Gone Indie

I’ve been published for 6 years now through various small presses with varying degrees of success but this year when my current publisher decided enough was enough and pulled the plug; AmazonKDP and Kobo platforms were the logical step.

I think there is still a stigma about e-books and self-publishing in general; Kobo and Amazon regarded as last-saloon options, the rung above the vanity press, but what swayed me was the KDP event held in Dublin last year. There, a number of authors spoke of their experience and yes, the message I left with was a huge amount of time and effort are required to get your books exposed.

I have a series of novels about an Allied agent during world war 2, Eva Molenaar and the decision of my publisher to shut up shop couldn’t have come at a worse time; Eva’s fourth adventure is at an advanced draft stage and my focus was getting the piece polished up.

Now I have to park it to either:

  1. Start the whole process of pitching to agents
  2. Start contacting possible publishers with their usual response lead time.

So I bit the bullet.

I drafted and tweeted a quick press release about myself & the publisher going our separate ways (amicably of course), then set about getting the books back up without losing the momentum gained over a holiday social media push.

I’m lucky in two respects; I have three great covers and once the publisher released me from contract and returned my formatted manuscripts, I knew that I had two elements in my favour to self-publish.

Over a period of three hours I uploaded Get Lenin, Zinnman and A finger of night up onto the Kobo and AmazonKDP sites.

All three books are now available as a Kindle on Amazon, the Kobo set-up shouldn’t be too far behind.

Looking at them up again, at least offers me a reassurance and the necessary kick in the behind to start promoting and promoting (and promoting them). But now this time, their success is all down to my work.

Here they are:

Get Lenin

https://www.amazon.com/Lenin-wartime-adventures-Molenaar-Book-ebook/dp/B01N1ZRPKK/ref=sr_1_2_twi_kin_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483802074&sr=8-2&keywords=get+lenin

Zinnman

https://www.amazon.com/Zinnman-wartime-adventures-Molenaar-Book-ebook/dp/B01N9OW26I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483802140&sr=8-1&keywords=Zinnman

A finger of Night

https://www.amazon.com/finger-night-wartime-adventures-Molenaar-ebook/dp/B01NAQB1MR/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1483802197&sr=8-12&keywords=A+finger+of+night

 

Comments

good luck with that. Amazon are the biggest publisher in the world (although they claim not to be) and let's face it, more people read from tablets and phones than books.The problem of publishing with less-well-known epublishers is quality control and the big one, nobody knows you exist. But that problem is the same for all publishers.