For readers and for writers, the emergence of Smashwords.com revolutionized the publishing world. It also made self-publishing a much less risky investment for those of us who are indy authors, and let readers purchase books by unknown writers at low cost. It consolidated the platforms so readers of Nook or iPhones could read the same offerings as those coming from Kindle. It also offered an alternative to Amazon, which countered with Kindle Direct Publishing, meaning we could appear in both venues. Real competition can be a good thing, right? Essentially, it's free for those who follow a few formatting guidelines and can design our own covers.
Since I've posted previously about the pros and cons of digital books versus paper, both for readers and for writers, I'll focus today on my personal reflections on the development.
Getting my books "out there," rather than collecting dust in a filing cabinet, provided a huge emotional relief. Twenty-three years had passed between the publication of Subway Hitchhikers and my Smashwords debut. And now the novels were available at the Apple Store, Barnes & Nobel, and other ebook retailers, as well as public libraries.
First out of the gate was Hippie Drum, drawn from my subway story outtakes, at the end of May 2013.
At the beginning of September came Hippie Love, using other outakes, and then Ashram in October, reissuing what had been Adventures on a Yoga Farm.
Daffodil Sunrise, developing more of the subway story outtakes, appeared in November.
Subway Hitchhikers was republished in January 2014.
So I had something along the lines of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet before the public or maybe a string of Jack Kerouac tales.
I then turned to my other big pile of drafting to extract Promise, which appeared in April. I intended to follow that one with two related novels, but the royalties weren't covering the cost of having a designer create fronts for those volumes. Instead, Peel (as in apple) and St. Helens in the Mix would eventually appear as free PDFs at my Thistle Finch imprint.
That left Hometown News, my newspaper-based novel, for September release.
Getting noticed, however, was a different matter. Nobody was reviewing digital editions, or at least nobody of note. You can't sign copies at readings or bookstores, either. What was left was largely social media.
And that's where it stood until the beginning of 2018, when What's Left joined the lineup. I'll tell you more about that one and its impact on the earlier volumes in an upcoming post.
As for marketing and self-promotion? It's still an uphill struggle. Do most users of Facebook even buy books?
No comments:
Post a Comment