Self-publishing is misleadingly easy

Buy this book. It’s really rather good.

This is going to be a quick blog. Once I’ve got more data from my experiences, I shall be writing a more in-depth article.

That said, I’ve had nearly two and half month’s of experience with Blaise Maximillian: Bitter Defeat and so I thought I would share my initial findings.

Firstly, self-publishing on Amazon is ridiculously easy. So long as you’re able to create the document in the format required and place an image as a cover, you can upload your book and within 24 hours it will be available for purchase.

It really is that easy.

Secondly, just because you’ve put your book up there, it doesn’t mean that anyone is going to read it. There are so many books available on Amazon that you would never be able to read them in your lifetime. And more are being added every day. This means that unless you’ve done some form of advertising, you will be struggle to get sales. Which leads me to my third point.

Sales aren’t guaranteed even if you tweet, Google+ and Facebook to your heart’s content. I have nearly 5000 ‘friends’ on Facebook. Currently less than 1% of them have actually bought a book. Which, if you look at the results expected from advertising is actually quite good. Normally, advertisers expect to get a 0.1% result from their efforts. Because they’re doing it on a much larger scale than I could ever dream of however, they still make a fabulous return on it.

Fourthly. Reviews are very hard to get. People are busy, and asking them to write a review and stick it up on Amazon is basically asking for a favour. Some people will write reviews off their own back, but I’ve had to contact people and ask them to do a review so that I can get a better result on how Amazon displays my book when people search for similar collections.

And that’s it for now. I’ll be looking at sales, Amazon advertising campaigns, Facebook advertising campaigns, pricing campaigns, and a whole raft of other subjects in my next article. Told you I’d be brief.