Secret Success in Self-Publishing

I have a secret identity. No, I'm not going to reveal it. What part of "secret identity" did you not understand? Only four people in the world know it, and two of those found out because I accidentally signed the wrong name on my communications with them! Keeping track of who you are can be a bitch.

Anyway, this secret identity of mine has now published three books on Smashwords; two novellas and a short story collection. It all started a while ago, when I was very excited about self-publishing and ebooks and wanted to get some first-hand experience of what it was all about. It so happens I had a pile of stories lying around in a genre I don't usually write in (FYI, anything except sci-fi is a genre I don't normally write in) and a couple of these were novella-length. I was obviously never going to do anything with them and who publishes novellas anyway, so I started looking around for a way to self-publish them at absolutely no cost.

In all my identities, I am a skinflint.

There was this great startup called Smashwords at the time, just beginning to make waves, so I bunged my novellas on there and then checked my 'dashboard' every five minutes. Please note, I didn't make any effort to publicise them. I didn't mention them on Twitter, or Facebook, or anywhere that anybody might look. I did start up a blog under the false identity and did about three posts, but that gets about one visitor a month. And, guess what? They didn't sell.

I brought the price down and down, but I never reached a point where anyone was interested. Eventually, I set the price to 'free' and started getting a tiny bit of interest. So I put the price back up to $0.99c ('free' was just an experiment – I have moral issues with giving my work away for nothing) and, eventually, forgot all about it.

That was about a year ago. Basically, messing about with self-publishing experiments went by the board when I actually found a commercial publisher for one of my novels. (TimeSplash. Yes I know you know, I just like saying it.) Besides, I was absolutely overwhelmed for months with publicising TimeSplash. I set up a website for it, gave it its own blog, I dived into Twitter, I did blog and twitter tours, and begged (and pleaded) for reviews. I was a busy bee.

Gradually, all the TimeSplash kerfuffle died down.

Then, a week or so ago, I took a look at my Smashwords stats, just for old times' sake. And – bugger me! – those novellas are doing quite well now. In fact, last month they sold more than my commercially-published book did. Which isn't saying much, actually, since, after a year on the shelves, TimeSplash the ebook is fading away as a force in the commercial publishing world. Please note that, unlike TimeSplash, which still garners the odd flattering review and earns me the occasional interview, but which is still drifting down the rankings,  the novellas had no publicity at all, and yet they are gaining in popularity. It is still true that, over their respective lifetimes, TimeSplash the ebook has earned me many, many times what the self-pubbed novellas have, but that may not always be true, the way things are going.

So I gathered up a few short stories – which have the same characters and world as the novellas – into a 30K-word collection, and published that at Smashwords too. It went 'live' yesterday. Partly it was as a sort of 'thank you' to all those people who are buying my novellas and might be wanting more, partly it's another experiment, to see if adding a third book will increase the momentum still further.

That short story collection is my fifth self-published book by the way.  (I also did a children's story called Hangin' With the Monkeys under my own name – another genre I never intend to exploit commercially – and a collection of short stories – mostly from my already-published 'backlist' – called Placid Point.) I will be watching its progress with interest. Shame I can't tell you what it's called, so you could go and buy it. On the other hand, maybe I'd better stick to my no publicity policy since it seems to be working so well.