Indie-pub Nikki 11
Book marketing maintenance day today.
1) After the Hal-Con I did some work on my homepage and added the “Half-Life” short story page.
2) I linked the YouTube video of my reading to the Dome Child page (unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to embed it in the page itself, I need some more studying of “widgets” for that, I suppose).
3) Next I created a new page for my new indie novel project. The title is yet a secret and I will announce it as soon as I have secured an ISBN for the book. I am in the final stages of editing the book, which is an urban fantasy novel and Naoyuki Kato, who made the excellent Dome Child cover is already working on the cover for the new novel already as well. I expect the novel to come out around August 2012.
4) I tried to add the Dome Child reading YouTube video to my Amazon author page, but as soon as I click the “upload video” button the page crashes… wonder what is wrong.
5) In this blog itself I changed all the self-pub nikki post names and the category as well to “indie-pub” or “indie publication”. Simple reason is that sounds better than “self-publication”. I think we have gone way beyond the days of self, or vanity publishing. Indie publishing is becoming or already has become a serious thing to recon with.
The best thing about indie publishing is that the author is in full control. I can decide whether to enroll in the Kindle publishing “direct” program or not and I decide whether to use the free download offer or not and if so when. During the first free download period in February I had roughly 1000 downloads, now, during the Hal-Con free download campaign I had another 300 free downloads within 2 days. I have not achieved such numbers with the Dark Matters novella that was “traditionally” published.
The goal is of course still to get traditionally published, but being a non-native speaker and living in Japan my chances are even more ridiculous than those of American or British authors. I see my best chances at the moment in building an audience as an indie author, hoping to get one day enough momentum and clout to break into the traditional publishing world. I wish myself good luck with that! 
