An Amazon Adventure (Part 2)

So... what's the answer? That, as they say, is the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

If I'm honest (with myself as well as anyone sufficiently interested to read this) then I'd have to say that although I went into self-publishing with my eyes open (i.e. not expecting to become a best-selling author overnight), and would be the first to confess that I may well fall foul of some of the items in the list with which I closed my last post (Part 1), I don't think I had fully grasped quite how hard it is to get your books noticed.

I don't know how the search engines work that Amazon uses, but I know (from watching) that selling one download can move a book up the listings by tens of thousands of places, but that advantage is short-lived unless it's followed by further sales. In reality though, I'm sure that single digit sales aren't going to be sufficient to make a book visible to anyone other than the most determined bookworm. It's the classic catch-22 situation - your book isn't going to be visible unless you get a significant number of sales, but you aren't going to get a significant number of sales unless your book is sufficiently visible.

Anyway, I've no doubt many of you will be all too familiar with this conundrum. Some will have found a solution, whilst others will have remained frustrated. Let's face it; for your precious novel to fail to sell because it's (frankly) not very good, whilst painful, is still ultimately something you can learn to live with. For it to fail because no one can find it (leaving you wondering whether it might have been a success if only enough people got to open the cover) is much harder to swallow.

There are plently of people out there (mostly those who have triumphed in the self-publicity stakes) who have shared their thoughts on this subject, and some of the theory at least is 'out there'. For what it's worth, if my own contribution to that is of any interest then I shall share it here in due course.

In the meantime, I am battling with the technology - more of this anon...