Sales of Big Lake grew monthly, from 103 copies to 125, 247, 545, and then it really started to take off in November with 4,283 copies. December and January were unbelievable, with 33,539 and 32,138 copies respectively. Sales dropped off significantly in February, down to 14,520 sales, and they have continued their downward spiral, with sales so far this month of just 1,507 copies. A lot of independent authors I know would be thrilled with what I’ve sold so far this month, and it’s been a great ride, so I have no complaints.

I started to panic as I saw my sales dropping, but in reading the Kindle Author’s forum, which I follow daily, it seems that just about every author there is experiences the same thing. Part of it is apparently a normal slowdown that happens this time every year, and there is no question that the huge proliferation of free books being offered on Kindle has also had a negative impact on sales. Why buy a book when people are giving them away for free? The authors giving away freebies are thrilled to report that they have given away 100, 300, even 1,000 copies of their books. But I approach publishing as a business, and I can’t pay the bills by giving away my product for free.

It was a heady experience when Big Lake was selling 1,000+ copies a day. My best day ever was Christmas Day, when I sold over 1,800 copies. That’s more than a book a minute! It was even more exciting when I got the phone call telling me that Big Lake had made the New Yorks Times Kindle bestseller list. Pretty good for a first novel from an unknown author! To date, Big Lake has sold a total of over 107,000 copies, most of them on Amazon, with lesser numbers on Smashwords and in print with Create Space. I tried for weeks to get my e-books on Barnes & Noble, and finally gave up trying to jump through all of their hoops. Smashwords sells my e-books in Nook format and I let them deal with the dweebs at Barnes & Noble.

The end of January I published the sequel, Big Lake Lynching, and to date it has sold just over 8,800 copies combined, on Kindle and Smashwords. A few days ago I uploaded the print edition of the book to Amazon’s Create Space print program, and I should get the proof copy tomorrow. Even though Big Lake Lynching isn’t selling in the numbers the first mystery did, its higher cover price of $2.99 (as opposed to 99 cents for Big Lake) means I make much more per book. I purposely priced Big Lake low as an introduction to the series. Every copy of Big Lake earns me 35 cents, while each copy of Big Lake Lynching earns $2.07.

My non-fiction e-books are all priced at $2.99 or $3.99, and while they only sell a couple of copies a day each, it all adds up.

And how much does it all add up to? Over $53,000 (before taxes) in my first year as an independent e-book author/publisher. One could live comfortably on that, but I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon. Especially since my day job is publishing the Gypsy Journal RV travel newspaper. I’d do that for free!

Many independent authors have asked me what I attribute my first year’s success to. It was a combination of hard work, a marketing plan that included my blogs, Facebook Author’s Page, Twitter, and other social media. Added to that were the many, many wonderful readers who told their friends about Big Lake and Big Lake Lynching, and posted links to it on Twitter and Facebook, helping to spread the word further than I could have ever reached myself. I also give credit to fellow author Dale Roberts, who created the stunning covers for Big Lake and Big Lake Lynching.

So what have I learned in the past year? That dreams can come true, if you are in the right place at the right time with the right product, and if you then take advantage of that unique position and work your butt off.

I’ve also learned that the minute you start to show some success, there are people waiting in the wings to shoot you down. Big Lake had an amazing number of five star reviews on Amazon until it hit the big time, and just as suddenly, it started getting very negative one star reviews. Some of them were from people who just didn’t like the book, but authors with more experience than I have told me it always happens to a book that is doing well. Apparently some folks just feel a need to cut you down to size. It sucks, but it’s part of the business. I learned that you have to grow a thick skin if you want to survive in this business.

I also learned that there are a lot of amazing, wonderful people out there who are thrilled for your success and want to help you continue to do well. Many of them are also authors, whose books are just as good as mine, if not better. I look forward to the day that their books make it to the top, so I can congratulate them as they have done me.

