Numbers, Numbers: To an Indie Author, what do they mean?

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9,093; 2.99; 2,049; 99; 15,570; 440; 7135; 4,882, 10,281; 1517; 94; 54; 18; 89; 229; 28; 18; 5; 10.264; 539; 20,505; 1577 For a writer, supposedly dominated by my right-brain, I seem to have become obsessed with a left-brained fixation on numbers. On reflection, I think this obsession with numbers may be related to the important role marketing (or selling-depending on how you define it) plays for me as an indie author. L. J. Sellers had an interesting blog post on Publetariat the other day, where she argued that one of the reasons that self-published authors seemed more motivated to get out there and sell their books than traditionally published authors is because the “…steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases.” I tend to agree. Read more…


Marketing or Selling: What’s the difference and why do I like to do one and not the other?

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To sell: “to influence or induce to make a purchase” Merriam-webster.com To market: “to expose for sale in a market.” Merriam-webster.com People commenting on the new trends in publishing frequently say that for self-published authors to be successful they need to be entrepreneurs. In fact they often say any author who wants to be successful needs to participate fully in the selling of their own books. I heard stories for years from my traditionally published friends about going to conventions to network with book sellers, arranging book tours, book signings, and speaking engagements at local libraries, and how much they dreaded this aspect of being a published author. Author Forums and groups like Murder Must Advertise are still dominated by similar discussions of the ins and outs of selling books, including these traditional methods. As I prepared my historical mystery, Read more…


Write, write, write…

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I just added a 1000wordsaday badge onto this site, because I have finally begun to stop putting marketing before writing. I know that for months I have said that I would do this, but in January I finally did. I averaged between 500-900 words a day for the month of January, but in the first week of February I averaged 1400, so I felt I could safely enter this challenge set up by Debbie Ohi on Inkygirl.com. For those of you who have been following my blog, you may remember that I wrote the first draft of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, over twenty years ago, which means most of my fiction writing experience in those past twenty years has been rewriting. I am very good a rewriting, but I wasn’t so sure about my ability to write fresh Read more…