When a new year begins, it is not uncommon for people to make resolutions: they find themselves dissatisfied with some aspect of themselves or their lives, and so they promise themselves that they will make a change or two. It is in January that the fitness centers are filled with people exercising, the Weight Watchers centers are filled with people who want to lose weight, and Christians begin the process of trying to read through the Bible in the next twelve months.

What did I want for this year? I wanted to make some more money from my writing. A purely mercenary resolution.

So I’ve undertaken the process of “indie publishing” where I take stuff I’ve written and haven’t gotten published yet and convert it into a format that works with the Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers. In order to do this, I essentially transform myself from being just a writer, to being a publisher: which means I had to do my own editing, copy editing, proofreading, and cover designs.

And then there’s the little question of how to let people know I’ve got books that they can purchase? There are over a million e-books for sale on Amazon; how do I stand out in such a crowd?

Of course, the situation with Amazon.com is not much different than my books in any bookstore, anywhere. Walk into a Barnes and Noble, or even your local used book store. How is it that you know to find the sort of book that you want to purchase? When I go to purchase physical books, I wander into the sections that contain the sorts of books I enjoy reading, such as the science fiction or history. When I’m searching online for a physical book or an e-book, I do much the same thing. Occasionally, I’ll look for a specific book that I’ve read or heard about in a review or from a friend’s recommendation.

I cannot think of a single book I purchased because I read an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, or because I saw an ad for it on TV.

My best selling traditionally published book thus far is The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, originally published by Reader’s Digest Books in 2008 and reissued in February, 2012 by Chartwell. The book has not been advertised anywhere. The only reviews of it that I’ve seen have been the reviews readers have posted on Amazon.com—and there are only seven of those. And despite the dearth of advertising, for the past six months, according to the data from BookScan (think Nielsen Ratings, but for books) the book has been selling at an average rate of ten copies per day. That does not seem like a lot, of course. In a month, that means only about 300 copies.

But from the publisher’s point of view, that level of sales is actually quite good for an average mid-list book. And if you’re going to do indie publishing, you need to think about book sales from the publisher’s point of view. After all, a publisher is not selling just one book. They’re selling a bunch. So let’s say the publisher is offering one hundred different titles. Ten sales per title per day means a thousand books multiplied by thirty days. If they make five dollars profit on each book, that’s 150,000 dollars per month—and 1.8 million dollars per year. Not a bad business, really. Large publishers like Random House make considerably more than this, of course.

So as an author doing indie publishing, if you want to succeed, you need to be selling more than just one book. So, I’ve made 17 of my books available as eBooks on Amazon. The list price for each is $7.99—the average cost of a trade paperback. I get a 70 percent royalty rate on each book—which works out to $5.59 per book for me, minus the 9 cents that Amazon charges as a “delivery fee.” So, on each book sold, I stand to make $5.50 (much better than the 79 cents I would make from traditional publishing with a ten percent royalty rate.)

In the first two weeks of the experiment, I averaged a sales rate of a little over one book a day; that’s not a lot of money, but it’s money that I otherwise would not be getting. Obviously, if I can get my indie sales on each of the 17 titles to the levels of The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, I’d see substantial income. It hasn’t happened yet, after three months.

So how do I let people know the books are there for the buying? Do I simply hope that people will randomly come upon them? Mostly. Just like the big publishers mostly do. I have this blog (www.nettelhorst.com) and whenever I publish a book I announce it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter. And every so often I remind people.

And, periodically, for a limited time, I give books away for free. Sometimes I lower prices on select books.

So, over Christmas, I gave away the first book in a six book series, The Chronicles of Tableland. Within a day and a half more than a hundred people had “purchased” that free book, pushing it up into the top one hundred books in the category “science fiction—adventure.” This made it stand out to people looking for that sort of book—which then increased its sales all the more. My hope of course is that the readers of that free book will then fork over the cash for the remaining five books in the series. And I’m hoping that they’ll tell their friends about it. And post reviews on Amazon (assuming they actually liked the book; if they hated it, I’d prefer that they keep that to themselves. Heh.)

So, my New Year’s project, at least thus far, seems to be generating some money. More money than the books were generating just taking up space on my computer’s hard drive. It’s certainly not making me rich, however. But maybe I’ll be able to afford a coffee at Starbucks once in awhile.

So what books of mine can you buy now? As I said, I have 15 science fiction eBooks available on Amazon.com for the Kindle. If you don’t own a Kindle, you can still read these books. Amazon offers an app for Windows based computers, and for the Mac. There are also free apps for all tablet computers, whether Android, Windows 8, or iPAD. And there’s an app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows 8 phones.

1. Inheritance
2. Somewhere Obscurely
3. Antediluvian
4. The Wrong Side of Morning
5. John of the Apocalypse
6. Chronicles of Tableland 1: All His Crooked Ways
7. Chronicles of Tableland 2: Twister
8. Chronicles of Tableland 3: Dark Waters
9. Chronicles of Tableland 4: Sail My Darling Lovely
10. Chronicles of Tableland 5: Behind the Wall
11. Chronicles of Tableland 6: Day Come
12. With a Rod of Iron
13. Darkness Warping
14. Clash Point
15. Narrow Gate

Click on any of the book titles above or below. That will take you to Amazon, where you can see a brief description of each book and even read the first few pages for free.

I also have 2 non-fiction eBooks for the Kindle or Kindle apps:

1. The Complaint of Jacob
2. What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology

And then there are my traditionally published books available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Two are hardbacks and two are paperbacks.

1. The Bible’s Most Fascinating People
2. The Bible: A Reader’s Guide
3. A Year with God
4. A Year with Jesus

Thus, a total of 21 books written by me are available to be purchased by anyone so inclined. Let all your friends know.

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