Seriously. I used to lurk on SA all day, but lately, I've been spending all my time on Kboards!!
I hope you'll forgive me. Once I decided to self-pub my first novel, I had to go there to learn as much as I could about doing that successfully. Refer to 2017 Career goal on my sidebar ---- Welp. Goal met!
Bear with me as I recap...
As some of you remember, I've been a freelance writer for 9 years, since my oldest was born, and it was not only difficult to have constant deadlines with two little kids and limited daycare, but the pay rates kept going down (thanks Great Recession), and then I lost 60 percent of it to taxes. (Yay self-employment tax penalty!)
DH and I eventually decided the paltry amount of money I was clearing after taxes (which amounted to almost nothing after childcare) just wasn't worth the stress.
So...I decided to pursue my life-long ambition of writing fiction and tone down the freelance, since I wasn't really making any money anyway, might as well take the risk right?
Stick with me. There really is some finance in this story!
Zoom ahead to now:
I tried traditional publishing, and I'm told for a very first ever novel, I did better than most:
1. one agent read the whole book, but declined bc publishers aren't buying paranormal romances anymore. A couple other agents declined the query for the same reason. I'm told getting any response from an agent is good. Still hurt my feelings, though.
2. The book won one Romance Writers of America contest for young adult fiction. It was a real honor! The book placed third for young adult romance in a second RWA contest. Also, another honor.
So, all in all for a first try, I'm satisfied with that. Now that I'm in a professional author's group, I hear a lot of people saying they never got a bite until their sixth or eight book!
Which leads me to now. I didn't want to put the novel in a drawer just because it's not what five publishers are buying right now. I decided to self pub, which is why I've been cheating on SA with Kboards! (Professional development. I'll always love you guys most.)
So the big news is I just hit publish on the paperback version of my book! Feels good to see it for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And the bigger surprise: I've sold 16 copies so far. (Net: $41 in royalties, which means TECHNICALLY I'm a pro writer now. Goal met!)
The ebook version goes live on May 1, which, I'm lead to believe, is where the real sales begin. I'll be enrolling it in Kindle Unlimited, which pays you for every page kindle members read of the book.
My expenses, other than time, were $12 for the licensing fee for the cover photo. Thanks to my experience in journalism, I saved a ton of money on production costs.
I edited the book myself, then handed it to my mom for proofreading (She's good and picky about misspellings and commas). I'm not saying it's 100 percent error free, but it's close. All those years copy editing paid off.
Then, who knew that one graphic design class I took in college would pay off? I created my own ebook cover and print book wraparound cover (free) instead of having to pay a designer to do it.
The rest-- formatting and reviewing the print book layout and learning how to and formatting in the various ebook formats-- just took time and practice. Both turned out better than I expected.
So yes. Life goals, right?
Here is the link, as per LuckyRobin's request....
I feel like I'm cheating on you.
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My secret identity has been revealed! I feel like everyone finding out Batman is Bruce Wayne!!
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