When I pressed the ‘publish’ button for ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ twelve days ago, my expectations were realistic (read: low). First book, no platform, no horde of fans waiting anxiously. And no plan to promote the thing beyond telling people I know: hey, look, this book I’ve been wittering about? It’s out. So being realistic (read: pessimistic), I hoped to sell 15-20 copies to online friends, and thereafter perhaps a copy or so a week to random strangers. Maybe 50 copies in the first six months. Today when I checked my sales stats I found a nice surprise: a sale in Germany which brought the total sales up to 50. My first milestone achieved already. It isn’t much of a milestone, but it’s more than I expected at this stage, which is pleasing. So ‘Danke’, random stranger in Germany. I hope you enjoy the book.

Yes, ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is finally published. Hurray! Since it’s been on pre-order for a week or two, my daughter and stayed up until midnight to watch it go live on Amazon.co.uk. Eight hours later, it went live in the US. If I’d planned things better, I could have watched the roll-out around the world, starting in Australia. Then there was the paperback version to get up and running, which took a few hours for all the kinks to work out. Mid-afternoon, the ‘look-inside’ feature was activated. And then there were sales reports to watch and rankings to track and royalties to check. And hey, I’ve made around $5.00 already. Better get that Ferrari ordered… Oh, wait, there are refunds… 🙁 Last night I threw myself a launch party, with champagne and nibbles and a cake with ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ inscribed on the top in icing. And I’ve […]

With the publication of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ rapidly approaching, I’ve finally taken down most of the chapters posted on Wattpad, so that I can sign up for Amazon’s exclusive program, KDP Select. I’ve left six chapters up as a sample, but I don’t expect them to get many reads. I started posting the book on Wattpad a chapter at a time, many months ago, and then posted the remaining chapters more than a month ago. So how did it do? Some numbers: Total reads: 2,018 (each chapter viewed counts as one read) Votes: 344 Comments: 156 This is barely a blip in the Wattpad world, where the most popular books garner reads in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. It’s more interesting to look at individual chapters. Chapter 1: 450 reads Chapter 2: 69 reads Chapter 3: 60 reads Chapter 4: 54 reads and so on. So a […]

‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is getting closer to publication! I now have ARCs available, so if anyone out there would like a copy to read for review, please email me at brightmoon@paulinemross.co.uk. I have both mobi and epub formats available (sorry, no print copies yet). Reviews can be posted immediately on Goodreads or your blog, and on Amazon after publication in mid-September. ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is an epic fantasy adventure with a strong romantic element. Here’s the blurb: Thousands of years after a magical catastrophe reshaped the world and pulled the moons out of alignment, the secret of magic has seemingly been lost. At the centre of the vast, forbidding Plains of Kallanash lies a land ruled by a secretive religion, whose people fight a never-ending war against the barbarians in the wilderness beyond the border. Amongst the nobility, double marriages are the norm. Junior wife Mia always dreamed […]

Now that I’m getting closer to publishing ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ in September, I’ve been starting to think about marketing (for want of a better term). Which online retailers to sell through, pricing and all that jazz. And how to build up some awareness of the book beyond the three regular readers of this blog (hi folks! {waves}). I had already devised a plan to post ‘The Plains of Kallanash’, chapter by chapter, on Wattpad, a process that would take many months. I’ve now uploaded more than half the book, and somewhere around the two-thirds point would fall the actual date of publication to Amazon. The idea was to make Wattpad readers aware of the book itself while uploading the final chapters, and even if that didn’t translate into sales, it might generate a review or two. But then I started looking into Amazon’s programs in more detail, in particular, […]

A year ago, for reasons not relevant here, I decided to record every Kindle ebook uploaded to Amazon for a full month. For the sake of my sanity, I restricted it to epic fantasy. I recorded 390 ebooks uploaded over the month of April 2013, excluding foreign language ones. A year on, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what had happened to those 390 books. So during April 2014, I looked each one up on Amazon, and noted the number of reviews. These are total numbers; I didn’t attempt to track numbers of 5*, 4* and so on. I noted rankings, too, but these are just a snapshot in time, whereas reviews are cumulative.

It’s coming up for two months since I started posting chapters of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ on Wattpad (previous posts here and here), so this seems like a good time for an update. First, some stats. Chapters posted: 27 Followers: 27 Reads: 543 (each person reading one chapter counts as one read) Votes: 102 Comments: 97 I post one new chapter a week, usually on a Friday morning. At the current rate of progress, I should reach the last chapter at the end of January.