If there is one thing I’ve learned about being a self-published author, it’s that it takes a lot to be successful in the industry. Thousands of books are published each day, and standing out among the crowd is no easy feat, especially with only one book to sell.

My dreams of making a career as an author seem like just that, dreams. A vague aspiration that seems impossible to overcome. My journey so far has been fraught with days where I think I’m the next J.K Rowling and days where I think no one wants to read whatever crap I wrote down on a piece of paper and called a novel.

I have a lot of self-doubt, but I love to write. If editing wasn't so expensive I’d spend more time writing and less time trying to edit my own manuscript, but alas, a quality editor costs several thousand dollars, which a self-published author will most likely never make back.

The various statistics I have found show that most self-published authors sell from 100-250 books all together. Now, I’ve exceeded 150 because of a five day free ebook promotion campaign where I got 125 downloads, not including my own because I was curious what it looked like on Kindle.

I’m hoping to get between ten to twenty good reviews out of those 125 downloads, but since I can only market to spam Facebook groups it is likely that my book was downloaded by ebook marketers who will never read it and will sing my praises about how good of a writer I am anyways, or someone who might read a few pages, but then get distracted by something else, or just don’t find the story compelling. There is also the fact that mostly other self-publishing authors frequent these Facebook groups, so they spend most of their free time focusing on their own book, or are just keeping it on their kindle app in case they want to do a review swap.

Hey, I’m not judging because I’m guilty of that too. I have about five books that I’ve downloaded from kindle unlimited that I haven’t touched yet. Will I get to them? Maybe. Would I be willing to do a review swap? Also maybe. I know that Amazon can crack down on reviews, especially if they think they are biased because they are from friends, family, known associates, etc. From what I heard, you can stop getting reviews if your book's sales to review ratio is too high.

If only that was the only challenge. Paid promotions is another thing that I am paranoid about because authors are being cracked down on for promotions that are paid for not making it explicitly clear that they are paid for. Apparently, according to some sun-section of some law somewhere, any paid promotion has to be marketed as such. For instance, if I wanted to use Fiverr to pay someone to blog about my book, the blogger is supposed to mention that they were paid for this service.

Now, they, whoever they are, are mainly cracking down on big fish, so a guppie like me should have anything to worry about unless I become one of those big fish (But that’s kind of the idea, which is why I don’t do paid promos through Fiverr, upwork, or other freelance services anymore). I’m trying to do my own marketing which has been pretty much fruitless so far.

In an over saturated market creating awareness about your self-published book without relying on these paid promotions seems virtually impossible (But I will continue to play by the rules and suffer for it. So be it.). That being said, some of these promotions might be “legal” . I just don’t know which ones, so I will continue to suffer quietly.

I do enjoy self-promotion though, but trying to play by the rules and be ethical is impossible.

For instance, I was told about an AI tool and thought I could use it to create character designs, and interesting backgrounds I can use for A+ content and for social media advertising. Now, i did try to use it at first, but after someone pointed out the AI uses other artists work in its algorithms i decided to remove all of those post (an entire hour of removing Facebook posts from a couple dozen groups sucks, but I'm trying to be ethical). I could save hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousands of dollars to get the character art I want, but I'm not using it at all instead. While AI might be taking or using the works of other artists, in my case it isn't stealing a potential customer from artists because I don’t have that much money to spare on what most would just call a passion project. (If I could throw around hundreds of dollars every month on these projects I wouldn’t be pursuing a career).

And don’t even get me started on the scammers. Most likely there are plenty of artists on the freelance platforms who are using AI anyways and making a killing off of it. I will continue to use an actual artist for my covers though because she comes up with really good ones that I love, i'm not very artistic, and I have no idea how to create or reformat any of this stuff so it fits the different platforms I use for self-publishing, nor do I want to learn how to use them. Plus, that’s just more work for me, and the price and subscription fees for the programs needed for cover design might end up costing more than paying someone to do the cover for me.

Of course, there are some positive things that have come out of this journey. Since I self-edit everything, I’ve become a much better writer and storyteller, and have even been complimented on my edit at times by people who have read my works, albeit they were friends and family so interpret that however you like.

I’ve also learned a lot about making interesting content for social media and enjoy both the process and the result. It is because of my desire to self-promote that I decided to create a podcast where I talk about all things fantasy, scif-fi, horror and mystery. (I’m hoping to add indie author spotlights to that once I get the podcast going- Speculative Fraction is the name of the podcast, and I’m trying to release episodes on a bi-weekly basis, and get ahead on recordings for when the school year starts and I have to work again).

And finally, self-editing has inspired some of my favorite scenes in my upcoming novel Paranormal Frontier: Burning West. This is the sequel to my first novel Paranormal Frontier: Wild West which you can find on Amazon. The first book is a good story with a good concept, solid writing, solid editing, solid characters, and an interesting ending. The second book is… Well, as my harshest critic who is kind of insecure about my own work- my second novel is awesome. A lot of soul went into writing it, from character backstory, dialogue, sequence of events, the twists and turns that make up every chapter, to the slew of sequels these characters are currently inspiring as I write this.

Writing this book was a lot of fun and characters I hated at first turned into characters I now really love and hope readers will love as well.

Take care,

MJ Maddox
Visually Impaired Author