Brand New Top Selling Fantasy Novel Electrify Me

My name is Erica Stanciu. I'm a twenty four year old nursing student living in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was lucky enough to find the love of my life at the young age of nineteen. We've been together ever since then. Both of us live in a beautiful two story house with our cat Mischief but soon we'll have a little person moving in. That would be our child who will be brought into this world on July 7th, 2012 (hopefully).

I grew up in Jamison, Pennsylvania which is a little farming community two hours away Philadelphia. Living there was simply amazing. Everyday my parents would take us to the dairy farm where we would get fresh ice cream. My favorite was pink bubble gum because it was like two treats in one. After eight years we decided that a warmer climate would be nice so, all of us packed our bags and moved to Las Vegas. When I say all of us, I mean all of us. My grandparents, Aunt, Uncle, two cousins, great aunt, great uncle, second cousins, third cousins...you get the picture.

Everyone that moved to Las Vegas was on my father's side of the family. My mother's side lives in New york which means I have some pretty cool summers. Eating pizza until I exploded was just one of the many ways I use to enjoy New York.

My brothers and I were the first generation of children born in the United states from our family. Both sets of grandparents and our parents were born in what was formally known as Yugoslavia. Their little town was called Lokve and everyone spoke Romanian. After Yugoslaiva broke up my family's town now lies in the territory of Serbia but we'll always consider ourselves Yugoslavian.

That brings me to my next topic. I am bilingual and so is one of my brothers. My first language was Romanian and my second was English. I have no accent but my grandparents do. It's okay though because it's barely noticeable.

I'm proud to be American and also love my Yugoslavian heritage. There are some unique cultural ideas that we still follow, along with amazing food recipes that I haven't been able to find anywhere else. Knowing what it's like for my grandparents and parents to struggle as immigrants really makes working for my dreams worth it. If they could turn nothing into something then so can I.

That led me on my journey to become an author.

My journey of first becoming an author started in March of 2011. I bought a phone for my birthday that came with a handful of apps. One of those apps was Wattpad.com. I read through a bunch of free stories and soon came to realize that these were people, around my age, posting stories on a free website.

One day I was reading and told my friend I hated the ending of a story. Her exact words were, "Well if you think you can do better than write your own story."

Instead of being offended, I took her advice and started to write out Electrify Me. I posted the story on Wattpad and got a fantastic response. Once the story was about half way done I decided to take it down so I could perfect the grammar, plot, and dialogue. Needless to say, my fans wanted more so I tried out a few romance novels. They were hooked.

Five stories later and almost 4,500 I knew that it was time to edit my story. With the honed skills of writing I immediately got to work. It took 3 months to finish my novel and another two to edit it. Once that was done I knew the next step was to find an agent. Little did I know how heart breaking that process was.

I purchased a membership to Writersmarket.com and started to seek out agents in my genre. Twenty-five submissions later I still hadn't heard back from any of them. After about two weeks later that's when the rejections started to pour in. They all basically said, "My client list was full. Have a great day."

I was so upset that I put months into writing this novel when all these people could write me were two sentences. I know agencies are busy but that didn't stop me from feeling a bit hurt. Finally, after another wave of rejections I decided it was time to work on self-publishing. The skills of becoming an entrepreneur that I learned from my family kicked in. Now was not the time to throw a pity party instead, I did research.

Here are the steps I took to self-publish and how I've promoted my work so far:

1. First I made sure that my book was perfect. Nobody wants to purchase a book only to see a spelling or grammar mistake on each page. It gets annoying as a reader so I wanted to make sure and deliver high quality work. I also made a cover with my mom (who is a pro while using Potoshop). You can get free images off of Allposters.com which is what we did.