What happens next? I know that just as fast as things can take off, they can plummet, and to succeed in this business, you have to keep writing, keep promoting, and keep planning for the future. I am working hard on the third book in the Big Lake series and hope to have it out in early summer. I also have an unrelated standalone book about halfway done, and I am planning a second mystery series. I hope to bring the first book in that series out by the end of the year.

My long range goal is to release two books a year. I know some authors who are pumping out a book every six weeks or so, but I just can’t work that fast. As it is, I have ideas for at least two more Big Lake books, three books to start off the new series, and a new idea pops into my head every now and then and I make notes for the future.

It’s been a wonderful, exhilarating year, and I feel like I’m just getting started. I can’t wait to see what the next twelve months have in store for me!

It is okay to just be an author and write your books, if that is what gives you satisfaction. And when I say "just an author" I mean that with the highest respect. To me, being an author is one of the greatest accomplishments in the world. We should all be very proud of that fact that we have done something very few people in the world will ever accomplish. I’ve had literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people tell me over the years that "someday" they are going to write a book. But that day never rolls around. We did it! How cool is that?

None of us should be ashamed to be just an author. However, there is a lot more to this than just writing a book if you also want to see consistent sales. Ever since Big Lake took off and did so well, I have had people asking me how I did it. I’ll tell you right now that Big Lake is no better than a lot of books out there, and I believe that a number of the books I have read from my fellow authors on the different author forums I read are much better, including (but not limited to) books by Mike Meyer and Dale Roberts.

But, I market my books every day. I see a lot of authors here bemoaning the fact that promotion is hard work, and it doesn’t always pay off, or at least not as quickly as some would like it to. But it does pay off! Consider this, I first published Big Lake to the Kindle bookstore May 22, and while sales grew steadily, it wasn’t until November that it really began to soar. But every day of those six months in between, I was actively promoting my book.

I see publishing as a business, and I am an entrepreneur. My products are the books I write, and to sell those books takes effort. A lot of effort. But I knew that going in and I was, and am, willing to put forth that effort for the payoff I am getting.

I’m an author, and I am a businessman. It’s okay to be both, but it’s also okay to be just an author. Me, I’m greedy, and while I love writing, I want to be compensated for my work. So I promote. I promote every day of the week, every week of the year. I didn’t make Amazon’s Top 100 list and stay there for 78 days because I wrote a fantastic book. I made it because I worked hard to get there. And even though sales of Big Lake have peaked and are down to a couple of hundred a day, I keep right on promoting. It’s what I do.

What kind of author are you?

The book has been in Amazon’s  Top 100 list for seven days in a row now, selling anywhere from 1,000 to over 1,200 copies a day. Even at 35 cents a copy, that adds up pretty fast!

Sales numbers have been rising every month, from 103 in July, to 125 in August, 247 in September, 545 in October, and then in November sales suddenly exploded, with 4,283 copies sold. And as of midnight last night I had sold 8,319 copies so far this month!

Several people have asked me what I credit the book’s success to. I did a lot of research, and studied what other authors were doing, both those who were selling a lot of e-books, and those who were not selling many at all.  I had a marketing plan in place before I published Big Lake, and have followed it all the way. You can read about that in a blog post I wrote a while back titled How I Sell E-Books.

There is no question that luck has played a big part in it, but it takes more than that. First of all, the support of so many of my blog readers, Gypsy Journal subscribers, Facebook friends, and everybody else who has bought the book, told their friends and families about Big Lake, and shared comments about it on Facebook, Twitter, and their own blogs. It’s like dropping a pebble in a pond, and as the ripples expand, they reach people I never could.

I credit two other things with helping bring about the dramatic increase in sales numbers; launching a Facebook page titled Nick Russell’s Writing Life, in which I share info about my writing efforts; and the beautiful new cover Dale Roberts created for the book to replace the very bland cover I started with. I have never met Dale, just exchanged comments with him on Amazon’s forum for Kindle authors and publishers. I was lamenting the poor cover, and Dale e-mailed me with an offer to design a cover for me, absolutely free, because that’s the kind of nice guy he is.  

