I had such a book, no sales, no reviews at all. So I printed some paper copies and distributed them to a retirement home. Got plenty of positive feedback there, face to face, and demands to read the second book in the series!<p>No revenue either, but lots of satisfaction and the sure knowledge that there may actually be a demographic for my writing.
I've always wanted to write a book, but it’s challenging for people to discover it. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. There are literally millions of books out there—who will even notice mine? I believe this is the main issue with OP's book; he needs to find a way to promote its existence. It's a classic business challenge: effective marketing is essential. That’s why publishing companies are so important; they know how to market a book and have the necessary industry contacts. When you self-publish, part of your responsibility is to manage this marketing aspect as well.<p>I understand he started since I know about the book but I’m an unlikely customer. I don’t particularly enjoy sci-fi books, especially random ones. I prefer to know a bit about a book before committing to the hours it will take to read it. My suggestion is to study other self-publishing authors and see how they made their books successful, then model the approach after theirs.
Why even sell the book in such a situation?<p>It seems to me that a first release from a casual author with no marketing beyond friends and family has nearly zero chance to even get a single sale. The revenue aspect seems completely moot in such a situation, and effectively what one is doing is throwing the work into a void.<p>On the other hand, I can see how it might seem demeaning to just to give a work away that so much time was spent on, but at least it then has a chance to get maybe a dozen readers or so, especially if you go out and do some casual posting on forums and discussion boards, maybe go to a local book club, that sort of thing. Of course, there's always a slim chance of it going viral out of the blue, and I suppose that's one reason to attach a price to the work, but to me it seems like the virality chance is indistinguishable from zero if it's just tossed out there with a paywall among millions of other hobbyist books, While if there's a lower barrier to entry, that chance probably goes up at least an order of magnitude. In the infinitely small chance that it does go viral, it would be pretty easy to transition to a Patreon and put a price tag on the second work too.<p>I occasionally read these stories about authors working so hard and getting no one even reading their stuff, and it just seems so grim to me, even after accounting for the "make lemonade out of lemons" state of mind that OP has.