eBook Experiment - First Week Report

I didn't set the world on fire in my first week. I sold four copies, at least two of which are to close friends and family. And one was to me. I also had sixteen downloads of the sample from Smashwords, but some of those will be repeats from the same person, because many people download more than one format.

But I haven't done much in the way of promotion, and it's early days yet, and it is a specialized title. And in this ebook adventure I have come across other people doing this, and they have confirmed three things for me. It takes time, it takes promotion, and you do indeed need more titles.

And just by pure coincidence I paused to look over my very first book today. I was interested in adding it to the experiment later, but I was putting it off because I was sure it needed extensive rewriting. But what ho?! It's ready! (Except for some pesky remaining typos.) I had forgotten that I had run it through the critique mill again a few years ago. I've already done the rewrites that I thought it needed. (And before those rewrites, it had got very good responses from the few editors who had deigned to actually read it - it was just really hard to get anybody to read a swashbuckler at the time.)

And that's the upside of this one - it's a straight swashbuckling YA adventure. It's horses, adventure, kidnappings, mystery, swordplay, and more horses. It should be easier to market. While YA isn't all that big in ebooks yet, I think it's growing, especially due to the iPad - since Apple has always been great at selling to schools.

So The Adventure of Anna the Great is up next. It needs a cover (which I already have a good start on), a polish, catalog copy and conversion. I will probably not do this too quickly, though, because I don't want to promote more than one book at a time, and I need to give the first book more of a shot.