In May of 2011, I released the first three installments of The Awakened series in eBook format.
Originally written and released as a single novel, my first attempt at writing fiction had already been available for months in paperback format. It had only sold about 50 copies to friends and family, but I was happy just to have written something. To hold a thick book in my hand and see my own name on its cover.
Then I began hearing about some newfangled electronic format called an eBook. And Amazon had a device called a Kindle, which allowed you to read these electronic books. Around that time, I came across a blog post by an indie author who had found success with this electronic format because it allowed him to give his first book away for FREE—something that couldn’t be done inexpensively with printed books. His reasoning was that readers weren’t going to give up their hard-earned money for a book by an unproven author. But if the book were free, they might be willing to invest their time in reading it. And if they liked it, they could buy the next book with some measure of confidence about what to expect.
It sounded reasonable, so I decided to give it a try.
I researched how to reformat my manuscript as an eBook. Then I split the story into three parts and uploaded them to Amazon’s self-publishing platform. It took some time to make the first one free—I had to publish it on a competitor’s site and get Amazon to price-match it. In the meantime, I got into the habit of checking my download numbers every few hours. And I was pleased to find that a handful of readers each day were buying my books. People I didn’t know and who weren’t related to me. Pretty cool!
Days later, I woke early on a Saturday morning and navigated to my Amazon product page to find that the price had finally been set to FREE. And there was something else I’d never noticed before … a tiny label that read: #1 in Free Science Fiction & Fantasy.
“That can’t be right!” I thought.
So I went to my downloads page and verified that—in fact—over 8,000 readers had downloaded my first book during the night. My excitement was only just beginning, because those readers went on to purchase the second and third books as well. And within days, Book 2 and Book 3 had labels on their product pages that read: #1 Bestseller in Science Fiction & Fantasy.
By February of 2012—with Book 1 still near the top of the free list—Books 2 & 3 were ranking around #400 (meaning only 399 books were selling better than mine … out of any genre … in all of Amazon)!
For someone who only wrote as a hobby, I was grateful and dumbfounded. I simply couldn’t believe that so many people wanted to read something I’d made up. I expected it all to vanish at any moment, which is why it took a couple years before I felt confident enough to quit my job and start writing full-time.
Though the glory days of the eBook revolution are past, and I’m doing other things to make a living now, I’m still grateful for the amazing response from readers across the world who changed the trajectory of my life. I see writing as my vocation now, as opposed to a hobby. I have many other stories in me, including the last two Awakened books. And though it may take some time to get them written, they’re coming.
Since we’re already taking a trip down memory lane, I thought it would also be fun to look back on the progression of cover art (or regression, depending on your perspective). Here are the covers I created for the first trilogy, as they appeared on Amazon in 2011 …
I knew the series would eventually become 9 books in total, and I couldn’t simply keep changing the colors without running out of cool-looking options. So in 2012, I hired my friend Mike Heath to design a new look for the series …
He created some fantastic covers, but he was heavily constrained by my input and budget. And I still hadn’t solved the color conundrum or settled on a concept that would work for an entire 9-book series (How would I find landscapes to match the post-apocalyptic final trilogy, for instance?). So in 2013, I took another shot at doing the covers myself and began playing with textures to match elements of each storyline …
The concept was flexible enough to work for the whole series, but the results weren’t as pretty as the previous covers, and the first two books in particular were visually cluttered. So in 2015, I tried again …
Much better. But the covers still don’t quite do what they’re supposed to—make a visual promise to the reader that will be fulfilled inside. Establish expectations that will be matched and met by the story experience.
Now that I’m seven books into the series, I think I know what needs to be done with the artwork … and the first three book descriptions (which I’m also not content with). But at this point, my time is better spent on writing the last two books. Then I can take another shot at artwork that truly encapsulates the soul of the series.
Thanks for strolling down memory lane with me!