I'm not a patient person. One of the hardest things for me to do is to wait. So, once I've finished my latest books, Last Chance Lane and Five Stones, I've uploaded them to the Kindle store before I had time to create physical books. Actually, I had no plans to create physical books for either of the books when I first wrote the stories. Publishing through iUniverse was quite expensive, and I didn't want to go through that with two books simultaneously.
Now, on to marketing.... I've watched some youtube videos, and the general consensus, from my perspective, is that marketing is wasted if you don't have several books, more than three or four, written already. If a reader liked your book, you should be able to refer the reader to another book of your or another several books so that the reader will have a choice. So, if I don't want to spend money on marketing, I need to find some forms of free marketing. The simplest form is a review. If you look around, there are several websites, bloggers, etc. who review books. I even read somewhere that you should ask Amazon reviewers if they'd review your book (within the same genre).
AND that is the reason for putting in a lot of work to print physical books through Createspace.com. Getting Reviews. The process is surprisingly painless, and I'm quite happy with the covers I was able to create with the use of Pixlr.com and already existing templates. Most of the review sites, bloggers, and Amazon reviewers prefer a physical book.
And a very good secondary reason for it is the giveaways on Goodreads.com. Goodreads.com will allow only physical book giveaways. So, here I am, creating physical books.
Now, going back to patience, what I found out is that one of the by products of creating a physical book on createspace.com is I ended up with a file that's perfectly suited for the Kindle Store. So, my patience doubled the work for me, but now, I know better. I'll make sure I create my physical book first and release my digital and print book on the same day.
I know there are many book publishing websites out there, and I haven't tried any others, but so far, I'm very impressed with how easy it is to work with Createspace.com and Kindle publishing.
So, go forth and write.
Happy New Year!
