Launch Day !

Launch day has finally arrived !

I've mostly been ready to go for the better part of a week, but it was good that I set a date and got started on everything early. There was plenty enough that did go wrong, and there could've been plenty more. In the end, there was only one thing that I screwed up - the Amazon ad campaign. It's been delayed by 1-3 days because I meant to advertise mostly in the US, and so had set up a US ads account. Nope, don't do that if you aren't an American - you need to provide an American billing address. I'd set it all up to kick off on Sept. 1 a couple weeks ago, but never noticed the errors until today. Oh well, live and learn.

The Facebook ads are working fine. Over 6-7 hours, one of the ads I created has appeared on 170 devices, and 9 people have clicked on it. Or at least, that's what Facebook is reporting to me. Whether this will translate to sales remains to be seen, however this has so far only cost me a couple of bucks, and I set a fairly low spend limit for the duration of the two-week campaign.

I'm really relying on the title and the cover to get eyeballs on the first pages. The cover, writing, and editing, is all professional-grade, and I hope that will be enough to get people to read it and generate some word of mouth if they enjoy it. If I find any kind of success with this book, I expect it to take some time. I'm keeping my expectations realistic, leaning pessimistic. Can't be all that disappointed if you didn't expect great success!

In any event, having my work out in the world opens up a world of possibilities that would not exist if the story remained on my computer, gathering proverbial dust. Will an agent or publisher randomly come across this work one day and enjoy it? And want me to do a sequel, or write something new? It's certainly unlikely, but now it's at least in the realm of possibility.

This project has finally been completed. It's out there now, and I'm going to take a bit of a break before I start working on the next project, whatever that might be. I still have a few short stories that I feel are good enough to be published, so I'll probably get back to doing more regular submissions, starting this weekend.