My self-publishing experiments actually began in 2009, before I started publishing murder mysteries to the Kindle.
I wanted to create a book that would be helpful to people. The thing I knew the most about was managing nonprofits. And what I saw were a lot of nonprofits who were terrible at fundraising. This was most true in small nonprofits, where the organization was too small to have paid development staff.
My model was Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I wanted a book that was very short, readable, and specific to a very narrow segment. Even though I think there’s a lot of good stuff in it that many people could find helpful, it’s written especially for Executive Directors of nonprofits with budgets under $500,000.
I built a website to market it, Mary laid out the book, and I bought some ads to try to sell it. It mostly worked. I didn’t lose money, but I didn’t make much money either. I stopped buying ads and let the site just sit there, getting a sale or two every few months.
This summer I decided that the book should be on Kindle. A professional editor went through the book, I added a few pages of new content, and voila, A “Revised & Expanded” version was now in the Kindle store. It started selling much faster.
And, since the 23rd, it’s stayed on Amazon’s bestseller list of Top 100 Kindle Books for nonprofits. In fact, as of this posting, it’s #3 on that list. That’s 10 days on a legitimate bestseller list.
Not only that, but on a couple days–like today–it’s actually made it into the Top 100 books for nonprofits, not just Kindle books.
From time to time my marketing experiments for The Saints Go Dying or The Marinara Murders have sent those books into a bestseller list for a few hours. But those books are in very popular, and very plentiful genres, so it takes a lot more sales to stick around there.
Still. We’re only three days into the new year, and The Little Book of Gold has sold better than the two mysteries combined. And that’s at a higher cover price too.
I’m most excited about writing and publishing fiction, but there is clearly real potential for helpful non-fiction books to highly targeted audiences.