Well, I Changed It (New Book Title)

In yesterday's post I talked about my novel from 2021 and the fact that it only sold two copies (!) Honestly, I'm the least successful self-published author in the history of self-publishing. I just read a Reddit post from someone who said, "I had been publishing a few tidbits for a long time. Very amateurish.. However, after 4 years of selling max 5-13 books per month..."

Per month? Very amateurish? Apparently everything that's published sells, except my books. I don't know what kind of conspiracy is going on to hold my books down, but I'm going to get to the bottom of it. 

Is it possible that I'm suffering from dementia? My books read fine ~ sometimes great ~ to me, but maybe they're all a bunch of gibberish. Maybe they're written in hieroglyphics. Are you able to read what I've written here? 

Regardless, with my novel formerly known as The Apple, I went ahead and changed the title. I acknowledged that the title was bad; that no one knew what it meant except me. So now it's What We Conceal. That's hardly perfect, but the better choices were already taken, and while I understand that titles can't be copyrighted, why use something that's already out there?

I went through variations of "secrets" and "hidden", among others, then turned to my trusty thesaurus to find related, but different words. Yes, I even tried AI, which is completely useless. I'm not in love with "What We Conceal", but I'm not particularly in love with most of my books' titles. I deliberately chose "we", because every single member of the main character's family has a secret.

While I was immersed in this exercise, I took a look at the manuscript and found a couple of minor things that needed changing ~ no indentation on one of the paragraphs, an extra word in a sentence that sounded clunky ~ but admittedly, I was in no mood to read the entire thing again, so I'll need to trust that everything else is fine. 😮 Naturally, I had to update the version housed in Kindle Create to change the title, and I revised the cover text. 

Once the new manuscript and cover were uploaded to KDP, I wanted to change and add new categories, but that's apparently not allowed. It could be that KDP operates by the same arcane rules as Goodreads, in that if any previous copies were sold, you can't make changes (except for everything else about the book).  Dear Amazon: I'm truly not trying to scam anyone.

As soon as my changes went live, I signed up for a free book promotion for three days, starting Friday. Trust me; my expectations are low, low, low. Some authors claim to achieve good results from a free KDP promotion; that has not been my experience at all. I even stopped a promotion for another book, because I was embarrassed that no one grabbed a copy after two days. But again, it's free, and embarrassment won't kill me.

After living with The Apple for four years now, it does feel strange that it's gone. It's going to take me some time, or forever, to get used to my new title. Yesterday when I was updating my changes, I had to keep referring back to the new cover to remember what the book was called. The new title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. 

But after this week, I'll probably not think about it again anyway. The longer an author is separated from her book, the less it matters. Shoot, I'm not all that interested in pushing Running From Herself anymore, and that was only published less than three months ago.

On the upside, thank you for driving up my site views. I've been looking at my analytics ever since I changed the layout, and the numbers have risen.

Now, granted, I didn't realize that anyone but me was fluent in hieroglyphics, but I'm grateful some people are.