Last week I lost my job to a tech company merger. I’m sixty years old and I could retire now, so working a regular job is not something I have to do to get by. Instead, I’m using the next couple of years to really lean into my writing career that has been largely on hold since I started writing over a decade ago. Sure, I’ve been steadily writing books over the years and randomly publishing them with zero promotions and very little fanfare in general. But I never had the time to promote them correctly.
Now, I have that time. So I’m picking up the pieces and reorganizing myself and my product back list. It’s a bit tedious, but I have to do it so that I can build a process for future publications and try to grow sales over the next few years. It would be nice to have some income in retirement from all the books I’ve written.
The first part of the reorg is ensuring that all my ebooks are published first on KDP and then everywhere else possible on Draft2Digital. Then I’ll go through and make sure you can order paperbacks at least on Amazon. After that, I’ll be deciding which books would sell if they were published by IngramSpark and made available to bookstores. Most likely, I’ll be making the Mystery series available from IngramSpark and waiting to see if there is a market for the Sci-Fi books.
The next stage will be to step up my social media promotions and start experimenting with advertising on various platforms. I’ll probably start with Amazon and then branch off to Facebook. I’m so out of touch with what is good business sense for self publishing these days it will take me a while to figure out the markets. Once I figure that all out, you’ll start seeing ads for my novels and we’ll see if I can get on different podcasts and talk them up.
The other front I use in social media is YouTube. I started a channel this summer, but have not been able to produce many new videos lately. I’ll be doing more posts there and trying to build an audience there.
It’s going to feel like a full time job, at least until I start generating some income. In addition to all of that business work, I still have to write more books.
Stick around to find out if I can generate some income from this writing gig.