Well, that was underwhelming

Eight books into my half-assed writing career, I got tired of begging my friends and family to write me reviews. So for my ninth and tenth books, I tried different strategies.

When I published Mary Monster, I focused on giveaways. The week the book came out, I distributed 1,200 copies. Fifty of those were to readers who promised to post a review in exchange for an advance copy. The other 1,150 were through a promotion I supported with paid advertising. The result? Zilch. I saw zero sales after my giveaways ended. And the reviews online are mostly from my friends and family. To date, Mary Monster has sold maybe 80 copies.

So for Camille, I focused on advertising a special $0.99 launch price. I invested $300 in different platforms, one of which "guaranteed" at least 50 sales. The result? Again, basically nothing. Camille has sold about 20 copies, at least six of which were purchased by personal friends. Only one review has been posted on Amazon.

I sort of expected Mary Monster to flop. It's too stylized for a self-pubbed genre thriller. But too supernatural to be considered serious literature.

But I really thought Camille might take off. The cover design is killer. The keywords and book description are solid. It's a popular genre. It's very dark, in a way some readers might miss until the book's final chapters, but I don't think it flopped because the hero was an antihero.

Anyway, I have four different books marinating, but I'm ignoring them for a bit. I shared some of my songs back in 2017, and I'm going to focus energy on writing more music and publishing an EP. Once that's done, maybe I'll write another novel the world can ignore.