October was a hell of a month for me, not just writing-wise. But if I was to stick just with writing, it was the month when I made the big step.

Book 1 launch

After all the prep over the last weeks and months, I’ve published my debut, Eternal Defenders – in pretty much complete silence. For now, only in Kindle format, with paperback planned for early 2021.

The process itself was quite smooth from filling the required forms to register a KDP account (in fact, upgrading my customer account into KDP account, given that it uses the same registration mail address), following the upload (which was processed in a few hours), and creating the author profile.

After that, I’ve send the request to be upgraded to Goodreads Author account, which was likewise fast – around 2 hours.

All of that on Sunday…

I then enabled X-ray on the book, which took just a few minutes to process – and revealed a typo and an issue related to formatting – which I’ll not cover here and now as I plan a post related to DIY HTML formatting that will mention this issue.

And so, with the Sunday given to wrap up book one, I became a self-published author in the true meaning of the word. Yay!

The only thing I haven’t managed to sort out is the map, but when I do (and I’ll give it a few tries here and there), it’s a small thing to update the live manuscript.

Sequels

In the meantime, I was also going through the current draft of the sequels to prepare for the next draft. I’ve read through #2 and, as soon as I finish reading through #3 (for continuity), I’ll go to drafting #2 again. My goal is to have it beta-ready in early 2021.

With the work on #1 done, I realize I’ll have to start thinking about the description and cover of #2 as I draft – probably the best moment as that’s when the story is taking a lot of my mind’s space.

The Great Purge

As I waited for the upload of the book to process, I’ve also went to my WordPress settings and did one thing that was in my to-do list. I’ve called it The Great Purge.

Told simply, there were many people who hit the ‘follow’ only in hopes of me checking their site but never interacted with me anymore after that. This was easy but time-consuming, to remove over 140 “followers”. I still haven’t removed everyone as I dropped to ~40 followers while the real amount of people who read my posts, leat alone interact with me, is around 25. But I did quite a clean-up while playing it safe.

What’s next

I’ll continue some research on the topic of book marketing, though I have yet to decide what, exactly, I’d eventually do on that front. Some people say that the best marketing for book one is to write book two, and that’ll likely be my main focus anyway, but I may want to give book 1 at least a small nudge at some point. Time will tell, I guess.

Another thing I’ll be looking into is preparing the paperback – I’ll need to look into things like font size, borders, and other print-specififc things before I wrap it up and create the final file.

And, of course, drafting book two.

The report

So, how was my launch week? My KDP report, as of writing this, is at two purchases and 152 KU page reads, which means I’ve something around $3,5. Yay. But let’s look at it the other way: without making any buzz for it, someone had randomly found my book.

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So, that’s the month. As usual, feel free to comment or ask questions, and I’ll do my best to answer as soon as possible.