Hint: Free book offer at the bottom of the post.

Writing a book is difficult. Getting your book published is more difficult than writing a book. Selling books is harder than both and probably the most difficult part of being a writer.

I worked hard trying to go the traditional route for my first novel. Received 76 rejections from agents and publishers. Spent countless hours going through the process. Got frustrated. Quit for years. Went back to it. Finally, a small press contacted me and said yes. I was stoked. I won’t name them because it wasn’t the greatest experience. But it was an experience. I didn’t have to pay for cover art or formatting. That was a plus. I got some line editing. That was a plus. I thought I was on my way to becoming a bestseller. I was wrong. There was very little promotional work done. For all the promotional work I did, I would only get a 10% royalty and had no way to verify the number of books that were actually sold. I had to trust the publisher. I’d get a ridiculously low royalty check on occasion. But I didn’t write to make money, right?

She offered to publish my second book. I took her up on that offer. In February of 2021, five years after Native Moments was published, my publisher sent me a letter saying that my books were no longer going to be printed. I wasn’t ready for my books to go out of print. She offered to transfer all rights to me. That was pretty nice of her. I took the offer. Decided I would self-publish both books. Now I see exactly how many books are sold and I get a much larger percentage of the sales. The amount of money I make on books has tripled and I don’t believe I’m selling that many more books. I like the control of owning my own rights. I’m okay investing my own money into promoting it now because I get the return on investment instead of my publisher. But I’m not really making enough on book sales to justify advertising. I gave it a try with amazon ads. I spent more than I made.

I then decided to try running a free book promo with Amazon. I offered Native Moments for free. 141 books were downloaded on the first day. That’s way more exciting than making money. I’m getting new readers. Native Moments reached #4 on a bestsellers list. That’s cooler than making money, too.

Even cooler than that. People started buying Panhandlers, my second novel, at full price. So getting new readers and making money. Sounds like a great deal to me.

So, I’ve decided to try it with Google Play now. If you have read this far, use the promo code V2WAZ4AB8AHED to download a copy of Native Moments. But go ahead and buy a copy of Panhandlers, too, while you are at it.

The promo code is good only until 1,000 downloads. So if the promo code doesn’t work when you try it, that means this shit actually worked and 1,000 people downloaded it already. Thanks for reading.

PS: I’m currently working on a third book. I’ll attempt the traditional route again. Maybe.