My First Month as a Debut

I’ve officially been a debut novelist for one month—and I specify novelist because I have been publishing short stories since early 2023, but the experience of writing and publishing a novel was indeed very different. Given that, I wanted to put together a bit of a retrospective on that first month, but also on some of the differences and some lessons learned about my first novel and what I will do the same or differently with the next.

This November 1, 2024 also comes with a particular significance for Pray For Him as well, because I started my very first draft of what would become the book on November 1, 2019. Pray For Him is one month old as of today, but it’s simultaneously five years old. It feels big.

This newsletter will cover, in order:

• The writing and publishing process generally for Pray For Him

• How this first month went (i.e. The Numbers)

• What I learned and want to do the same or different next time

• What I’m working on now

The Pray For Him process

The writing process for Pray For Him was wild. On November 1, 2019, I was between jobs—I had a new one lined up but it wasn’t going to start until later in the month—and the anxiety of being unemployed (albeit thankfully temporarily) and the restlessness combined in that perfect timing with a certain writing event I’m no longer talking about. I channeled it into the fastest drafting I could have possibly done: I finished the challenge on November 9 at about 53,000 words. Those of you who have read Pray For Him know it is significantly longer than 53,000 words now, but that’s not the only read it took almost five more years to publish it.

A few months later, in early-mid 2020, a lot changed in my life, and not just because of the pandemic. For better or for worse, I basically became a different person. I stopped writing and reading basically altogether. Then, in 2022 I started to read again—and I discovered the indie writing community. Slowly but surely, I started to not just fall back in love with reading, but with writing, too. I dipped my toes back into writing with short stories, which taught me a lot about my own writing and allowed me to experiment a lot more. Between being introduced to a lot of incredible authors writing cool shit that you rarely, if ever, see in traditional publishing, learning a lot about my own writing, and having had my perspectives in life shifted so drastically since 2019, by the time I finally returned to Pray For Him, I realized a lot had to change.

The story at its core remained mostly the same, but I made some pretty significant structural changes, redid a few subplots, added entirely new characters. The book became almost 70,000 words longer as a result.

(Side note: one of my favourite changes were the letter interludes, which didn’t exist in the original iteration. Shoutout to Morgan Dante, whose book Providence Girls rewired my brain chemistry and provided the inspiration for that format change. Morgan has also been one of my biggest supporters and has taught me a lot when it comes to writing and publishing, so I owe a lot to them!)

Obviously, it took a long time to make the changes that I did, but I’m proud of the book that resulted. I’m also really happy with the wider world that it starts to seed, including by adding new characters and worldbuilding that weren’t in that first draft. Can you believe Lena wasn’t in the first version of the book? I stole her from another WIP of mine—and she will still appear in that one as well, so we will absolutely be seeing her again.

Pray For Him took a long time, but I think it took the time it needed. And I’m amazed it’s been five years since I first put proverbial pen to paper.

First month results

This is the numbers portion, so please do skip it if you don’t want to know! However I do think transparency is cool and it can help people understand the lay of the land. So here we go:

• Pray For Him got 50 preorders between June 9 (when they were announced) and release (October 1)

• As of October 31, I sold 142 copies (82 ebook, 38 Amazon paperbacks, and 22 Ingram paperbacks)

• There were 9,170 page reads on Kindle Unlimited for the month, which is roughly the equivalent of a bit under 23 full reads of the book

• This totals around $600 CAD across all formats, with ebooks being the most lucrative, followed by Amazon paperbacks, KU reads, and then Ingram paperbacks

• Pray For Him has been added to Goodreads 512 times

• Bonus: my top jurisdictions for sales are the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia; for KU page reads, the top jurisdictions are the US, the UK, Italy, Canada, and Germany.

I’m still a little ways off from ‘earning out’ (revenues equivalent to what I spent on the production of the book), but I’m very happy with this as a first month! I’m not exactly making a ton, but a lot of people are buying and reading the book, which is all I could ask for, at this point.

