Kia ora! (that’s Kiwi or New Zealand speak for hello!)

Thank you for having me here. So…I believe we’re talking digital publishing? I’ve been writing for a long time, and I struggled for years to find an agent and/or publisher. I was sick of waiting 6 months to a year or even longer, only to have rejection after rejection. Close to giving up, I saw a submissions call by Samhain Publishing for sweet novellas for an anthology, and decided to give it a go. My story was accepted, and since then I haven’t looked back.

Over 50% of books are now read on digital devices. The first person to convince me that digital is not the poor man’s print was author Maya Banks. You can read her fascinating article about print v digital here:

I’ve had several books published now with Samhain and also with Noble Romance, Entangled Publishing and Lyrical Press. What do I love about digital publishers? Firstly, they’re quick to reply to submissions. Most digitals publishers get back to a writer within 4 months, and most of those are a lot quicker than that. Secondly, your book gets onto the e-shelves a lot more quickly than with print. With Samhain and Lyrical it’s around a year from submission to publication—Entangled and Noble Romance were a lot quicker. Thirdly, the royalties are higher! Usually anything from 25-40%. And that can’t be bad 🙂

My latest venture has been to dip my toe into the world of self-publishing. I decided to do this because a) I wanted to offer readers a chance to sample my work at a low price, in the hope they’d then go on to buy my other books, and b) I wanted to try the self-publishing system to see what the process was like, as many of my writer friends have self-pubbed with astounding results. It worked on both accounts.

I chose the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Select system as you get 5 free promotional days with it, and I was just about to go on a blog hop and thought it would be a great time to offer those who came to my blog a read for free. I chose Stranded with a Scotsman, a novelette of 13,000 words, to try, which is a sweet contemporary romance that a publisher had turned down, but which I was convinced had some merit. I couldn’t afford an editor, but I’ve learned a lot over the past two years from my editors, enough to feel confident enough that I don’t write too badly on my own, so I polished and polished it myself, then had a friend proof-read it for me.

I made a cover on Powerpoint, joined Shutterstock, spent hours looking at pictures of semi-naked men in the name of research, downloaded a picture I liked, added text, and saved it as a jpeg. Wrote the blurb, polished, polished. Then uploaded the whole lot to Amazon. Chose 99 cents as a price because it’s so short. Within 12 hours, the book was up!

Over the first three days, I didn’t market it at all on purpose, and it sold 7 copies, bought by friends in the RWNZ. Then the following day I started the 5 day free promotion, at the same time as I started the blog hop. I advertised it on my Facebook page (which has just under 200 fans) and on Twitter.

Over the next five days, 23,500 people downloaded the book for free. I spent those days in a haze of disbelief. It reached No. 5 in the top 100 free Kindle contemporary romances. It was more than I’d ever hoped for.

I had a fear that as soon as it came off the free promotion, I wouldn’t sell a single copy! But the day the promotion finished, it sold 86 copies. Since then it has continued to sell over 100 copies a day. As I write this, it is at No. 1 in the romance short stories category on Amazon.uk, and 57 in the top 100 contemporary romances on Amazon.com.

I included a few pages of one of my Samhain books, White-Hot Christmas, in the back of the book, and my ranking for this book has risen from 350,000 to 16,000, so it’s definitely worked as a marketing tool.

I love digital publishing. And the whole self-publishing endeavour has been a revelation. People are buying my book – and saying they love it – and it’s all my own work. I love my digital publishers, but it has been so refreshing to have such an achievement with something I’ve done completely by myself.

Anyway, that’s my humble opinion. Digital publishing rules! Stranded with a Scotsman is available on Amazon price 99 cents.

Serenity

Stranded with a Scotsman is a “second chance at love” novelette. This is a sweet romance with some adult themes and language.

Blurb:

Lady Victoria (Cori) Spencer doesn’t particularly mind being stuck in a refuge hut three feet above the rising tide in the middle of the night. She’s fallen in love with Lindisfarne, the tiny island off the north-east coast of England that’s isolated from the mainland by the sea twice a day. The problem is that she’s not alone. She’s stranded in a ten-by-four-foot wooden box for four hours with Ewan Macbeth, and that’s not going to end well. She’s either going to kill him or kiss him—and she’s not sure which option is the most likely.

Ewan flew back from the States when his sister told him Cori had become engaged to a man she didn’t love just to please her father. The Earl once threw Ewan out when he found him kissing his daughter, prompting her to end their relationship. Ewan’s never forgotten her, though, and in spite of the fact that he’s certain there can never be anything between them again, he’s damned if he’s going to let her marry a man who doesn’t appreciate her.

With only a bottle of Lindisfarne mead, a crab sandwich, and Angry Birds to keep them company, the two of them end up playing a game of Truth or Dare that forces Cori to accept the truth about her relationship with her fiancé, and Ewan to push her to the very limits to admit her feelings for him.

Bio

Serenity Woods lives in the sub-tropical Northland of New Zealand with her wonderful husband and gorgeous teenage son. She writes fun, flirty, and sexy romances in a variety of romantic sub-genres. She’s won several writing competitions and is a member of the Romance Writers of New Zealand. She would much rather immerse herself in reading or writing romance than do the dusting and ironing, which is why it’s not a great idea to pop round if you have any allergies. You can check out all her books at www.serenitywoodsromance.com.

Links

Website: http://www.serenitywoodsromance.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/serenitywoodsromance

Twitter: @Serenity_Woods

Amazon Page: http://www.amazon.com/author/serenitywoods