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  • Kris Ashton

The reviews are in...


And so are the sales.

These are two unusual occurrences for me. You see, even though I’ve published three novels and nearly forty short stories, reviews and sales have always been pretty scant. The reason is simple (and something I’ve discussed before): most small publishers are terrible at marketing.

To give you some idea what I am talking about, take a look at this graph from my Amazon author page, for the anthology Corrupts Absolutely – easily the most successful anthology of which I’ve been a part:

Now check out the graph for Blood in the Rain 2:

This is much more typical of a small-press book’s performance: a small burst of sales upon initial publication followed by a rapid descent to a sales rank in the millions only alleviated by an occasional single sale.

Then we come to the second edition of Invasion at Bald Eagle published through Digital Fiction Publishing:

See the difference? This is what happens when a publisher has promotional nous and the funds to support its titles with advertising. I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to click on the bestseller rank for Invasion at Bald Eagle and see that it has jumped up instead of languishing in the millions.

That’s not to say Bald Eagle is anywhere near a bestseller; it’s not even close. But I am getting monthly royalty payments – and that’s a first for me in nearly 15 years of publishing fiction.

I’m also getting reviews. Not reviews in exchange for a free copy, but reviews from readers who bought the damned thing and then felt compelled to offer their opinion on it, good or bad.

That makes me feel like a real author for the first time. Even though I’ve been enormously chuffed to publish in respected markets such as Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways and The Fiction Desk, there is something unpleasantly existential about seeing your story in print and then never hearing another word about it. Sometimes small press anthologies garner a few reviews, but not often – and not many of those are organic.

While my ultimate goal – a contract with a name publisher – remains frustratingly out of reach, my experience with Digital Fiction Publishing has been the next best thing: a small press that operates with the professionalism of a big one. What the second edition of Invasion has brought is a sense of validation; that all the hours writing and revising it were worth it because readers care about it. Editorial validation is pleasing – “An editor liked my work enough to want to publish it!” – but reader interest is the validation apotheosis. In the end, that’s why a writer writes.

And that’s why the Invasion at Bald Eagle graph is so heartening. Not because it tells me I'm getting rich, but because it tells me every few days someone new has been inspired to buy my book and start reading it.

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