A Colossal Failure?

All the data indicates my first published book was a failure. Total sales and overall marketing traction were... underwhelming.

But here's the thing.

This book was a complete do-it-yourself project. The writing, editing, cover design, publishing and marketing. I was a newbie indie author and had no clue what I was doing. The production process demanded new skills beyond just writing... and I found myself watching endless Canva video tutorials and learning newly minted graphic design skills in the process. There were also quite a number of YouTube videos on how to format and upload my novel on Amazon KDP open on my browser.

After publishing, I realized that this genre demands a certain type of cover (nude men or cartoon drawings of men) for people to pay attention to it. I'm not sure that's the type of cover I want for any of my books, but maybe if I find a graphic artist that makes it tasteful, I'll consider it.

Anyways, the process took much more time than I thought it would. I poured myself into every step of it. And when the first Goodreads review came in, it hurt.

But after breaking it down, I realized a few things. Let's examine the first part of the review:

This wasn't bad, though could have done with another proofread (punctuation and capitalisation in particular).

There were parts in the book that I deliberately did not capitalize. The titles of each chapter and the informal texts between kids for instance. That said, I definitely plan to look it over again. You never know - maybe I missed a comma or question mark somewhere. The next part made me smile:

Might appeal if you like K-dramas, but it was a bit too mountains-out-of-molehills and melodramatic for me.

I know this wasn't meant to be a compliment but... That's Awesome!! I love K-dramas 😄 Who doesn't? Now I know how to market the book. I meant for this to be a light, fun read and nothing serious. The diction and narrative was deliberately simple as the main goal was to make it easy to read. I know my later novels that I plan to publish are a bit more advanced - not necessarily better - but I feel in terms of thematic and character development, they are a lot heftier.

I realized that there are readers of this genre looking for certain things that are not in my book. This book was a romantic comedy and not a dark romance filled with kinks, or a romantasy which is quite popular right now. So, if this was all about money for me, I would need to write to the trends. However, I am a bit stubborn and I want to write what I want to write, so maybe what I need to do is direct my marketing to finding the people that want to read what I write.

My first book release may be a colossal failure, but for me it was the best learning experience. I'm looking forward to learning from my mistakes and publishing my next one.

Failure is the opportunity to begin again, only more intelligently. - Henry Ford

Never give up on what you love to do.

❤️JJ