Easy to self-publish / hard to market

by Scott Swift
(Bergen County NJ)

POD with CreateSpace

Easy to self-publish / hard to market

I'm new to writing. I've been telling stories for years but only recently decided to publish them. I found the writing process easy, and, after a bit of work, the whole self-publishing thing wasn't so hard either.

My book (The Traveling Salesman's Darktime Tales Anthology - Available on Amazon) is a collection of children's short stories - the same stories I told to my own kids when they were younger.

Coming from a technical background, creating the website was easy, as was the ePub version for the Apple iPad (STAY AWAY from Lulu.com).

The hardest part is getting people to read/buy them.

I'm paying for search ads on Google, Bing and Yahoo, and have some traffic, but have only made a handful of sales on Amazon (<20). I've even started taking out slide ads at the local movie theaters (you know, the slides they make you watch while waiting for the movie to start).

My focus group (more than a dozen kids) all love the stories, and a few of the parents have told me they enjoy them as well. The reviews on Amazon have been encouraging, but it's just SO hard to get the message out there on your own.

Dark Time Tales.