Bestselling Author? – The Climb #963

Tuesday 12th October 2021

Nearly 7 years ago, I published a couple of short non-fiction books. The idea was to dip my toe into the world of indie publishing, without pissing off my agent. They were proper books and I did them under a pseudonym.

Then, like now, I wanted to get some experience of different parts of publishing. Whilst I’d very much like to go the route of traditional publishing for my novels, I didn’t think it was a bad idea to know how to, for example, create an ebook if I ever needed to.

I also dipped my toe into indie book marketing, which is a whole thing on it’s own. I experimented with reader magnets (making one of the books free), newsletters and the whole shebang. As I said, the idea wasn’t to build a career as a non-fiction indie author, but to get some practical experience.

So after doing it, I left it be. With one of the books free, I wasn’t getting a lot of money from it. A dollar or two a month if I was lucky.

Anyways, today I logged into KDP for the first time in years. I’m surprised I remembered the password it’s been that long.

And what do I find? That my free little ebook is doing pretty well. So well in fact that it was in the top 100 of two categories.

Now they’re obscure categories, and the book is free, so I’m really treating this with amusement rather than anything approaching seriousness, but I figure this makes me a bestselling author now?

What I am impressed with is how the book has remained relevant after nearly 7 years. I would have expected it to have its little run and then drop off a cliff. I mean, the book has its faults and the contents seem to be like marmite to people but it’s still technically selling.

I’m quite impressed with that and pleased I took the time to do it all those years ago. It shows me several things.

One: Negative reviews don’t bother me. Maybe because I’ve become detached over the years, the fact that someone didn’t like the contents just says to me, “well perhaps it’s not for you because someone else loved it”

Two: That I managed to write something with a long tail. I don’t have enough data to know if that was down to a great cover, good content or excellent meta-data, but I obviously did something right, which is good for a first attempt.

Three: I hear so much about compounding these days. That success builds on success. If I’d continued to turn out these non-fiction books, I would have got better at writing them and marketing them. If one free book could make the top hundred in two categories all those years later, think what I could have done with a book written after years of cranking them out.

I don’t plan to drop everything and start writing more non-fiction self-help books any time soon, but who knows, maybe in the future I’ll dip my toe in again. It’s just been a pleasant surprise to discover that I’m now a “bestselling author” for something I wrote seven years ago. Who wouldn’t want retention like that?