A lot of interesting things happen when your book reaches bestseller status. First of all, in my case at least, you spend some time pinching yourself, because you are sure you are dreaming. And, of course, your ego gets a huge boost. Then you start to get congratulations phone calls and e-mails from your friends and supporters, who were there for you all along.

And a couple of e-mails that say things like “Well, sure, if I had a blog following, my book could do that too!” or “It really sucks that rich guys like you get all the breaks!” Rich? Well, yes, if you count the love of a good woman, an extraordinarily happy and fulfilling marriage, many wonderful friends and family members who have been there through thick and thin, and a job I love, I guess I am a rich man. Very, very rich.

But if you are talking money, there have been a lot of very lean times, and some of those friends and family members I mentioned above know just how bad it got during those times. Rich? Not in money, trust me!

You may also hear from what another author called “privateers,” who are shysters who want to take on your book and do all kinds of wonderful things for you, all for a very large piece of the action.

Another interesting thing is that, after getting glowing reviews, the majority of them 5 stars, since I first published Big Lake back in May, yesterday I got two very bad reviews in about 90 minutes. One was a 1 star and the other a 2 star, and both had a lot of bad things to say about the book.

I was a little bummed at first, but having spent much of my career publishing small town newspapers, I’m no stranger to criticism. Several more experienced independent Kindle authors have told me that this just goes with the territory, and once you start to do very well, you become a target. Some suspect it is sour grapes on the part of other authors trying to shoot the good books down, others say that there are just people who delight in bursting someone’s bubble, just for spite.

I purposely priced Big Lake at only 99 cents, as a marketing tool to introduce myself as a new fiction writer. This means I earn 35 cents for each copy sold on Kindle. That doesn’t sound like much, until you consider the fact that for the last six days it has sold from 1,000 to over 1,400 copies a day. Several people have suggested I raise the price and double or triple the royalties while the book is hot. But why? It’s not all about money (though money is a very good thing), and my Daddy always told me, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

So where do we go from here? Obviously, those sales numbers won’t last forever. No book stays at the top for all time. But hopefully, I’ll have the sequel, Big Lake Lynching, out by the end of the year, and maybe we can start the ride all over again! I also have several other books rolling around in the back of my head, and maybe we’ll see some of them down the road a ways.

If you have a book inside of you, there has never been a better time to take the plunge into the e-book publishing world. What do you have to lose?        

Last month, I sold 545 copies of my Big Lake mystery e-book, and 709 e-books total, and I set a goal of 1,000 e-books for this month. On November 16th, Big Lake alone hit 1,030 copies for the month. As of midnight last night, it was up to 1,690 books. I’m more than a little thrilled.

At the same time, I set a goal to get the sequel, Big Lake Lynching, finished and onto Amazon by the end of the year. I’ve been working hard on it, and I think I’ll make it. Big Lake was a little over 77,000 words, and I’m at 59,600 on the new book, and churning out about 2,500 words a day. Of course, it may not be the exact same number of words, but the story seems to be rounding the bend and I think it will start heading for the home stretch soon. 

But I do have a new issue of the Gypsy Journal to get out of the way in the next couple of weeks, and once it’s done, the book will need to be edited and proofed. 

Somebody wrote the other day to say I was wasting my time giving the first book away with the low 99 cent introductory price, and that may be so. But I earn 35 cents per copy, and at 1,690 books so far this month, I will laugh all the way to the bank.

This has been a win-win for everybody but the big traditional publishing houses. Independent authors win, because now anybody can bring out a book. Readers win, because they have millions of new reading choices, and most of them are offered at very low prices.

While the big publishing houses still charge big bucks for e-books (Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs is $14.99), independent authors and self-publishers are offering some wonderful books for $9.99, $5.99, $3.99, and yes, even 99 cents!

However, the very thing that makes e-publishing so attractive is the same thing that may be its downfall. As I wrote above, anybody can now bring out an e-book, and a lot of them are producing some excellent work. But there are a lot of unprofessional wannabe authors who have not taken the time to research the industry or their craft, and are turning out absolute crap.

