A Milestone and a Low Point

So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.  One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.  Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each.  And today I also got my first one-star review.  The reader was upset because he didn’t know it was a science fiction story.  And I can understand his anger.  When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction.  But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book.  And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I’ve received so far.  Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.

But, all in all, it’s been an interesting experience.  It seems Amazon has created an opportunity for anyone to create a book and it even makes it possible to try and find an audience for that book in the enormous marketplace they have created on their platform.  And to the extent that I’ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before.  And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one.  And by that, I mean I could never have found a publisher (other than a vanity press) that would accept my story because of the right-leaning slant of my story.  After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the “Big Five” publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan).  So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me.  But that doesn’t mean finding an audience is easy.  It’s not.  It’s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.

The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited.  But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I’m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road.  I’ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I’ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first.  I want to see what feedback I get once I’ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it.  After that I’ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited.  KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I’m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.

And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I’ve been reaching up till now.  Now maybe this isn’t my target audience but I think it’s important to test that hypothesis.  If Kindle Unlimited doesn’t move the needle, then I know what I’ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect.  So, let’s see what happens.