I recently re-released Mixed Tidings as a duology, splitting it into two books: Tidings of Hardship and Tidings of Hope. I did this for a couple reasons.
- I wanted to offer free giveaways on Amazon.
- I was concerned that potential readers who had never heard of me would be dissuaded by how long Mixed Tidings was before I split it up.
- Several authors had written in their own blog that they had more success publishing books as a series.
When I first published Mixed Tidings, I thought I would be better off if I distributed it to as many retailers as possible (via Smashwords, Ingram Spark, etc). I also read several articles advising that I buy my own ISBN instead of one provided by a distributor. So I purchased 10 barcodes from Bowker and assigned one to the electronic copy of Mixed Tidings and a second to the paperback. However, because Mixed Tidings was not exclusively published on Amazon and because I was using my own barcodes, I was not eligible for Amazon’s KDP Select program. And the only way I could give my book away for free was to be in the KDP Select program. Amazon sells more books than any other retailer. And there are a lot more people who will read a book by an author they’ve never heard of before if the book is free than if it costs even a nominal amount. Mixed Tidings was at ninety-nine cents for two months and I sold all of thirty copies. I ran a three-day giveaway for Tidings of Hardship and “sold” just over a thousand copies.
The print version of Mixed Tidings is over 400 pages long and over 138,000 words. That’s a lot of words for a first-time author. By contrast, Tidings of Hardship is 47,000 words — a much easier commitment to make to an unknown author. And if a reader doesn’t enjoy the book, there’s no reason to bother looking at the next book in the series.