Greetings and salutations. It is I, Greyson.

It’s done. The book is out there. One of the adages we keep hearing is “the average book doesn’t sell a hundred copies in its lifetime”. Well we beat that, hitting a bit over one and a quarter in presales. We did a soft launch at Lodgecon and sold a few copies as well. Now Clevenger is hitting up a comic store event at the end of the month, where I’m sure he will pop out another couple of sales. Then our big opening is going to be in April, where we plan to make a bigger splash at C2E2 in Chicago, and possibly the Huntsville Pop Culture Expo, down here in North Alabama.

The point is that we have plans for where we intend to make our sales. Clevenger has been visiting Cons and Ren Faires for decades, and he’s done the homework on what is needed to sell in person at author’s events. C2E2 has about 85,000 visitors each year. Multiple self published authors have insisted that if you bring a hundred copies of your book, you will sell out. And since its Fantasy, it is more likely to sell a hundred and fifty minimum.

I said all of that, to say this: There is one aspect of the “tried and true” self publishing process that we skipped. We didn’t heavily research it. We didn’t dig into it too deeply. The very premise of it just doesn’t make much sense, at least for a debut novel from a debut author. Will we find out we messed up and are leaving piles of money on the table? Maybe. Will someone convince us to go back and do this on future books? Maybe.

But probably not.

What am I talking about? ARCs. Advance Reader Copies. Advance Review Copies. (I’ve seen both used.) Supposedly a few months before street date on your book, you send out copies of your book to interested readers, for free. I seen some people talk about two hundred or even as many as five hundred ARCs. And your target is to try and get ten percent of them to read the book so that on release day, they will leave a book review on websites like Goodreads or Amazon.

Apparently gathering reviews is supposed to help raise your book through the ranks of the website algorithms. Of course, single week sales is also supposed to propel you higher in the algorithms. But how many reviews? How many single week sales? Is it a game we want to play, gambling away hundreds of free copies of our book? After all, wouldn’t the very people that know about the book, to read it right before release, be the same people who have heard of the book, and might preorder a copy?

It felt too much like we would be giving away our preorders. Maybe someone will convince us we were wrong. And maybe it would be different if we were relying primarily on online sales to build our initial fanbase. But apparently there are a good dozen of these conventions across the US that cater specifically to hosting an Author’s Alley for self-published and self-promoting authors. Apparently there are authors that make the rounds of these events, all run on weekends away from the fulltime, nine-to-five jobs, bringing in good money from in-person sales.

For now, we are giving this a shot. Until we are convinced otherwise. After all, we are at nearly $500 in profit, with a bit over $2000 invested, just at street date! We’re only a couple of weeks old, and we’ve already recovered twenty five percent of investment? I’ll take that. We will be out of the red before summer. I think we are doing okay without ARCs for now.

Don’t forget to love one another.

Greyson Black