Goldfish Dreams

[jimhines]

Back in March of 2002, I sold my very first novel. This was several years before Goblin Quest. Nope, this was a mainstream novel which almost nobody has ever heard of.

Goldfish Dreams was my Masters project at Eastern Michigan University, and the second book I ever wrote

Comments

[jimvanpelt]

Hi, Jim. That's interesting that a fantasy writer like yourself, particularly a comic one, had this other serious sounding book in you.

I'll have to put together a blog entry on my experience with my first book, which was also a POD title, but has done very well. I think it has sold close to 4,000 copies since 2002. My 2005 collection is around 1,300 copies sold right now, and my novel that came out last year is over that, maybe 1,500 copies. I'll have to check my royalty statements.

It sounds like you are probably right about why the numbers were low: new author and a niche subject.

Thanks for posting this.

[jimhines]

Thanks, Jim. Believe it or not, I can write serious stuff sometimes too :-) (My agent has been advising me to stick with the quirky, at least on the novels side, though.)

Seriously, I would love to read about your adventures in book publishing. You've done amazingly well. Having read your work, I'm not too surprised at those sales figures, though ;-)

[jimvanpelt]

Do you ever use TitleZ to see how your books are doing at Amazon (http://www.titlez.com/welcome.aspx)

Since my POD titles aren't in the bookstores, that's where a lot of my sales happen, so I have a tendency to check often. It's an interesting experience to see how a review or an appearance can spike the sales.

[jimhines]

I've got TitleZ tracking all of my SF/F books, and I check Amazon.com more often than is probably healthy.

Sometimes I can look and understand a sales spike, but other times, it's baffling...

I also follow the Bookscan numbers, though they're trickier to get. And of course, even Bookscan only captures maybe 2/3 of sales.

[branchandroot]

Well /I/ still like it. ^_^

It'd be kind of neat, some day, to meet counselor-guy and his cat in another context, though. They made a very engaging pair. *grins* You're good with non-verbal characters, I must say.

[jimhines]

Thanks :-) I've actually got about 15,000 words of a sequel I started back on '03, though I never got any further with that project.

And the cat was just fun!

[sandratayler]

Thank you for sharing this story. Most of the voices talking about self-publication are either issuing a call to abandon traditional publication or decrying self-publication as a wasteland of talentless authors. I'm glad to hear a more balanced account of how it can work, or not work, for a specific author and book.

[jimhines]

Hey, thanks! It's out of print, and with print-on-demand, that usually means the end of the books. But I knew there were still a few copies floating around out there, along with the e-book version at Fictionwise.

$65? Wow. Glad you were able to do better than that :-)

[chris_gerrib]

Well, if you like the book, and it's out of print, why not toss it up on Lulu? You won't sell a lot more copies, but it will at least be available.