A little over two months of results...

[Evan]

So I published my first novel Hood about two months ago, January 13th 2016. As of today I'm on three different Amazon bestseller lists:
#9 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Metaphysical & Visionary
#18 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Post-Apocalyptic
#20 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Military > Space Marine
(idk how they hell I ended up on "space marine" but whatever)

I'm averaging around 20 books sold a day and 14k KENP read over the past two weeks. Here's a post on my results after 50 days (have yet to update):
My post

I'm posting this for two reasons: One, I'm excited, beyond ecstatic, and want to share it becuase let's face it everyone wants to share their success.
Two: I think I'm not a particularly gifted writer naturally. Honestly, I think I just was able to get the book to this place because I had an amazing editor and I listened when she told me I was doing shit wrong. I cut 200 pages from the original 280 page manuscript, lol. I wanted to saw my own head off. But the book is 1000x better than my original manuscript becuase I ate my pride. Just because I had spent 3 years writing the book and needed to chop most of it, didn't mean it was in vain. It meant I needed to learn.

TLDR: get a great editor and listen to them.

Anyway, thanks for listening and letting me share,
Evan Pickering.

[Joe]

Love to read about success. That was big edit too. Not everyone is willing to do that. How did you spread the word about your book?

[Evan]

Joe wrote: "Love to read about success. How did you spread the word about your book?"

Hi Joe, Thanks!

I ran a kindle countdown deal and goodreads giveaway simultaneously. I reached out to boatloads of people I knew of facebook and gave them free books. I did plenty of twitter marketing using hashtags, and also just looking through hashtags of my genre and making friends with bigtime posters in the genre until they asked about the book and I gave them a free copy. Other than that, I basically just posted in my blog, excerpts, writing process, stuff like that. But yeah, I gave free copies to people early on.

[Riley, Viking Extraordinaire]

Awesome Evan, always good to hear someone having success, and it goes to show everyone has a different path to get where they are.

[Joe]

Great to hear it. And thank you for sharing!

(Looks like I need to get serious about twitter.)

[Evan]

Joe wrote: "Great to hear it. And thank you for sharing!

(Looks like I need to get serious about twitter.)"

Oh dude, definitely. It's super valuable, and It's VERY easy.

Thanks Riley! It's true there's many a winding ways to get somewhere.

[Ken]

Evan wrote: "So I published my first novel Hood about two months ago, January 13th 2016. As of today I'm on three different Amazon bestseller lists:
#9 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Scienc..."

Congratulations on your success--those are great numbers!

And I agree that a good editor can always help, as painful as it might be at the time.

[Mike]

Completely agree with your point on a good editor, an editor really helped me with the shape of the ending of my book but I'm really interested in how you have sustained such high levels of awareness and trial. I've managed to get some pretty large numbers with free giveaways but you seem to be able to keep on climbing.

[T.L.]

Blimmin' heck, that's impressive!
3 years into my journey and I'm still dreaming of such success.

I hope it continues for you.

And if you want to share such wonderful friends with me please do so ;-P

xx

[Nik]

Hey Evan, doing great, kick some a.s -:)
Try to distill maybe another piece from the 200 pages that weren't aired

[M.L.]

Congrats, Evan, that's great! :-)

[P.]

Evan wrote: "So I published my first novel Hood about two months ago, January 13th 2016. As of today I'm on three different Amazon bestseller lists:
#9 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Scienc..."

Congratulations! Very inspiring.

[D.N.]

Congrats! It's so great to hear of other's success. Huge motivation.

[Evan]

Thanks for all the kind words, everyone!

I'm glad I can be an inspiration. I'm pretty jacked up about the whole thing myself. Now I'm trying to get the next book rolling. Can't rush the process, though.

Mike: I haven't really gone crazy with marketing. I tweet once or twice a day about it, I post stuff on facebook like once a week, and I run a modest blog I post on once a week. That's most of what I do at this point. I have a few review bloggers lined up but it's taking awhile for them to get to my book (as expected). Obviously it's hard to know what portion of sales come from social media, but I daresay it's probably a small fraction, most of it is organic from Amazon AFAIK

Nik: Yeah, I'm definitely going to draw on stuff I didn't use where I can :D

[Mance]

Oh wow, that's amazing! Congratulations on your success!!

[M.L.]

I guess it's perspective and expectations managing, but the marketing described sounds pretty doable. The set up takes time, but once there, it's the most reasonable description I've read. :-)

[Evan]

Yeah I definitely don't sink alot of time into marketing! I try to explore worthwhile avenues when I find them, but mostly I just tweet a bit and write in mah blog here and there :)

Just had a breakthrough with outlining/storyboarding of book2 so I'm excited. Booyar

[Marie Silk]

Thank you for sharing your success story! Well done :)