Trawler Speed: What My First Week as a Self-Published Author Taught Me
There’s something strange about publishing a book.
One week after publishing my first novel, here's what I've learned about waiting, watching numbers, and moving at trawler speed. For months—years, really—you work toward one particular moment. You write the story. Rewrite it. Edit it. Read it again. Change things you were certain you had already changed. Design covers. Order proofs. Build a website. Learn about ISBNs, distribution, formatting, advertising, and a dozen other things you never thought about when you first sat down and decided to write a novel.
Then one day, the book is published.
And you wait.
I’m not entirely sure what I expected to happen when Journey of a Salty Soul was released. I certainly wasn’t expecting fireworks. I’m an unknown author publishing my first novel, and I understood from the beginning that getting a book into the hands of readers would take time.
Understanding that intellectually, however, is considerably different from staring at a dashboard filled with zeros.
Publishing has introduced me to an entirely new collection of numbers.
Sales. Rankings. Impressions. Clicks. Pages read. Royalties.
And when you're starting out, a surprising number of those numbers are zero.
You can spend an embarrassing amount of time staring at a zero, refreshing the screen as though Amazon might simply have forgotten to tell you something.
I may have conducted that experiment more than once.
But something happened today.
One of those zeros changed.
Someone, somewhere, opened Journey of a Salty Soul through Kindle Unlimited and began reading.
Two pages.
That was it.
Two Kindle normalized pages and approximately one penny in royalties.
I laughed.
Not because two pages or one penny is particularly impressive. They're obviously not. I laughed because after spending the past several days wondering whether anyone outside the people who already know me could even find the book, somewhere out there was a person I don't know who had opened it.
For a first-time independent author, that tiny bit of movement felt surprisingly significant.
At the same time, something else has been happening closer to home.
This morning I spoke with the woman who bought the very first copy of the book. She's already several chapters into Damian's story. I asked her for something every writer probably wants and fears at the same time: brutal honesty.
She told me she felt like she was right there in the story.
That meant considerably more to me than anything displayed on a dashboard.
Because that's what I wanted when I wrote this book.
I wanted readers to stand beside Damian at the marina. I wanted them aboard Salty Soul. I wanted them to feel the rivers, the Gulf, the Keys, the quiet anchorages, and those moments when a man begins wondering whether the life he's been living is necessarily the life he has to keep living.
If a reader feels like she's there, then maybe I accomplished at least part of what I set out to do.
Still, this first week has reminded me of something the water taught me long before I became an author.
Not every journey begins at full throttle.
Some begin at trawler speed.
A trawler doesn't throw an enormous wake behind it trying to prove how quickly it can reach the next harbor. It settles into a comfortable pace and keeps moving.
Mile after mile.
Hour after hour.
The shoreline changes slowly. The destination gets closer almost without you noticing.
And eventually, when you look behind you, you realize how far you've traveled.
Maybe building an audience for a book isn't all that different.
One reader.
One conversation.
One signed copy.
One review.
One page at a time.
There will be plenty to learn along the way. I'm already discovering that writing the book may have been the most straightforward part of becoming an author. Now I'm learning advertising, discoverability, bookstores, events, social media, and all the other things that happen after the manuscript is finished.
Some things will work.
Some won't.
And I'm fairly certain there will be many more zeros staring back at me before this journey gets very far.
That's okay.
The bow is pointed in the right direction.
We're underway.
And for now, I'm perfectly content traveling at trawler speed.
Fair winds,
Michael Hoskins
Salty Soul Chronicles