Lost Talent – Three Weeks out!
Lost Talent was released weeks ago today, on 3rd April, so I thought that it was time to take stock on how it’s done so far!
The Launch, such as it was…
So, despite my best efforts, I did not manage to get on any panels at Eastercon, which was a shame. I think that was probably down to me not pushing myself forwards on the panel selection site enough, I could have selected more panels, offered to moderate more and ranked my panel preferences higher, so lesson learned there.
The promo materials that I scattered around eastercon did seem to provoke interest though! I printed 100 bookmarks prior to the con, left 25 at the British Fantasy Society Table, and scattered a spray of them around other places where flyers were collecting. I returned to those spots as the con progressed, it seemed like quite a few were taken, which was super encouraging. I left the ones on the BFS table, but cleared up the others before I left on Monday morning, I feel like more indie authors should probably do, rather than leaving them for con/hotel staff to bin after the cons. It saves us money and it’s probably a real pain for them!
All in all, I ended up taking about 35 home. That’s a pretty good result!
What was even better is that on the first day, I actually got recognised by a stranger and asked if my book was out! They recognised me from the World fantasy panel on Asexuality in Fantasy I was on in Autumn last year. That was super flattering and made me feel like a real author! It was the lovely C.M. Kuhtz who writes Queer fantasy series, and they had a dealer table at the con. Their work can be found here: https://www.wollschweberpublishing.com/ and it looks super interesting. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but we swapped bookmarks, and it’s sitting on my computer so I don’t forget it. Now I’ve blogged about it, I'll remember even if one of my cats snatches it!
From that point, I had low but steady sales over the next few days. Overall, I’ve sold just shy of twenty copies, and had around 500 pages read on KDP. For a no name author with very little advertising and a tiny social media presence, I think I've done OK!
What’s more important is the feedback I’ve been getting: I’m currently on 4.0 with 12 ratings on goodreads, with twelve ratings and ten reviews. I'm so pleased! I think most of those ratings are from Netgalley ARCs, so I think that the ARC distribution from the Victory Editing Co-Op was worthwhile. You can find them here: https://victoryediting.com/services/netgalley-co-op/ the price for Arc distribution was very reasonable, and everything was set up really smoothly. I’d recommend them if any-one is looking for a similar service.
What’s Next?
Well, that is the big question. Marketing the book now will be mostly done online, and I’m on the lookout for more opportunities to do that. Amazon’s own advertising options seem to be a little complex, so I need to do a little research before committing to any of those. It does seem like advertising and marketing are the kinds of things that you could probably spend as much money as you wanted to on, and it wouldn’t be clear what worked and what didn’t, so I want to go slowly and not lose my head.
In the meantime, Book two is out with beta readers, and I could probably do with finding a couple more at some point.
I struggled with making progress on Book three this year, and I think that was mostly down to worry about my launch, but now that Lost Talent is out there, I’ve managed to make some progress. I’ve still got some wonkiness in the plot that needs to get ironed out, but I’m in a better place than I was a couple of weeks ago! I think I am about halfway done with the First Draft!
I am aware that there were some grammatical errors that didn’t get caught in my proofreading, so I do intend to give Lost Talent another pass, and then update the file on Amazon, but I haven’t quite had the wherewithal to do that just yet.
If you are reading this, and you have read and enjoyed Lost Talent, well, I really want to say a big THANK YOU for taking a chance on a new and very inexperienced author! For all that I have talked about numbers and marketing and all that boring stuff, I am really not concerned if I sell two more books or a thousand. The experience of being an author has been what is important to me, and the small parts of that I’ve experienced have been really rewarding.
