Diary Entry #2: Discovery Numbers (And a Quick Favor)
My book just launched on Reedsy Discovery!
Hi everyone! Surprised to hear from me again so soon? So am I! I haven’t been a super prolific newsletter writer partly because A) I know everyone gets a lot of email and B) with all the work I’ve put into the book, it’s been hard to carve out time for other writing.
That said, I wasn’t planning on writing a second The Numbers / The Honda Civic Diaries (it’s kind of growing on me) entry for at least another week, but a cool opportunity popped up that I wanted to share (and also beg y’all for a quick favor).
Today, my book launched on Reedsy Discovery! It’s a platform designed to connect authors with readers, and they have a weekly newsletter where they share the most popular books by genre with their subscribers. Spoilers was just uploaded this morning along with a fantastic review!
So, if you can go to the review page and upvote the book, that’d be a huge help towards getting the book on one of their newsletters!
For bonus points, if you can either leave a comment or write a reader review, that will boost my chances even further.
Will launching on Reedsy Discovery lead to any sales? Who knows? Will I be diligently crunching the numbers to see whether or not it had an impact? You bet Che Guevara’s sexy, beret-loving ass.
Reedsy, by the way, is also the platform I used to find freelance editors, illustrators, and other professionals that I worked with on the book, so I’ll be writing about that process in a future diary entry.
Since I’m already here, I might as well talk about something I was planning to talk about later, which is how I think about paying for press for the book. For semantic purposes, “paid press” is what I’m going to call any sort of visibility for the book that I had to pay for, including placing ads in newsletters and sites like Amazon and Goodreads, or making deals with village crones, minor demons, or mysterious cloaked figures whereby I exchange fame and fortune for some sort of future, soul-bound servitude, that type of thing.
Reedsy Discovery is the first of those “paid press” opportunities (don’t worry, no blood oaths were signed). It costs $50 to be listed on Discovery, and there’s no guarantee of ending up on a newsletter or getting a blog feature.
So, is it worth it? Well, I look at is this way: as I said in my last post, I make between around $3.50-$6.80 per book, which I average to a nice, even $5.00 in my head. That said, if the Reedsy Discovery feature helps me sell 10 books, then I’ve broken even. But, more importantly, I’ve gotten 10 more copies of the book out into world, so that’s 10 more people who now know about the book and might tell their friends about it, so there are secondary effects beyond just the direct sales. That’s how I try to think about those opportunities, especially since, as a first time author, my biggest challenge is just letting people know I exist, so the more copies of Spoilers that are out there, the better, as far as I’m concerned.
Not that everything has to be about “copies” and “sales” and “profit” and “making enough money to eat.” But, as I’ve said before, this series is about the business side of self-publishing, which is why it’s called The Numbers. Or The Honda Civic Diaries? I don’t know, I kinda like it? But maybe it’s only me?
With the Reedsy Discovery page launching today and a few in-person events coming up (see you tomorrow, NYC!) I thought I’d put together a list of the “free press” the book’s gotten so far, because I think it’s useful for context. So here’s all of the places the book’s been talked about since it launched:
I did an interview for Paste Magazine (thanks, Megan Broussard!)
An excerpt of the book ran in McSweeney’s.
I chatted with Weekly Humorist editor, Marty Dundics, on Talkward.
I was invited back onto The Official Dream Dinner Party Podcast, which officially makes me a friend of the pod, not that I’m bragging (I’m bragging).
I was interviewed for Ysabel Yates’ awesome newsletter,
My friend and satire legend, Caitlin Kunkel, shared the book on
Fellow author and satirist, Eli Grober, plugged the book on
Writingworkshops.com featured an interview with me in their blog.
So many friends and family members posted about and shared the book on social media (thank you to everyone who’s shouted out the book!)
As I said in my last post, it’s often hard to quantify exactly what shout outs have led to which sales, but, suffice it to say, I would not have sold 122 copies of Spoilers since the Oct. 2nd launch without all of the amazing people that were willing to talk about and write about the book!
Okay, thank you for indulging me in this unexpectedly soon diary entry, and, if you have a moment, please give the book an upvote on Reedsy Discovery! The results will be documented in excruciating detail in a future entry of The Numbers. Or will it be called The Honda Civic Diaries? Does that title make any sense? Is it too weird of an inside joke? Like everything about this series, it’s happening in real time with no clear answers, so stick around and see what happens!
To read the next entry, click here.
I saw Emily Nunn post your Substack stats article on Notes and went down a rabbit hole, reading a few of your posts and loving it, including laughing out loud on the train while the people around me wondered wtf is going on :D Subscribed and created a Reedsy account in order to upvote Spoilers there. Happy to contribute to your thriving German fan club 😉