While there are some excellent books available for just 99 cents, there are also many that are not worth the time or effort to download and even try to read. I’m talking about so called “books” that are filled with spelling and punctuation errors, are written by people who have no idea how to tell a story, and are too lazy to learn the basics of e-book formatting. 

I read a number of publishing forums and blogs, including Absolute Write Water Cooler, and Amazon’s own Voice of the Author/Publisher forum. One thing I have seen a lot of lately, especially on the Amazon forum, is authors offering to trade book reviews with other authors. One would hope that these reviews would be straightforward and honest, but I think it will result in a lot of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” 

To me, this is akin to paying for book reviews, another practice I see too much of. It’s false marketing and unprofessional and it serves neither the author or the reading public well.

It’s one thing to ask your readers to leave an honest book review, based upon their opinion of your book. It’s something else entirely to “salt the mine” wirth reviews to convince potential buyers that a book is good, when it may or may not be.

I have had quite a few requests to exchange reviews lately, and my response is that I’m too busy writing my next book to waste time with such underhanded nonsense. 

During that time, I self-published four or five non-fiction RV and travel books, and co-authored a book on self-publishing titled The Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit! with Christi Pinhero. From time to time my wife would urge me to format the mystery manuscript and publish it, but I just wasn’t ready.

Finally, after I began to see how well the self-publishing book was doing in e-book format, I figured I’d give it a try. But I was still pretty nervous about the whole fiction thing, so first I offered to send a PDF copy of Big Lake to my RV blog readers, asking only that they give me their honest feedback on it.

To say I was blown away by their response would be an understatement. The overwhelming message was “Go for it. It’s good!” So I did, uploading the book to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore on May 22nd. Within the next couple of days, I also uploaded four of my RV and travel books to the Kindle store. It’s been a wild ride since then!

Every month the e-book sales have increased, to the point where the e-book version of my RV books are outselling my printed books by huge numbers. But it’s the mystery that has really amazed me. 

In July, I sold 103 copies, in August the number climbed to 125, September was 247, October 545, and so far this month, I have sold 423 copies!

At the same time, my sales stats on Amazon have skyrocketed. As of right now, Big Lake is rated at #805 in all paid Kindle e-book sales, and #93 in the Mystery and Thrillers category. Wow! Those numbers constantly fluctuate up and down as sales ebb and flow, but I never thought the book would break the Top 100 in its category. I still can’t believe it.

I am hard at work on a sequel to Big Lake, and I hope to have it out by the end of the year. And now that I have finally taken the plunge, the creative juices are flowing and I have a half dozen or more books taking shape in the back of my mind.

Now, I keep asking myself, “Why did you wait so long?” Part of it was my fear of failure. And, the technology wasn’t ready for e-books back then. In the last couple of years, the market has exploded; between dedicated e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook, and the ability to read e-books on smart phones, iPads, and computer screens, it seems like everybody is reading something.

But, none of this would have happened if I hadn’t finally screwed up my courage and taken that first step. So what about you? What about that manuscript sitting on your computer’s hard drive, or in your bottom desk drawer? Maybe it’s time to dust it off and give it life. What do you have to lose?

The September sales report is in, and I sold a total of 711 e-books, earning a commission of $422.50. I also earned another $15.43 on my e-books from Smashwords.

Obviously, I am very pleased, and I expect those number to increase as time goes on and I add more books to my inventory.

I also appreciate all of you who have bought my e-books, and helped spread the word to your friends and relatives. It really helps a lot.

When you consider the low price my e-books are selling for, I think that’s pretty impressive. Nearly half of the royalties from Amazon were for my mystery, Big Lake, which sold 545 copies (up from 247 in October). I have purposely kept the price for that e-book at just 99 cents, which earns me 35 cents on each sale. When the sequel to Big Lake comes out, it will have a higher price, probably $2.99, which will earn a commission of $2.09 per sale.

Of course, now that I have reached my goal of $300 a month from e-book sales, it is time to set a new goal, which is a total of 1,000 e-book sales per month. And to get my Big Lake sequel finished and uploaded to Amazon.

