Please welcome back fellow Austin RWA author Gretchen Rix, here to talk about life since she published her first novel The Cowboy’s Baby and her second book Arroyo!
Last July when Jessica invited me to share my Kindle publishing experiences I was full of great expectations and concentrating on getting The Cowboy’s Baby out. Just learning how to do it and do it right took up a lot of my time. I was self-publishing. I’m still self-publishing (although now everyone wants to call it indie publishing).
Maybe the great expectations weren’t realized, but the good expectations came through. That e-book has sold more than 2,500 copies at last count. But a lot has changed in that year and a bit. And almost all of it grew out of the self-publishing experience.
I’ve got Twitter to keep up. I write a blog. There is Facebook. There are the Austin RWA meetings each month. I judge a couple of romance writing contests. And now I’ve just put my second novel out, Arroyo, a paranormal western.
But the same week I did that I also wrote a Q&A on my blog with a couple of very successful thriller writers. My paperback POD of The Cowboy’s Baby went up on the whale table at Book People (a famous bookstore in Austin) giving it more than a fighting chance at sales. And I was preparing to sell The Cowboy’s Baby in a booth at Lockhart’s Evening With Dickens festival the first weekend in December (plus promoting some other writers as well).
I just finished selling fifteen copies as one of the featured authors at this year’s Evening With The Authors in my own hometown. I just prepared a book review of Stirred by J.A. Konrath and Blake Crouch, and one for Deb Sanders’ debut romance novel Stone Cold Justice, and just did one more promised for another best selling author’s first space western Guns of Seneca 6.
And then finally, with my sister, I am finishing up the third year of the Scare The Dickens Out of Us ghost story contest.
It’s not like marketing Arroyo, or continuing to market The Cowboy’s Baby is not on my mind. There’s just so much else to do. The new book to start, for one. And that novelette I’ve already got the cover for.
I’ve read time and time again that the best marketing you can do for your e-books is just to write the next one, and make it the very best you can. Then go on to the next.
We’ll see. It took The Cowboy’s Baby more than a year to take off. That might very well be the fate of Arroyo as well. But they’re published, they’re available for any e-book device or app, and I’m damned proud of them. Have a look.
Link for B&N is http://barnesandnoble.com/c/gretchen-rix
Link for Smashwords is http://smashwords.com/books/view/79235 and http://smashwords.com/books/view/105559
Amazon.com links are http://amzn.com/B0067NCEJ4 and http://amzn.com/B003UYUVZC