I could lay a great big sob-story guilt trip on you about how hard it is to even begin to get within four billion light years of “making it” as a self-published author, but instead I’ll just throw out a few facts and figures. I’ll try not to take more than, oh, say, 45 or 50 minutes of your time with this.
VWORP!1 (and, unless something rather major happens between now and then, its successors) is published through Createspace, which is a self-publishing subsidiary of Amazon. It’s got a lot of advantages over Lulu: you don’t have to shell out gobs of money to buy an ISBN, your stuff is automatically listed on Amazon and all of the little Amazonettes around the world, and generally I found that the whole process of setting up a new title was a lot more streamlined and painless on Createspace than on Lulu.
The downside is that it’s basically an Amazon product. You set the initial price, and then Amazon can suddenly decide, with no warning or notification whatsoever, to discount it. And “third party merchants” who undersell your set price – even though they’re listed as “fulfillment by Amazon”? In the words of world-renowned chocolatier Mr. W. Wonka, “YOU GET NOTHING!”
All told, not quite a hundred copies of VWORP!1 have sold through various outlets. Before you go patting me on the back, let me point out that a total of 35 of those copies have been shipped to my house so I can sell them at conventions. 😆 September has already outsold August; in August, I sold twice as many books face-to-face as I did online. Which is cool! I love the conventions. But it’s losing traction online in a rush.
There isn’t a single review for VWORP!1 anywhere. Not one. I’ve looked. Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk… nowhere.
Bearing in mind that I’m not demanding anyone write an unrealistically fawning review – if I wanted that, I’d just get this guy to do it for me – I’d like to ask anyone who’s bought VWORP!1, either in person or online, to post a review on Amazon where it actually stands a remote chance of affecting sales. Short of buying another copy at full price, that’s the best thing you can do for me between now and the next book. 😆
If you have no idea what book I’m talking about, then by all means, please click right this way.
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