This is part 4 of my series called, “Creating Silver.” This blog and its posts will talk about the troubles I went through brainstorming, writing, and publishing The Silver Ninja. I will talk about user reviews, sales, editing, marketing and any other miscellaneous obstacles I encountered along the way. I’m also going to talk about what went wrong.

What went horribly wrong…

Ah the marketing. Did you have fun formatting that book for print and digital? No? Well there’s more where that came from!

Marketing, oh the marketing! If you’ve been reading my blog up to this point, have you figured out why publishers rarely take on new authors now? Publishing a book isn’t exactly a cheap endeavor. Sure, you can publish your book with almost zero money spent. But that also runs the risk of becoming zero sales. If your book formatting is garbage, if your cover image is amateur, hell, even if you don’t have a table of contents. Guess what? You’re going to see a lot of refunds being processed by Amazon or whatever platform you’re distributing on.

Now, I’m not saying a ton of money invested into a book is going to necessarily going to make it into a best seller. In fact, what you may notice is that it takes a long time for a book to pick up steam. If you don’t have an established fan base and don’t have any connections to people with more renown than you, well, your book may just drown in a sea of indies.

There’s no magic formula to getting your book to sell off the shelf, it’s really luck based. Sometimes you can get away with having spent no money on your book and run into the fortune of being reviewed on the NY times. Other times as an author you may have spent 3 years building a fan base with other works and those same fans support you and grab your book. Then there’s just those times where you just happened to talk about the right topic at the right time and people end up searching for your book.

And sadly, there are also times where you’ll spend a lot of money on your book; only to see very little return on your investment and efforts. If you really want to take off as an author, you’re going to need to do the necessary evil all companies, authors, and products need to do, marketing.

Marketing is expensive and is not  guaranteed to generate sales. Amazon offers all published authors an opportunity to place their book in the KDP select program. This is basically an agreement that stipulates that your book can only be sold at Amazon for 90 days. Amazon will market the book for you, and you may even see a huge burst of initial sales. However, this means you cannot make this book available at Barnes & Noble, which makes you lose out on the Nook readers. Please note that this rule does not apply to physical copies of the book.

So you really have to decide on what kind of author you want to be. Are you happy with just having the Amazon audience and don’t care about Barnes and Noble, Apple store, or any other misc. online retailers? Then by all means, KDP select is perfect for you. However, if you want to reach out to people who don’t have a kindle and also don’t want to own a paperback, then KDP would not be to your advantage.

If you want to have a little bit more control in the advertising process, you can buy: ad banners, facebook ads, youtube ads and goodreads ads. But remember that these cost money! Sure you can get away with doing small amounts of 40 dollars or less, but you will get what you pay for. You also need to put a lot of thought into each individual marketing campaign. If I created a web banner with a gratuitous close up of The Silver Ninja’s breasts, I’m sure I would have gotten a ton of hits from male readers; while simultaneously offending most of the female audience.

Also, let’s just get this out of the way. Unless you are a graphic artist, don’t cheap out on your book cover. People do judge a book by its cover and they will ignore your book if the cover looks lame. Hell, I -AM- a graphic artist and I still paid someone to do the cover artwork for me (shameless plug for my good man Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe). I also hired a freelance 3D sculptor artist to create a model of The Silver Ninja that I could animate and pose (Maciej Marcinsk from Pixel flow). And I hired a freelance web designer to create the beautiful website in which I post all my blogs (Chris George from 801red).

All of them are great guys who do amazing work. But, like the rest of us, they have bills to pay. I spent a considerable amount of money hiring each individual, but it was worth it, their efforts exceeded my wildest expectations.

If you want people to take you seriously as an author and want to convince them that this isn’t a vanity project to stroke your ego; then you need to present yourself as a professional. Make the artwork look professional, make the website look professional, make yourself look professional. And that costs money, a lot of money.

You really need to think about this, I mean really carefully. I have spent over $10,000 US dollars getting this book to market. Artists, formatting, trademark, copyright, marketing, advertising, editing, publicists; all of these things need to be paid for if you want to look like a professional (with the exception of trademark unless it’s a series of books). Of course, if you’re one of the lucky few that got a big name to give you a shout out, then you probably don’t need any of this advice.

The worst part of it all, is that spending $50,000 worth in marketing (I didn’t spend this amount, just sayin’), does not guarantee your book will sell. This is why publishers are so selective on who they publish. Can you imagine how much money they spend getting a book ready for public consumption? Pause for a second, really think about everything I just listed. I gave you a general idea of how much that cost me and that was on the lower end of the scale. Now, imagine if this were a book being sold internationally, imagine how much money that would cost a publisher. Imagine all that money being lost? If I were a publisher, I too would be hesitant to sign any author that came my way.

Let’s ignore that for now, let’s say you’ve bought marketing for your book. You have your beautiful cover artwork; you have a website; the book is available at most distributors; and you’re monitoring sales. But something’s not right…

You’re getting a lot of refunds, and your reviews are showing up consistently as 1 star or 2 stars. You’re getting upset, angry even, because you can’t believe your book is being decimated by reviews. At this point, you may need to step back and accept the harsh reality…

Maybe your book sucks?

I’ll talk about dealing with negative user reviews on the next: Creating Silver.