Alright, I know I have exactly zero followers reading this blog but in the off chance that someone stumbles across this little project tracker sometime in the near future I wanted to make a final statement for a bit.
I've a large number of projects coming my way the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 and my ability to update this blog will likely vanish for several months at the very least.
Our overall thoughts on the Book
We feel pretty good about what we accomplished with Paranormal America. We've created a book. It's something we can hold in our hands and other people can hold in theirs and is available in a couple of formats. My wife was beyond excited to have a book with her name on the cover and it was worth it for her sake alone. It spawned in me the desire to create a publishing company which I've already begun limited advertising for reaching out to new authors. The company is J&M Publishing, LLC.
While we know it is not perfect, we did put in a lot of personal time and energy and we are proud of what we accomplished in such a short time. We'll make updates in the future if we need to do so to fix any mistakes that slipped through.
My wife is excited just to have a book. I'm excited about the process and the ability to create a paperback but I was truly hoping to have greater sales for the sake of the 50 people who contributed. I wanted to give them something back for their time. We'll have to sell about 10 times what we've currently sold to give each of them even enough money to buy a dinner, haha! But if the sales continue at the rate they've been going, we may be able to send everyone who contributed to the book a check for about $20 around Oct. of 2014.
How's the Book Doing?
Since the book was released, we've sold an average of one book a day. We stopped actively promoting the book after the first two or three weeks, so we feel as though it is a reasonable accomplishment in that regard. We've sold enough Paperback books to cover our initial costs for proofs and such and with the regular Kindle sales and "borrows" we've made back the money we spent on the limited advertising we did to begin with early on. We're definitely making a profit at this point, though after we split the money out to the authors we'll not be getting rich any time soon from Paranormal America. :)
The highest "paid" rank we achieved on Amazon was #8 in the "Supernatural" category while we ran the countdown promotion. I was excited to get in the top 10 and I know for certain our next endeavor will reach #1. The key is to hit it fast and hard - lots of interest all at once at a steady drip.
Our Twitter account never really went anywhere. We had maybe 12 followers and I think most of them were random people that had no interest in the book. We didn't have much luck getting many of the authors to follow us and spread the word in that social media circle.
However, our Facebook page did reasonably well - with a total of 480 followers to-date. While it's not the number we hoped to reach - based on the initial concept of each author getting a minimum of 10 friends/family to like the page - it is a decent number of people to be interested in something we created out of thin air.
Final Thought
The main thing we take away from this project is that making money from Kindle books is possible. We can see how you could make a reasonable amount of money as a side income stream. If you are a writer of any level and hope to make money writing, you should definitely check into self-publishing. We're also happy to help you out or publish for you if you don't want to get into the technical side of things - just check out the link to the publishing company above and mention this blog for a big discount. :)
We have many more books we plan to write, beginning with a Children's Book series. Each time I see another copy of Paranormal America has sold, I get even more motivated to create more and more books.
...And the way things are going, we're getting a daily dose of motivation!!
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