Lessons learned

A few things were interesting to me that I learned in this process. There are two key themes that I learned a lot from and that I will be taking with me going forward:

• I’m so impatient that a long period between the announcement and the release drove me mad. I felt frustrated with talking about a book that most people couldn’t actually read yet! I saw some social media chatter that didn’t translate into preorders and wondered if it would have been different if the book was already available. Initially thought I might skip the preorder period altogether next time, except…

• The release day hype that people gave me made me so happy and made it worth it that I had done ARCs and a lead up period. Seeing people shouting about it on release day made my day.

  • Take away: I’ll probably still do a preorder and ARC period next time, but four months was way too long for me. I mostly did that long with Pray For Him because I wanted to announce on my birthday, which happens to be in Pride Month, as both a little gift to myself and to take advantage of Pride Month for marketing. I sent out ARCs in late July, which still gave a decent amount of time to read the book despite its length, I think, so I could do a shorter period next time with similar results but less madness.

• Ingram Spark feels difficult to predict and takes a lot longer to wrangle than you’d think! The cover requires a different spine width and a different colour profile (neither of which I realized initially), meaning a separate file, on a specific template, and that can also mess with your cover’s colours a bit if you aren’t prepared for it (Ingram tends to print darker). They also review your files instead of just automating it, so getting your files approved (or rejected, for that matter) can take time—the first time I submitted files, it took about a week and a half for approval, but another time it took 20 minutes, so it feels unpredictable. Physical proofs took quite some time to arrive, too.

• I have also heard of stories where Ingram can print whatever you initially approved for distribution (i.e. after proofs), so if you fix typos after initial approval but before release, there is a risk those who pre-ordered between updates may receive an out-of-date version.

  • Take away: because Ingram can be unpredictable, and because its royalties are much lower, it can feel like a hassle that isn’t worth it. I do like that my book is available in print wider than just Amazon (including hypothetically through indie bookstores and libraries), and it allowed for some preorders, but you need to plan in advance for Ingram and be basically 100% sure before you submit things and give yourself buffer to receive proofs and do quality checks. In order to have paperbacks available beforehand while waiting for Ingram, and knowing sometimes preorders on Amazon from Ingram can cause problems with the two platforms fighting it out (the only loser is you), I released my Amazon paperback a few days early as a substitute for pre-orders, so that the book arrived around release day. I think this was a good approach and generated a little bit of extra hype just before release, so I’d like to do that again.

• I had a significant number of my KU reads in the first few days of release, so while it’s not the most lucrative platform, it did help the book get to readers who may not have otherwise bought it. I then saw another spike toward the end of the month! In general, it’s done better on KU than I thought it would.

  • Takeaway: As a debut author with a longer novel, I think KU helped my reach—the book isn’t necessarily expensive, but it’s long, so it’s a bit of a commitment, so I think having that option helped, especially as someone whose writing isn’t well-known. I’ll likely use KU for the initial period for other long-form releases to help get the initial push, as I can always take it out after the initial 90 day exclusivity. Plus, it makes it easier to participate in some sales events, which I’m looking forward to trying out!

In general, I also felt that the release experience for a full novel is very different from a short story. Obviously the marketing was different, but there was a much bigger splash for Pray For Him. However, I did get a small boost in sales on Amazon for my short story ebooks (and page reads for “And The Mountains Melt Like Wax”), which was great to see and goes to show how backlist can help keep up momentum!

What I’m working on now

I have a few WIPs on the go right now, as well as a few short stories coming out soon, so expect more news. The long-form work I’m most embroiled in right now is about a sort of messed up poly triad facing something that will really test them. I’m enjoying exploring how different traumatized people face life altering changes in different ways. I hesitate to give it a genre label yet, as it can’t precisely be called a romance. Dark urban fantasy, maybe? Regardless, I’m looking forward to more of these characters soon! I’ll likely start teasing that project more on my newsletter as it comes to fruition. I’m hoping for a novella or novel length release in 2025, but it’s too early to say for sure.

Thank you for reading, and until the next time! And of course, if you haven’t already checked out Pray For Him, you can find all its sale links here! Thank you to everyone for an excellent debut month and for your support.