I wrote River of Tears in 2006. I can wallpaper three of the larges rooms in my house with rejection notices. I continued to write while being rejected. My next book Theft of Innocence was also rejected, rejected, rejected. What did I do, I continued to write. Now by this time, I was at three books all getting rejection notices. Someone turned me on to Smashwords to get my books out as E-books. I did that but sales slacked.
My sister told me about Create Space a long time ago but told me that it was complicated; so I avoided it. Big mistake! A friend and member of my writer's group, Jason Gansen and I got together and figured out how to use it at the cost of $0.00. That is a budget I can live with real easily. The first book took some time to learn how they do things. They have articles of every aspect you can think of; from what type of font to use to book art. They have templates to use that can be modified to the your selected font. There is a free form template and a formatted template. As I am writing Pagan Mirth, I am using the formatted template. All I have to do is type the chapter name and then copy and paste the chapter body. I am real creative on chapter names: Prologue, Chapter 01, Chapter 02 ... Epilogue, etc. Use Doc, Docx avoid using a PDF format.
Make sure to have trusted friends and associates edit for content, spelling, grammar, general flow, etc. Make modifications they suggest; because you are too close in to see the mistakes. Then Create Space has a simple upload tool to Amazon.com. They will upload it to Kindle as well as paperback. When beginning I suggest using Amazon Select and they will push your work to the top. Then you need to figure out a marketing campaign. that is where the real work of being an author comes in. Nobody else is going to market your book and no one is going to do it better than you. Make sure when you price your book to price it so you get at least $1.00 royalty from each sale. Google Plus and Amazon Select let you run coupon sales to promote your book, too.
Jason and I have been meeting over coffee and mapping out a strategy for selling our books. So far it is working. First off you need to buy copies of your book from Create Space. They sell them to you at cost. The highest price I have paid is $4.47 per book. Make sure you distribute some to people you know and ask them to pass it on to friends and most importantly ask them to review it at Amazon with 5 stars and encourage them to pass that along with the book. So far I have spent to date $57.
You may ask how is that relating to sales. When I began the process at Create Space around January 20, 2013 my rank at Amazon.com for my genre was 632,588 roughly. Since I published my paperbacks and started to promote my book buy using Google Plus, word of mouth, linking my individual book pages out to Facebook both friends and public and to twitter, and I am still working on more sources right now. My best daily ranking since I started promoting was January 27 when I ranked 47,852. That is quite a jump in less than twenty days and so far all I have spent is $57.
Remember this is your business. Treat it like you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
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