Hello everyone! It’s been exactly one month since I published my children’s Christmas chapter / middle grade book. At this moment I am utilizing KDP, Kindle unlimited, and IngramSpark. I’ll break things down by the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

I set the paperback up for preorder through IngramSpark and the kindle version through Amazon. The Friday before my official release, I woke to a 56 unit order on my IngramSpark account! 56 units fit in one book, so I guess some retailer decided to place a whole order? Pretty cool but also nerve wracking (I don’t want to have returns!) I have also accumulated another 3 orders on IngramSpark for a total of 59 orders this first month.

Now on Amazon I have 139 completed sales with (I think) roughly 10 more waiting to complete. Two of those sales were Kindle versions, the rest all paperbacks. I know about 10 of those sales came from family and friends, the rest are random people out in the world. Pretty cool!

I also set up two different ARC campaigns and got 8 reviews posted across Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, and Bookbub. Not too shabby!

The Bad

I have become obsessed with checking sales. It’s an all day thing for me constantly refreshing and refreshing and refreshing. I have definitely lost a lot of sleep over this release.

I also just noticed a minor error in my manuscript. Somehow through my two re-reads, multiple friends and an editor read, a closing quotation mark was missed. I have fixed and uploaded my files and the new version is live now, thankfully.

I placed 5 copies in those Little Free Libraries in town and know it’s been borrowed in at least two of them since!

I have learned that social media is hard when I’m trying to self-promote myself. I have barely no twitter followers, 20 or so Instagram followers, and zero Facebook followers. (More on that later)

The Ugly

I have spent a small fortune on advertising. I am way way too deep in the whole on advertising costs and gross profit from sales. Nearly all of my sales can be directly attributed to Amazon ads / Facebook ads. I am not proud of this but the one silver lining I can see is my book is now out there in the wild.

I decided to publish under a pen name and I deeply regret that decision. I should have used my real name so I could have done more self promotion on my personal social media accounts where I have a much larger and personal audience. I have nothing to be ashamed of or to hide, so there was no good reason to use a pen name. I guess I could always out myself but I still have to live with this pen name choice of mine.

I think that covers all the basics so far. If you have any questions, just ask and I’ll do my best to respond!