Being the youngest child in the family, I don’t know what it feels like to be a firstborn. Having no live children, I also don’t know what it feels like to have a firstborn.

But I do have 2 baby books, and might be able to share my experience of giving birth to the firstborn and watch her grow.

First, I must admit that I sometimes forget my firstborn. Or maybe forget is the wrong word. ‘Give up’ sounds more like it, and it does sound more cruel, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing. I went into labor without any help, as far as marketing went. All I had was my own guts and a naive imagination of what life would be after giving birth to my first book. None of which helped, of course, and the latter didn’t even come close to the reality.

I did not have any beta readers for my first book. All I had was my mother/editor/alpha reader. I’m not saying this is a mistake; some people might be good enough not to need any other help but from an editor/one alpha reader. My problem was (one of many others) that I wrote about something I didn’t know.

The setting for my first book is Louisiana, USA, and I’ve never been to USA, let alone Louisiana. So I should have probably hired a local editor from that state. I didn’t, simply because I didn’t have the money. I was sane enough not to think that I would strike it rich with my first book, so I didn’t want to spend any savings for something I haven’t tested. And yet, in doing so, I probably just made things worse.

Having no beta readers mean that there was no one to tell me if there was something wrong with the story. I trust my mom/editor, but she is just one person. Sometimes we miss things. The advantage of having several beta readers is that one of these people might catch some oddities you/your editor don’t. Again, nobody told me about this before, so I went into the water without any beta readers.

Which also meant that there was no one to give me those ‘crucial’ reviews/testimonials/endorsements when my book just came out.

Imagine this: you see a nice looking book, read the preview at the back & got a bit interested, and try to find out if anyone has read it/if they liked it… and you found none. You read the author’s name again, and realized you’ve never heard of that person before. As you try to look for more info about the author, you found nothing either! What would make you invest your time and money to read a book no one has ever heard of, by an author no one has ever heard of?

Nothing.

And I learned all that only after my firstborn book was out. I thought I was prepared for everything and ready to sell. I waited in anticipation and religiously checked my sales report, while trying my best to market it on my social media platform (which also had no followers as yet). I’m sure you know where this is going. Yep. Downhill.

I won’t lie. I felt that slap in the face, hard. And I noticed I wasn’t the only one. Some people made the same decisions (again, not mistakes) and one by one, I saw them disappearing from the same social media platform, pulling back their books from the circulation at the same time. The authors and their books ceased to exist, just like that.

I thought of doing the same, many times. But I thought I’d stick around just a little more, and resorted to plan B, which in my opinion is also a sad fate for self-published authors: have a free promotion for the book.

Trust me, when you’ve written a book, pour out your heart & soul to it, the last thing you’d want to do is let people read it for free. And they shouldn’t, in the perfect world. You should know your worth, and your book is your artwork, and that is priceless.

But we don’t live in the perfect world, do we? And sometimes, you need to–ugh–beg. By begging, I mean do that f-in free promotion, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will read it and give your book a review (I didn’t even care what review, good or bad was all welcomed!). At least this way you’d know that the review is based solely on your book, not a sugar-coated version you’d get when you pay for a review.

To my surprise (I mean really, it did take me by surprise), the reviews did start to come… and none of them were as bad as I thought.

So I did this begging technique a few more times, especially since a year after my firstborn was out, the lockdown had just started everywhere. I thought that was the perfect timing for people to start reading, and if I could help in any way to ease up their days (with a free psychological thriller book, no less), then why not?

This was when I started to get even more surprised.

By this point, I started to notice how some reader, instead of using the free promotion, decided to purchase my book instead. Was it because I already had a few reviews for it? Was it because of the friends I made in the social media? Was it just because of the book cover (which I also really love)? Whatever it was, it was working.

Finally, my firstborn started to stand on her own feet.

When my second book was born, I decided not to have a free promotion. At least for now, I want to keep my self-worth and put a price to my books. I put everything I learned from not having a successful firstborn to launching my second book baby, and was ready to reap the profits.

At first, that was what it looked like. I got better & quicker sales than I did for my firstborn, reviews poured in quicker too, and all of this was without doing any free promotion. Feeling like I knew how to do it properly this time made me concentrate completely on my second book baby. I neglected my firstborn and, like I said, gave up on promoting it in any way.

But my firstborn is smart. I’m still not quite sure how she does it, but just when I gave up on her, she started running around the world barefeet.

Whenever I put both of my books for a countdown sale, my firstborn somehow convinced people that she was worth the read, too–sometimes even more than my second book. When there isn’t any promotion going on, she manages to make people read her on Kindle Unlimited, or even buy her for the full price.

As a mother, I am pleasantly surprised. To see that some new readers notice the book I had given up on, read it, and even put some reviews for it… there’s no greater feeling than that.

I guess in a way it’s my firstborn’s way of saying, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

And I am a proud Mama. Truly.

Thank you for giving my firstborn a chance, even when her own mother had been neglecting her.