When you set out to publish a book independently and without absolutely no outside help, then there’s a good chance you’ll make some mistakes. When I published Naughty Week, there was a lot I didn’t know. I was learning as I went — consuming any type of content that would help me go through the process of self-publishing. This included podcasts, books, blogs, and Facebook groups.
A lot of the mistakes I made couldn’t have been foreseen because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. In hindsight, I can see some mistakes were bigger than others. Some were avoidable, but some were not. Here are a few of my biggest mistakes as an indie author publishing my first book.
Big Indie Author Mistake #1
If my goal was to sell as many books as possible, then writing a book that takes place during the Christmas holiday was a huge mistake.
But Naughty Week was something I needed to write. I just had so much passion for the idea, and the bottom line was nothing was going to stop me from writing it.
I wrote Naughty Week first as a screenplay because at the time I was entirely focused on writing film and television.
My agent submitted the screenplay around town but there were only a couple of targets for a Home Alone-type Christmas movie, and none of the big streamers existed back then except Netflix, and they weren’t really doing movies. It was read by Nickelodeon Films and Disney XD, and both targets passed.
Needless to say, I didn’t get the movie set up anywhere, and after a few years, I dusted it off and focused on writing it as a novel. My goal for this was to create some intellectual property that could get the attention of development executives or producers and steer me towards the ultimate goal of making the movie.
I wrote the book in 2018 and tried to get it published traditionally. I got some very positive feedback, but in the end, every publisher I sent the book to passed. My feeling was that publishers weren’t going to take a chance on an unknown author for a book they could only market for two or three months out of the year.
So if you’re goal is to sell lots of books any time of the year, don’t set your story at Christmas.
If you’re not too concerned about that, then no worries. Sometimes a story just needs to be told.
Big Indie Author Mistake #2
As a first-time indie author, I knew I was going to make mistakes. As I alluded to above, much of the journey through independent publishing is learn-as-you-go.
As I was getting ready to publish Naughty Week, I consumed as much self-publishing content as I could — podcasts, YouTube videos, blog posts, books. I learned a ton and then created an action plan for my book launch.
The book was edited, I had my ISBNs, I had the book cover ready, I exported my format files, I had my short and long book blurbs, my website was live, the social media accounts were set up, and I was just waiting on the production of the audiobook, which was scheduled to be completed in mid-October.
Since the book was set during the holidays, I planned a November 1st launch for the paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. I was going to publish wide because I didn’t want to be limited by KDP and one of my goals was to get the book in bookstores and in libraries. The hardcover was ready to go on IngramSpark, so all I needed to do was set up the paperback and ebook on Amazon.
So on September 25th, five weeks ahead of schedule for my November 1st launch date, I went into KDP to get everything ready. I added all of the required information for the book like title, author, ISBN, categories, keywords, pricing — all of that. And then I went to save it as a draft.
But I didn’t save it as a draft. I launched my book. And it felt like a huge mistake at the time, but in retrospect, it was a good thing. It gave me more time to dig into the next phase — marketing the book — before the holidays arrived.
The big lesson I learned was that the best time to do anything is right now. Don’t wait to do the thing, just do the thing. Once the book is done, don’t sit on it. Just publish your book.
Big Indie Author Mistake #3
I didn’t know I was making this mistake, but this one really bit me in the you-know-what.
If you’re adapting a family-friendly holiday screenplay into a book, and you want to sell that book online, do not include the word “naughty” in the title. It’s taken me the better part of five years since I published Naughty Week to understand that search engines think the word naughty is… a naughty word.
And I’m not just talking about Google. Amazon is just as powerful a search engine, and if you want to independently publish books, that’s where your books need to be.
And it makes sense because the word naughty has been appropriated by adult-themed goods, services, and… also books.
But if you include the word naughty in the title of your middle-grade fiction book, that suddenly raises red flags in the algorithm.
As recently as this week, when I typed “Naughty Week” into the Amazon search bar, the autogenerated text refused to populate the search bar. So it doesn’t even suggest the book even though I’m using all of the letters.
That is totally bananas.
I didn’t know this was going to be one of my biggest mistake as an indie author in terms of getting found in searches, but it didn’t matter because the book was only ever going to be called Naughty Week.
I’m just wondering if my sales would have improved if this were a romance and not a fun and irreverent Christmastime chapter book.
I thought running ads would solve all my problems but NOPE. That’s a story for a whole other blog post.
Got any stories like that of your own? Let me know in the comments and keep writing!
