1. Self-Publishing on Amazon from 2012-2024: What I wish I'd known
The KDP hype, marketing things I tried, & why they didn’t work
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a link to why I’m writing this series in a new section of my SubStack & the publishing schedule (Wednesdays starting next week). Basically, it’s a real-time journey of my road to publishing my first real novel, inspired as a cure for all the false myths around writing and publishing. I’m debunking a myth every week while sharing my experiences.
(Please note that the book battles side of my Substack will remain free, still including the open vote in the first week of each month, followed by my book review of the winner before the month’s end.)
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At the moment, I have fully drafted 2 novels, one of which I’m revising and prepping to publish after getting lots of feedback. I’ve also written 5 other drafts of things that aren’t fully finished. The good news is that I still love it, the feedback from strangers has been encouraging, and I’m still all in for the ride.
Let’s back up though and look at where I started so that you have context for all this. This post is the “My Origin Story” part 1 out of 4.
From post 5 onward, I’ll share myths I’m busting with lessons learned in real-time.
When the story struck & dreams began
I’d done creative writing contests in school as a kid, and it was fun, but I’d never thought of pursuing it professionally. However, I was a fan of listening to music and then just writing down whatever came to mind, so you could call me a natural free-writing artist.
After I’d married and left home permanently while traveling abroad, I started having this VERY vivid and recurring dream that felt like a past life. I felt compelled to write it down, and the story just kept coming. That was my first experience of this magic space of not thinking about what comes next and finding out what happens only at the moment when I wrote this down.
Then the big news broke that self-publishing could actually by profitable. (Keep in mind that at this time, the number of self-published books on Amazon was less than a million. I’ll touch more on how much that’s changed later on.) The hype was real. This was the first year when self-publishing really made unprecedented waves in the book industry.
Truth: Self-Published Books Challenged NYT Bestsellers
Whether or not you remember it, 2012 was a groundbreaking year for people self-publishing on Amazon. Not only was “50 Shades of Grey” making millions, but also The Guardian reported that self-published ebook were pushing traditionally published bestsellers off of The NY Times Bestseller List:
Four self-published authors will have a total of seven novels on the New York Times ebook bestseller list this weekend, and the founder of self-publishing powerhouse Smashwords is predicting the number is only going to grow.
The highest-ranking self-published author on the 5 August NYT chart is Colleen Hoover, whose ebook Slammed ("A girl falls in love with a neighbour who enjoys slam poetry, but they encounter obstacles") comes in in eighth place, ahead of ebooks by established bestsellers James Patterson and Karin Slaughter…
I cannot tell you how many people I saw jumping into publishing Erotica at this time, believing themselves to be the next E.L. James. After I read “50 Shades of Grey” to see what all the hype was about, I now am only interested in erotica if it’s a parody like this:
➡️Disclaimer: I do respectfully acknowledge that Amazon has opened a lot of new doors for self-published authors, and I thank them for that. Nevertheless, I also believe people should know the truth about the business before they get into it. Some people will succeed on Amazon’s platform; some will crash and burn; and others will scam the shit out of everyone they can there, so authors beware. ⬅️
Anyway, I did the same thing that many other wannabe writers did at that time, and I jumped straight into this dreamboat of self-publishing, eating up all the lies that Amazon and other aspiring authors circulated: