The experience of writing Tale of Doom, my first novel #3: Publishing

For more about the origins and writing process of the book, please refer to the previous articles in the series:

The experience of writing Tale of Doom, my first novel #1: Origins
The experience of writing Tale of Doom, my first novel #2: Writing the actual thing and failing at it

Now that we've gone trough the details, some pointless and not applicable to anyone else's situation, let's go through the experience of actually making money off the book. It's something that was really bothering me as I was writing it, where am I going to sell it? Is a publisher ever going to be interested in it? Short answer, no. 

A lot of book publishers don't deal with writers directly. They deal with agents and with... I think the term is literary scout. So, don't submit to them, submit to people that will weed things out. Not all publishers do that, of course, some have a more direct approach, usually the smaller ones. What I'm saying is that if you're going with an established publisher for your book, you're going to have to have an inside-person. There's going to have to be someone to give you an introduction, put in a good word for you. So in preparation for that, I suggest you start Twitter stalking people befriending them, and years down the line, ask them for a solid. Now, I know that may sound duplicitous, nefarious, insidious, even thesaurus, but it may work. 

In the event it doesn't, there's a few more options in your bag. One of the first things that shows up when google searching "book publishing for n00bs" is Create Space. It's a service that lets you make physical books, design them and order copies for yourself or wait for others, like book stores, to order lots of them. It's an Amazon owned service. And if you're just in it for the e-books, you can go through Amazon Kindle directly.

I started out with the Kindle thing and learned a few lessons along the way. For example, there was (I think there still is) a feud in the US between Amazon and book stores, to the point where some stores won't sell books that published through Amazon. Your book will also be registered with Amazon and pricing will be controlled through Amazon. And by that, I mean that you can't set the exact price you want for it on the low end. There's a limited minimum price you can set, unless you give Amazon exclusive rights to your book for a certain amount of time. I think it was around a year when I tried publishing. The exclusivity will let Amazon do whatever it wants with the price, make special offers on it, and will also promote it. But if you, yourself, try to sell it somewhere else in that time, it's a big nono. I didn't do that, because I felt it was limiting. So, I stuck with the normal deal, in which I get 75% (in applicable areas, most of the world is applicable) of the income generated by the sale, and then handle all the actual publicity for the book myself. That, of course, can also be done through Amazon, and it tends to cost. People recommended that I spend as much as 1000$ on ads for the book, which was a bit out of my 14$ budget. 

So, what options do you have to advertise your book with no budget? Because I come from the tech/game press, I was under the impression that sending submitting the book for review would be enough for it to be considered. I know reading one is a considerable time investment, and if the book sucks it may be not as fun going through it as it would be going trough a bad video game, or reviewing a product that is insanely boring, like an umbrela stand that can tell the weather. But it's not that simple. Book reviewers tend to charge money. Like, you'll be asked for around 100$ for a review. And, again, 14$ budget, can't really afford a review, let alone several of them, which would be required to get the book some decent coverage. To be honest, my main idea for promoting it was to put half of it on The Pirate Bay, but it was shut down when I published it. 

Now, you may be saying to yourself. "Wait a minute mister journalamaist, can't you use your thinamabob what you write on to advertise your book?" Well, I could have. I did. But I wrote a book in English, and my audience doesn't really speak it. Some did buy it, and I'm very grateful they did. But for the book to get traction, it would need actual ads. It would also need to be totally finished, since only Volume 1 was out at the time(and still is at the time of writing). So, how did I fixe the problem of no ads and no visibility? I didn't. It's still non-existent outside of the videos I make on @gaminghd, and it's become a reward on the GamingHD Patreon. So at least some people own it, and at least have pretended to read it. 

Since then I've branched out from Amazon into Itch.io. Now, that is a site made primarily for games and software, but it also supports books. And it's where the most up to date version of the book is, since I can also upload a PDF there, not just an e-book. Especially since I had misplaced the software I used to actually make the e-book, and I forgot how it was called, and I couldn't just copy-paste things into it anyway, since it screwed with the formatting. Now I use Scrivener, so it's a bit easier to actually make the e-book. Itch.io allows me to set my own price, I cam make it anything, I get more of the money then I do on Amazon, there's no dubiousness about publication rights, nothing but a storefront that I have complete control over. I can also use it to easily distribuite the book to anyone just by generating keys.  In all honesty, I should have gone with it from the get go, and just not bothered with Amazon. Now I have to support that version of the book too, which is an extra drag, since I never actually use Amazon for anything else, I can't even remember what my password is. 

I was thinking that after finishing Volume 2 that maybe I should try and buy some ads. But then Steemit came along, and I've seen people like @techslut be successful with publishing a book here. The potential is there for Steemit to be a method of distributing the book. But it can only work by posting it bit by bit, and there's the disadvantage that each part of it can only generate revenue for a week. And let's say that half of the pieces will get like, 1SBD, which is generally what the posts about the book have gotten at their best, then it's not really that marvelous. Not after working on this for so many years. If the blockchain had the option to set for how long you want to gather rewards for a post, it would be a lot more viable. Like, setting something to generate revenue for up to a year. That would be a lot more usable for books without needing to hope that someone with a lot of voting power comes along. 

I'm still considering what to do next after Volume 2 is published, so a few months from now I may write another article like about #taleofdoom. 

Hope this helped you if you're considering writing a book.