There are over 12 million books on the Kindle store, and I’d have to dig for the source now, but a rule of thumb six years ago was that most never sell more than 5 copies in their life. (It probably far more than that, now, after the explosion of LLM-generated text, but it’s a good enough number for going on with.) Therefore putting out True Colours under a brand new pen name with no marketing, and no plan beyond “Get it off my hard drive so that mental loop is closed and I don’t have to think about it again”… left me honestly expecting that it’d sell 5 copies and sink out of sight.
I hadn’t counted on friends, who gleefully announced it on their blogs and their feeds. I hadn’t counted on fans cheerfully telling each other who it really was, and leaving reviews.
I am humbled, and grateful.
I didn’t expect the book to make back the cost of cover art, interior art, and formatting… but I was embracing my identity as a hobbyist, and saying, “this is a birthday present to me, and it’s an opportunity to be a test bed for friends – so my cover artist knows she can do whatever she wants with these tools, within these parameters, and we both get to see how it turns out.” But it just might… not within release week, but within a year, it is quite possible.
And in the end, now that it’s out there, it’s now backlist that I can come back to later, and should I write the Happily Ever Afters for the rest of the guys as a series, it’ll be one book more for readers to pick up when I actually promote a new release.
No effort is ever wasted in the long run, and I’m glad it’s done.
Back to the word mines!
13 responses to “With A Little Help From My Friends”
*ahem* It does help to leave a link in the post to the book you know.
Details, details….. 😏😇
I did put a hyperlink under the book name, if you mouse over True Colours…
But here?
https://www.amazon.com/True-Colours-Summer-Grayling-ebook/dp/B0HJP83423/
Oh! I completely missed the hyperlink. *facepalm*
Ka-Ching. Thanks for the link.
Five copies over their lifetime? Wow.
Depressing, isn’t it? It makes me look at my slowest books and feel better about things.
Same here.
I grabbed the sample to read!
Just bought, and although I’m not generally a fan of spicy romance, it’s worth it if it encourages you to keep on writing (so far I’ve enjoyed everything you’ve published, and I think there’s a good chance I’ll like this one too — especially since the blurb was interesting).
The only bad thing about this novel is that it ended. There wasn’t any more story to read, and I had to come back to present reality.
Excellent. There’s going to be next one, right?
I saw other reviews outing Summer Grayling, so I carried on. I loved the book, and want more Tactical Romances, either by Summer or Dorothy. No pressure, but I have a lot of downtime later this fall. [grin]