With so many authors out there tirelessly promoting and doing what they can to sell their books me included I have come to realize that you really have to play the long game. Success does not happen overnight that’s for sure. And one core thing you need daily is positivity! Yes, I know how hard this can be when sales are slow. But you need to be positive stop thinking negatively and remember why you started writing in the first place.

I am a true believer you need to speculate to accumulate, seek out the ads worth pouring your hard earned cash into and the sites that will most likely give you a decent return. Obviously you can never guarantee a return, but you can be intelligent about these things and do your research. Right now whatever you think, Amazon does hold the lions share of the market, so use it to your best advantage. Don’t cut your nose to spite your face! As tempting as it is at times.

Keep writing and getting those books out. It’s a proven fact that the more books you have out there the more overall success you will receive. Take the good with the bad, all businesses have good quarterly sales and then bad ones too. Not every month will be a great sales month.

It’s very easy to get caught up with the whole social media thing and you suddenly find that you’re spending all your time networking, tweeting, sharing and promoting. This side of things can really get on top of you if you don’t bring it under control. Set a certain amount of time aside per day for this and have a cut off point. Otherwise you will burn the candle at both ends and find yourself not able to cope with all the requests and demands that can be placed on you. So keep it all manageable.

Everyone has different ideas on what works and what doesn’t. Take KDP for instance, depending on which author you speak to will very much depend on the answer right now. It works great for some and not so great for others. Me personally, well, I have been with KDP since last April. To be honest for the most part this has worked for me and I have received a steady income ever since, even though I do have mixed feelings of my own where KDP is concerned.

This month has been my best month ever with KDP. I have upwards of 1,400 sales mostly from the US with 600 of those coming from borrows. Bearing in mind we get more per borrow than we do per sale. This great month was following a two day promotion at the end of December when I used my two free days. So KDP worked for me how it was always intended to work for authors. During December I had 700 sales 200 of those were borrows. So KDP does work sometimes! So over twelve months after KDP was launched and with all the negative press surrounding it recently, it still can work. Although this was not down to just KDP. This  was also down to a military like operation between a group of author friends. We all put our books up for free together, and registered with around 30 to 40 free sites to advertise our FREE book for those days. Which we all tirelessly promoted like crazy for the duration of our promo. It’s totally exhausting to say the least but the payoff was really worth it.

Don’t get me wrong it has not always worked out this way for me but for the most part KDP select has worked well and gives me a reasonable income for all three of my books combined. That said, I am at a point where giving thousands of my books away for free can not be sustainable in the long term nor is it great practice for an author. By this I mean, I don’t see how this strategy can benefit an author wanting to make a name for themselves in the long term. KDP requires your exclusivity thus meaning you are publishing exclusively with Amazon and your book can not appear on any other site. So therefore you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. What business do you know that would do that?

So yes I’m torn right now between a rock and a hard place. Do I stay or do I leave KDP? I have witnessed many comments throughout the social media world recently where authors are discouraged by low to virtually no sales since leaving KDP? Why is this I’ve been asking myself? The answer is, I really have no idea! Who can say for sure? One thing I know helps a great deal is keeping your eye on the ball, if you take it off for a while sales plummet. So keeping at all the promotion stuff on a daily basis is important. Just don’t allow yourself to be so consumed by it that it starts to affect you in a negative way.

With my fourth book due out in April/May I will approach my launch and the marketing of this book slightly differently as a test more than anything. Of course I will do it through social media as I normally do, but I will also try a few new approaches which I did’t try with my previous books. At the end of the day luck does play a small part, the right place at the right time, the right day of the week, and much more. But we have to be realistic about what we do too, not every author is going to make it, it’s not possible with so many of us out there. But we can just hope a few of us do and wave the flag for the rest!!

Whatever side of the fence you’re sitting on right now just remember, STAY POSITIVE…