Independent publishing has a way of keeping your ego under control.

I recently checked the numbers again, and Sovereign Knight appears to be up to about 17 books sold between Amazon and Barnes & Noble. That includes a couple of new Amazon sales in September, which was a very nice discovery.

Then I looked at my mailing list.

One subscriber.

My wife.

So, technically, I have a 100 percent family participation rate.

I am choosing to focus on the positive.

When I started all of this, I knew writing the book was only part of the job. What I did not fully appreciate was how many completely different jobs arrive after the manuscript is finished. Suddenly I am learning advertising, website traffic, retailer dashboards, mailing lists, social media, cover formatting, print production, and an impressive collection of acronyms that apparently everyone in publishing already knows.

Some of it is going better than other parts.

The sales are slowly moving. I have now sold books through both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I have a five-star review. A few people I do not know have clicked on advertisements for the book. Somewhere out there are copies of Sovereign Knight sitting in homes I have never visited.

The mailing list, however, remains fiercely exclusive.

Membership currently requires being married to the author.

That is probably not a sustainable marketing strategy.

The funny thing is, I do understand why people keep telling authors to build a mailing list. Social media can disappear overnight, ads get expensive fast, and retailers decide which readers ever see your book. The idea is that a mailing list gives you a direct line to people who want to hear when the next book comes out.

That sounds wonderful.

First, I apparently need some readers on it.

So I am working on that too.

The website is up. I am blogging regularly. I am learning which advertising messages actually get people to stop scrolling. I am trying to give visitors a reason to come back, rather than simply asking them to buy something the first time they see my name.

And Book 2 is still moving forward in the middle of all of this.

That part is easy to lose sight of when you spend too much time looking at advertising reports. The reason any of this exists is that I wanted to tell the story of Teren Vaust, Cyrene Oris, the Twelve Houses, and a piece of history humanity was never supposed to recover.

Marketing is necessary.

The story is still the point.

So the current scoreboard looks something like this: about 17 books sold, three Barnes & Noble sales, one five-star review, several advertising campaigns sacrificed in the name of science, and exactly one mailing-list subscriber.

She is very supportive.

She also knows where I live.

I am hoping subscriber number two will be slightly more difficult to identify.