During this year’s month-long writing challenge in November, I decided to put in the work to crank out the sequel to Turtle Heaven, and I managed to succeed again this year.

It was a lot easier this year than in year’s past, and I think it’s largely because I had the story outline completed ahead of time. Certainly, the fact that the outline follows my own life a bit made it easier, but I think that having a pretty structured outline helps with the creativity. In past writing challenges, I’ve stalled primarily because I didn’t really have any characters or plot in mind, and only a minimal amount of setting… and those are pretty much the key ingredients for a novel!

Anyhow, in addition to the writing, I’ve also got the artwork completed for the book, so hopefully I can get this one done in the next several months, and hopefully have another August launch. Very exciting!

I didn’t go into this publishing project with an intent to make a ton of money or sell a million books. I didn’t have a goal at all. I just wanted to get my story done and make it available for anyone that was interested in knowing my journey. In some ways, it felt like publishing a journal, and unless you’re personally invested in the person who wrote the thing, why would you ever pay to read someone else’s journal?

Everything I read regarding “how many books should I expect to sell” pointed to this rather bleak result: The average self-published book receives about 100 sales. In a lifetime. A LIFETIME?! It’s on wonder writers are on the list of “starving artists.” You can’t make a living selling 100 books, when you’re lucky to make $5 per book sale. 

Well, towards the end of the first month, I decided to push to see if I could how far I could get. I wanted to know if I could achieve a significant milestone with my book that would encourage me to put out another book. If my first book was a financial flop, it would be much harder to get motivated to go through all that work again.

As it turns out, I was able to achieve an important milestone. Between the Paperback (Amazon and in-store), Kindle, and the Audiobook, I settled in at 105 sales within my first month. Amazing! I’m nearly done with month two, now, and as expected, the results are nowhere near as big as it was for the first month. Without the big launch push, I’m probably only going to sell about 15 books this go-around, but I’m starting to explore some marketing via Facebook, so we’ll see how it goes. 

Anyhow, this has been an incredible journey so far, and I really appreciate all of you who have followed along, both here and in my novel. Thanks so much – it means the world to me.

Amazon (11), GoodReads (3), and Audible (6) gets me to TWENTY 5-star reviews in less than a month. Absolutely amazing. I am so blown away at the responses, I wish I could bottle up this feeling and keep it forever. I don’t even know what else to say, except that this is incredible. I’m over the moon.

I didn’t expected that my first in-store purchase and commission check would come from a local ANTIQUE store of all places! Courtyard Antiques in Olympia likes to carry local author books and they gave me a whole spread on their Facebook page. Amazing.

I walked into the store yesterday to check out the display, and walked out with my first official commission check for my books. How exciting!

A box of my books arrived! It’s so wild to see so many of them in person!

I’ve taken a batch of five to Browsers Bookstore and a batch of two to Orca books (that’s all they would take), and I’ve mentioned their presence to my friends on Facebook. In the next few days, they should officially hit the shelves, and I’ll stop by to see what they look like.

Even though I’m the one who put the books up for consignment in the stores, it’s still so neat to know that my books are going to be for sale in a bookstore!

After doing a bit of research, I’ve decided that it’s time to return to Facebook. As it turns out, the target demographic (people who tend to read books) hang out a lot on Facebook, and by not having an account there, I’m really limiting my reach. Additionally, Facebook is significantly better at targeted marketing, which allows me to specific exactly who I want to see any future ads for the book or for the NEWPROTEST Publishing company. 

If you’re on Facebook and want to see updates on the project(s), here’s the link to the Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/joshuaculley.author. 

Hope to see you there!

(There’s also a FB link on the footer of the site that will take you there as well)