An Irish Famine Trilogy
In my last blog, I wrote about how I market my novels through KDP Free Book Promotions. This piece will show how I market my paperbacks.
Numbers
Like some other indie authors I don't sell that many of them to be honest. For example, in the last fifteen months I have sold four hundred copies of my novels, with just one third being paperbacks. The majority of sales are ebooks.
As well as these sales, I have sold over 90,000 pages read via KENP, mostly in the US. This is equivalent to around three hundred books, which I am very pleased with.
Altogether I guess you can see there is no real money to be made with these numbers of books and pages read. However, I am happy that my books are being read and, at some point, they will all pay for the cost of their covers.
Online market places
The first way I market my paperbacks is to have them available on Amazon and Ingram Spark. It is free to upload your pdfs to both sites and I have all three on Amazon and two, so far, on Ingram Spark. I plan to upload the latest novel soon.
Direct sales
The second way I market my paperbacks is to ask book stores and libraries to stock my books through direct sales with me.
I have been very fortunate that both the main bookstore in Waterford, Ireland, the Waterford Book Centre and the Waterford Library both agreed to stock my books as soon as I spoke to them. They have both been amazing.
It would be great to get into other bookshops and libraries. I tried different museums in Ireland as I think my trilogy will look good on the shelves of Famine Museums, for example. However, I have had no luck with my endeavours. It is understandable, one said to me that it is too much to deal with individual authors as well as run the museums.
Conclusion
I'll be in Ireland in a couple of months' time and will have another scout around for shops or libraries that might like an Irish Famine Trilogy.
For now, though, I’ll stick with selling my books in Waterford and having them read in the Waterford Libraries. Can’t be bad for an indie author and publisher!