This is a thing.
It’s big and ugly.
I don’t know if it happens to everyone, but anecdotally, I think it happens to a lot of authors. The book is out, the flowers are starting to wilt. The world is moving forward. Your amazon ranking is moving backwards. Everything feels like a disaster, especially at three in the morning when you wake up in a cold sweat wondering if someone has posted the first review and it’s one star.
The dreaded Post-Publication Day Slump.
The PPDS didn’t hit me right away – I was too busy trying to get up the learning curve with amazon advertising (more later). But a few days after publication day, I was a serious wreck. Again, maybe if you’re a big name and everything is moving in the right direction (i.e. upwards) then it’s fine. I don’t know. Certainly as a first-time self-published author, things were not moving up at any kind of a steady rate for me.
Seriously, I must have refreshed the listing page 50 times a day, hoping against hope that someone would put up a nice review, or that I’d move up a couple thousand places in the ranking. To be fair, I was moving up in the rankings. But the lack of reviews especially made me feel like I’d made totally the wrong decision to publish a month early. I kept thinking about that checklist of things I didn’t do, and still needed to do, and was not really in a fit state to do.
So that’s how I was feeling. What was I actually doing?
Quite a lot, actually.
I started my amazon advertising campaigns and also one on Facebook. I arranged a blog tour through Rachel’s Random Resources. I’ve used Rachel before and she is not only lovely, but also highly efficient in getting those bloggers on board. Unfortunately, the earliest she could do was November, so I settled for that. At least it was arranged.
Blog tours
Authors have mixed views on whether these are worth doing. You can get by perfectly well without one. Most blog tour providers have a range of options at a range of costs. I went for the one week review tour – so about 7 days and 20+ bloggers who will host the book on the site and hopefully leave reviews. I did a blog blitz a few years back, and found that it gave a great boost to my book Moonlight on the Thames. They are also useful to combine with a price promo, because there will be a buzz during the tour, and people like to think they’re getting a bargain! I set a price promo on KDP for the week of the blog tour. It’s still in the future, but I am hopeful that it will be advantageous.
So all in all, I was working too hard and doing too much to let the PPDS hit me for that long. I kept reminding myself that this was all a learning experience. I was definitely learning. I was definitely out of my comfort zone.
And really, how hard could it be?
Lessons learned:
Mixed emotions (a lot of them negative) are natural when doing something new. Sometimes you just have to allow them. For me, taking action helps me get through them.
There are lots of things you can do while waiting for those reviews. Plan a blog tour, run an inexpensive advertising Facebook campaign. There is more than enough out there to learn so that you can keep taking action.
Go back to your original reasons for embarking on the project. Are they still valid even if the results aren’t immediately as planned? What actions can you take to get closer to the result you want?