As the title suggests, I’m struggling with two difficult decisions.
First: All of my books and stories are currently enrolled in Kindle Select, which is to say they’re exclusive to Amazon. The upside to this are the promotional tools available and, more importantly, the option to enroll in Kindle Unlimited. I recently took a look at my account, and saw that almost half of my income from my ebooks – such as it is – is from pages read on Kindle Unlimited. The downside is that they’re exclusive to Amazon. Amazon is 75-85% of the ebook market, but still, I personally know people who don’t have access to Kindle for one reason or another. So my choice was between maximizing the use I got out of the single largest market for ebooks, or trying to have as broad a base as possible by publishing in as many venues as possible. Until recently, that choice was actually pretty easy, since the one site I knew of that allowed me to publish to multiple platforms in a semi-efficient manner, Smashwords, is a serious pain in the neck. Formatting a document to publish there involves working through a 100+-page style instruction manual, or hiring someone to do it for you. But now a friend has introduced me to Draft2Digital, which publishes in multiple platforms and formats (including Kindle), but allows you to simply upload a Word document and then handles the formatting for you. That made the decision harder. Now that one is as easily accomplished as the other, do I go for the broadest possible base, or most effective use of the platform that “only” covers 75-85% of the market?
Second: I am currently working on an urban fantasy novel called City of Dreams, which is set in the same setting as Dreams of the Boardwalk. City of Dreams is going to be a full-length novel, not a novella like Boardwalk, and I’m already about 200 pages in. Would it be foolish of me to start posting excerpts and chapters on this site? How about the entire first draft, chapter by chapter and excerpt be excerpt? On the one hand, it’s publicity and proofreading all in one, and I always work better and faster when I know there are people waiting to read my work. On the other, am I losing potential buyers of the finished product if I let them read even the first draft?
On a related note, I have the beginnings of a slasher novel that could go up chapter-by-chapter in the grindhouse. Anyone interested in seeing that?
And the third isn’t a decision so much as something I’m just worried about. I’ve recently come into a bit of money, and I’ve decided to use it to promote my writing. The thing is, I’m not sure what the most effective use of that money would be. I would very much like to turn my writing into a side-hustle worthy of the name (a career is too much to hope for), and the worst thing that could happen is to spend all that money and find myself no better off than I was before…unless it’s for the money to slowly dribble away on bills and little things and accomplish nothing at all.
Advice on any of the above would be welcome.