Publishing Gone Wrong
So, I got self-published through Amazon last Sunday! Which is super amazing, except that its sounds a lot more simpler than it actually is.
Everything has been providential so far. My editor is a really good friend of mine and is willing to edit my book, which has been a huge blessing. Now that I have published my first few chapters (that you can find here), I am now committed to editing and submitting chapters every single week. It didn’t hit me until after I had published, how much of a commitment this is. As a student, I am going to be very busy with thesis-ing and the classes that I’m taking. Not to mention, every other extracurricular activity that I am doing on the side. The pressure of marketing has also been a big responsibility and stressor, as well.
Marketing is NOT my favorite thing in the world. It makes me excited to the see the finished product of a video, but it is SO easy to be let down by the low number of views/likes. I struggled so much with this because I was doing fine up until one week before publishing. I was actually super excited because I thought I would be able to promote it more. But then, one week before publishing the views plummeted drastically. I was getting very low interactions and did not get the hype that I expected. So, when it was finally time for publishing, I was very upset because the results were not what I expected.
On top of that, I changed the title of my book because of the advice of a mentor of mine. It took a bit of guts because it was not what I had wanted to do. It also threw me for a loop, and now I had to re-explain and correct it on my social media.
It’s also difficult to explain what Kindle Vella is. You can’t just purchase my book in one go, although that’s the plan in the future. It is a serial-chapter-kind-of-thing. You log onto Kindle Vella (using your Amazon account), search the title/author and read the book chapter by chapter. The new chapters come out every week. Only the first three chapters are free. The rest need to be “bought” using “Tokens” which are bought with real money. Don’t worry, it’s not a lot of money to purchase a lot of “Tokens”. You can buy around 1,100 Tokens for $10 and up until now, each of my chapters are about 15 tokens worth.
So, there you have it. Everything that goes into the mechanics of writing a new novel on Kindle Vella. All of this to say, that it is a lot of hard work, but I am willing and excited to do it. At the end of the day, I want to give my audience a book that they’ll enjoy :) If you haven’t looked at it, please give it a chance! If you want to further support me, then consider sharing the link to anyone you may know!
Thank you!