My experience of self-publishing - One year on

For those of you that are thinking of self-publishing your own books, I thought that this update on my first year of self-publishing my poetry books may be helpful. 

In the Summer of 2021, I completed my first book of landscape paintings and poetry "Colliding Contrasts". At that time I decided to have it printed myself by Inky Little Fingers and to sell it on my own website, at craft fairs and in local gift shops. I didn't choose Amazon KDP at that time as I was unsure of the colour print quality and wanted my artwork colours to display correctly. Since then, my book has sold consistently well, with local galleries selling it on an almost daily basis. 

Late this Summer I published "Distraction in the minutiae" which is in black and white. As this was a short chapbook with no colour, I decided to give Amazon KDP a go. It was a very easy process to upload your book on the KDP site. I also opted to use KDP's cover creator, which was easy to use but has limited design flexibility. After a few initial sales to my social media followers in August, my sales tapered down in September. However, in October sales really picked up, especially in the US. Interestingly, sales picked up after I changed the cover's colours to something brighter.

My second print run of Colliding Contrasts is almost sold out, so I have been trying to decide if I should have a third print run and risk being stuck with stock. This is why I have now decided to make it available on Amazon. I uploaded it last week and ordered an Artist's proof copy. I needn't have worried about the colour quality, the print is just as good as the previous version. The only difference is that it is matt instead of glossy. 

When uploading my book, I needed to redo my cover for KDP. This time I chose to use Canva Pro, which I think gave much better results.

Cover file created on Canva and saved as PDF

Now live, I have begun to advertise on Amazon and social media. I will let you know how it goes with an update in a few months' time.

 

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