P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

Today, I’m going to share about some new avenues I’ve been exploring with my novel, Dead Letters. Yes, yes, it’s been out over a year now, but it’s the one I’ve written with the widest appeal, making it the perfect guinea pig to experiment on!

 

Advance warning: this post will cover some of the technicalities about self-publishing, so it will be of most interest to people who want to follow my publishing journey – and not so much my writing specifically. You have been warned!

 

The first experiment I’ll talk about is NetGalley, which is a platform for sharing (normally unpublished) novels with booksellers, reviewers and librarians. I was put onto it by a marketing firm recommended by one of the other authors I met on my writing retreat in June. “Professional readers” can download the book for free until the end of August, hopefully ahead of leaving a review or placing an order for the establishment they work for.

 

Dead Letters already has quite a few reviews, although a few more can’t hurt. I’m mainly doing it, though, to test the water for a future book launch. Promotion and reviews through NetGalley can form an important part of a launch strategy.

 

My other experiment is with IngramSpark, and I’ve been putting this one off for a while. All my books so far have been published through Amazon, so can only be ordered through them. Although Amazon offers an ‘Extended distribution’ option, which makes books available to libraries and book shops, in practice it’s unlikely that these establishments will place an order, and they view Amazon as their main competitor.

 

IngramSpark is another self-publishing platform, with the advantage that half the world doesn’t hate them, so they are more likely to get orders from bookshops. The important thing is that you own your book’s ISBN (the unique number identifying it), rather than getting a free one from Amazon. I made sure to do this for my second and third novels, with the intention of publishing also through IngramSpark at some point.

 

Having Dead Letters on NetGalley was my trigger to doing something about this. In the event that a bookseller happens to read and like the book, I didn’t want there to be a barrier to them ordering it. So, I grappled with IngramSpark’s website and finally got it done. It wasn’t as easy to use as Amazon’s, and reformatting my book meant a change to the spine size, which led to yet more faffing with the cover. But I got there …

 

There are various articles out there about the relative merits of Amazon and IngramSpark, plus how to publish with both. If you’re interested in finding out more, I found this YouTube video most helpful https://youtu.be/IbhY2omVsS0?feature=shared

 

One downside of this venture is that I’ve had to raise the cost of the paperback version of Dead Letters. You need to give a percentage discount to bookshops for them to be interested in stocking a book – and for them to have the possibility to make a profit. That’s before we get into the scary options about what they do if the book doesn’t sell. Can they return it or destroy it? The publisher bears the cost …

 

Self-publishing continues to be a learning journey. At some point, I’ll get it all right. Let’s just hope I don’t have to write too many more novels before I get there!

 

I’ll report back on my success (or otherwise) in a future blog post. Until then, I’m off on holiday! Happy summer!