After that, I have several other book projects in the works that I want to get finished. I need another ten or fifteen hours in a day!

For our purposes, the press is defined as printed or electronic media – newspapers, magazines, television and radio news shows and broadcasts, blogs, etc. 

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

What people do not understand is that while every citizen has this freedom, it is not universally accessible.

This comes up regularly in the newspaper business when an editor or publisher does not print somebody’s letter to the editor. They say we are treading on their freedom of the press. Sometimes they threaten to sue the publication.

Actually, you don’t have freedom of the press. I have freedom of the press, because I have my own press (newspaper). Start your own newspaper, and you too can have freedom of the press. But, because it’s my publication, I can write and publish what I want, or not publish what I don’t want.

The Supreme Court decided that matter years ago, when it stated that freedom, but not responsibility, is mandated by the First Amendment and ruled that the government may not force newspapers to publish that which they do not desire to publish.

As with any of our freedoms, freedom of the press comes with certain restrictions, essentially those against libel. I can write that a product is a piece of crap and does not meet my standards, or that a political candidate is a complete dunce, and the First Amendment guarantees my right to do so. Each of us is allowed to express our opinion, as long as we do not do so maliciously, to cause harm.

However, I cannot say that a product is dangerous or that a person is a serial killer unless I can prove that.

The defense against libel is truth. I can’t count the number of times somebody threatened to sue me after their name appeared in the newspaper’s Police Log following an arrest for DUI or some other crime. As any small town newspaper publisher will tell you, if you don’t want it in the newspaper, don’t do it.

The flip side of that coin is that the editor or publisher also has an ethical responsibility to exercise fairness in reporting. More than once, a friend or advertiser found their names in the paper, right along with the rest of the folks who got busted for doing something dumb. It can be a bit uncomfortable to meet up with that person at a backyard barbecue or neighborhood party, or to go into their business to try to sell an advertisement after that happens, but it all comes with the job. 

So the next time you disagree with something that a newspaper columnist writes, remember that he is merely expressing his opinion, which he has a right to do. And the newspaper has no obligation to print your letter disagreeing with the column. But get yourself your own newspaper (or, in this electronic age, blog), and you too can have freedom of the press! 

Big newspapers lost their identity to corporate publishing years ago, and are a victim of the very corporate greed and tunnel vision that true journalists have long abhorred. Whenever decisions are made from a boardroom hundreds of miles away from the newsroom, and the bottom line becomes more important than the news business, both inevitably suffer. We have seen big city daily newspapers closing for years, and the trend will continue.

However, while the giants of the industry are disappearing, the small town weekly newspaper is alive and well, and thriving.

I cut my journalistic teeth in a small town paper, and for over 25 years I was involved in the community newspaper business. Even today, no medium can deliver the local news as effectively as the small town newspaper, and none is more trusted and loved by the folks who live and work on Main Street.

And even today, anybody who is willing to work hard, has the guts to deliver the news in an unbiased manner, and who is not afraid to step on the occasional toe, can have a good future in the small town newspaper business, if they are willing to go for it.

Only in a small town paper will you read about young Billy’s Little League homerun hit, or that Miss Emma’s blueberry pie won the blue ribbon at the county fair. Small town newspapers record the everyday incidents in the lives of the people who live there, and unlike the big city publications, every citizen in a small town is the news.

There is a saying in the business, that in a large metropolitan area, the average man gets his name in the paper three times; when he’s born, when he gets married, and when he dies. In a small town, that same gentleman’s name will appear over and over; when he makes the honor roll in grade school, when he catches a whopper fish at the city pond, when he earns a merit badge in Boy Scouts, when  he graduates from high school, when he goes into the military and when he comes back home, when he gets married, when he becomes a father, when he retires, and on and on. The everyday life of the average man, and that of his family, friends, and neighbors, is the fodder that fills the pages of small town newspapers from Blackstone, Virginia, to Lapeer, Michigan, to Coos Bay, Oregon.

