Last day of free promotion

Well, it has been a whirlwind few days. When I first uploaded my book to Amazon, it took a lot to press that publish button. A million things ran through my mind and most of them were not good. It has been my dream to be an author, an aspiration I’ve had since a child, and a journey that has produced six novels in 15 years. It has been a journey of much fulfillment, but also one of disappointment, stress, and heartache. It is hard to explain the feeling of having something you’ve spent so much time, energy, and love creating, be rejected.

Going the traditional publishing route, the first book I completed was rejected more than 40 times. My next book about the same. Most passed it by without reading even a single line of text. I didn’t have any publications under my belt and was basically cold calling agents and publishers. I did my research and queried only those that supported work like mine. I wrote and rewrote summaries of my story, provided outlines and samples, but still, nothing. I had a few bites. They even offered praise of my work, but even if the book is fantastic, getting someone to commit time and resources to support a work from an unknown author was daunting. It is a whole lot of rejection and it shakes you to the core. This is not a unique story. Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie was rejected 30 times before someone decided to take a chance. This anecdote helps, but only a little.

So, taking that first step of opening my heart and mind to the world was frightening. I had gone many years since the rejection of my first books and was scared it would happen again. The first few days were tense as the downloads stayed at zero. I checked, and refreshed, checked, and refreshed all day. It was driving my wife crazy. Publishing the book is relatively easy, but getting people to download it takes work. I read as many articles on self-publishing as I could and lowered the barrier to my book by making the eBook free for a promotional period (this expires today, so hurry!). I’ve leveraged my social network to get as many as I could to download and it seems to be working. By this post I am at 89 units since the book went live on April 3rd. The support has been awesome! I will not be retiring from my day job anytime soon (seeing that about 85 of those were downloaded for free), but just the fact that people are going through the effort of downloading something that I’ve written is humbling.

Island of Stone will likely not be a bestseller, but it is giving me an audience that I can leverage for my next books. Vril and the Slaying of the Bull are being edited as we speak. Once those are up, I will continue my work on some new material (namely the Great Lucado). Then it will be time for the sequel to Island of Stone, which has already been outlined. Like most things, it takes baby steps, then walking, and then running. With hard work and dedication, I will get to my destination someday.