So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.\u00a0 One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.\u00a0 Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each.\u00a0 And today I also got my first one-star review.\u00a0 The reader was upset because he didn\u2019t know it was a science fiction story.\u00a0 And I can understand his anger.\u00a0 When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction.\u00a0 But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book.\u00a0 And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I\u2019ve received so far.\u00a0 Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.<\/p>\n
But, all in all, it\u2019s been an interesting experience.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And to the extent that I\u2019ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before.\u00a0 And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the \u201cBig Five\u201d publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan).\u00a0 So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t mean finding an audience is easy.\u00a0 It\u2019s not.\u00a0 It\u2019s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.<\/p>\n
The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited.\u00a0 But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I\u2019m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I\u2019ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first.\u00a0 I want to see what feedback I get once I\u2019ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it.\u00a0 After that I\u2019ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited.\u00a0 KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I\u2019m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.<\/p>\n
And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I\u2019ve been reaching up till now.\u00a0 Now maybe this isn\u2019t my target audience but I think it\u2019s important to test that hypothesis.\u00a0 If Kindle Unlimited doesn\u2019t move the needle, then I know what I\u2019ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect.\u00a0 So, let\u2019s see what happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.\u00a0 One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.\u00a0 Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3366,2510,1289,1263,4],"tags":[5147,4484],"class_list":["post-36662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-dunwich","category-literature","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff","tag-book-marketing","tag-the-american-archipelago-book-1-the-sniper"],"yoast_head":"\n