The same technology that has led to the demise of many big city newspapers has actually made it easier to get into the community newspaper business. When I started my first newspaper in Aberdeen, Washington decades ago, the equipment needed was huge, heavy, and expensive. These days anybody with a laptop computer and a laser printer can become a newspaper publisher.

I just finished reading an excellent book that looks at contemporary small town newspapers, called Emus Loose in Egner, by Judy Miller. Available from Amazon.com in both printed and e-book format, the book looks at a variety of small town papers, and the people who produce them. It’s a good read for anyone who is interested in the publishing business.

I love community newspapers, and I pick them up in small towns across America as we travel. The good ones, where you will find interesting letters to the editor on the Opinion page, and often hilarious entries in the Police Log,  can offer a lot of interesting reading, and even the mediocre ones are worth the time, because they give you a feel for the place that you will never get from the Chamber of Commerce brochures. 

If I ever get tired of publishing a traveling newspaper, and decide to settle down someplace and get a real job, I know that there are hundreds of small towns in the 10,000 population range across America, where I could start a weekly paper in two week’s time, and earn a comfortable living, chronicling the lives of my adopted community.     

I also believe that goals have to be specific. It’s easy to say that I want to get rich, or I want to lose weight, or I want to write a best selling book. But you’ll never get there that way. You have to set a specific, somewhat reasonable goal, and then you have to lay out a course of action to make that goal a reality.

It is your roadmap to success, however you define success. 

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted a motorcycle. I had owned a motorcycle since I was a teenager, and had gotten away from riding for over ten years, and I missed it.

So I decided what kind of motorcycle I wanted, a Yamaha V-Star 1100. Not only that, but a silver gray V-Star, with saddlebags, windshield, crash bars, and all of the accessories. At the time, our budget did not have enough leeway to afford such a purchase, but I’ve never let a little thing like that get in my way. I also told my wife that within a year, I would own my motorcycle.

I decided that the best way to earn the extra money was to increase the number of seminars I taught at RV rallies and at the Life on Wheels RV conferences. At the time, I was doing six different seminars at Life on Wheels, and I determined that if I developed two more seminars, the extra income would provide the money I needed to afford the motorcycle. So I did just that, pitched the new seminars to the seminar coordinator, and nine months later I had earned enough to buy the motorcycle.

You see, I didn’t just say “Oh, I want a bike. Yep, that’s my goal!” Instead I decided exactly what bike I wanted, even down to the color and accessories, I figured out how much the bike would cost, I created a plan to earn the extra money, and then I put that plan into action. After that, it was easy to just follow that roadmap to my goal.

It is important to realize that goals are not always set in stone, and that they can change over time. 

As it turns out, after ten years of not riding, I discovered that owning a large motorcycle at this stage in my life was not a good fit, so after a couple of years, I sold the V-Star. But the point of this story this that I set a goal and achieved it.

I have always approached publishing the same way. When I create a new product, I decide in advance who the audience for that product is, and what I expect that product to earn. Often, I have a specific goal for that product.

A few years ago, when I added Google AdSense ads to my original blog and website, I had a goal of earning $300 a month from the AdSense program within one year. I developed several new blogs and websites, and I hit my $300 a month goal exactly one year later. Of course then I raised the goal to $500, and then $750 and…. you get the idea.

When I uploaded my first e-books to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, I had a goal of earning $300 a month from e-books within six months. That would cover the payment on our Ford Explorer.

I uploaded my mystery, Big Lake, on May 22, and in the next few days I added four other non-fiction titles. Ten days later I had sold 190 e-books. My royalties for those books were $107.53.  For June, my royalties were $167.45, and for July they were $251.11. Anyone want to bet I won’t reach my goal?

You can apply the same process to your writing and publishing efforts. Don’t just decide that you want to write a best seller. Decide what kind of book you are going to write, how many pages that book will be, when you want to publish it, and what you have to do to accomplish that goal. Maybe you need to write 2,000 words a day, or finish a chapter a week. Break it down into manageable bites, then start pounding the keyboard. You may be amazed at the results!

Check Out Nick’s E-books In Our E-Book Store