2. Then Google became my best friend. I used Google to find the best site where I wanted to publish my book. I eventually decided on Amazon.com since it was free and available digitally. Plus, the Kindle Fire was coming out which meant a ton of people were going to be buying ebooks. What better way to start the New Year than having your book be on someone's new holiday gift?

there were other great sites like lulu.com, smashwords.com, and many others but Amazon reaches over one billion people and I liked those odds. They even translated my book into eight other languages, free of charge.

3. The next thing I did was quickly learn how to upload my book so that it could be converted to an ebook. Amazon did a great job of walking me through the process while making it very simple. I was extremely pleased with the end result. In less than forty eight hours my book was already available.

4. After that I started to search around for the best information on how to price my book. Many people said to do it for free but there was no way that was happening. I also saw many author's put their books for 1.99 because you make 70 % royalties on that. Basically meaning you get around 1.25$ for each book you sell and Amazon keeps the rest.

I knew most of the people on Wattpad were very young so I went with the price of 0.99 cents. That way everyone could afford it. Besides, my main goal is to get my books in the hands of readers. I want to make some profit but not empty their parent's wallets. On 0.99 cents you make 35% royalties which was fine by me. 0.35 cents will eventually add up.

5. Then came the promoting. I've already stated I had a huge fan base on Wattpad.com so, I asked those people to please buy a copy of my book. Most are only ten to fourteen years old so they didn't have access to money. However, I did see my sales increase drastically because of how supportive they were. Thank you readers!

Now, everyday I post something quirky on the site and remind my fans to purchase my book if they can (you can send mass messages to all your fans).

6. The next promoting idea was setting up a facebook fan page and taking out an ad. Most people think that would be expensive but you can set your own price. I do five dollars a day and have surprisingly gotten over 250 fans this way. They charge me 25$ every two weeks and I barely notice the dent in my bank account. It really does work.

Then, I interact with those fans on a daily basis. Usually asking them questions about my Novel or posting fun facts.

7. I think creating a website is a must. Again, this may seem expensive but it's only nine dollars a month. I use 1&1.com which is an amazing site for beginners like me. They walk you through everything. Making it takes a lot of time but it's not confusing at all.

On this website I did a biography, news, purchasing information, pictures, a weekly blog, and contests. The contests are the biggest thing. My first one is having people create a character for my next novel (Electrify Me is a four book series). They will be featured in novel, have a thanks written to them at the end of my book, and receive a signed copy for free. I'll talk about paper back novels soon and how that helps with sales.

8. Blogs, blogs, and more blogs. Search around google and you'll find tons of blogs and websites that will allow you to post your novel on there. I use Bookblogs.ning.com and bargainbooks.com. These sites are a great help. Do I actually know if sales come from these sites? No idea but, the important thing is that you're getting your name out there and the name of your novel. When somebody searches in google you'll have a million things pop up about you. That's definitely a plus.

9. Give a preview of your book on free writing websites. I have a preview of the first five chapters on Wattpad.com but that's not the only site. I also use Inkpop.com, Booksie.com, and Quizilla.com. Don't worry about copyright issues. Once your book is published on Amazon then you are considered the owner.

10. Creat a Squidoo. Seriously, this thing is awesome.

11. Now comes the paperback part. I used Createspace.com to make my novel into paperback form. It's very simple and doesn't cost anything to start. You upload your book, cover image, and they even give you a free ISBN. They are a ship on demand site which means that your book won't be printed until people order it. That really saves you a lot of money.

Also, you can print your own novels and have them shipped directly to your house. You would think this is expensive but it's not. for instance, my novel, Electrify Me, is 330 pages. It costs 2.30$ to print one and 5$ to ship. The more books you purchase the more of a discount you get. I also upgraded to the pro plan which is 39$ a year. That's not a bad price considering you get the books for a lot less when they print which means more money in your wallet.

The plus side to all of this is that Create space makes your book available for worldwide distribution. They send it to Instagram (largest book distributor) who in turn ships it to Barnes and Nobel and many other books stores. Even libraries! Your book is also instantly put on Amazon where you set the price. It's just an all around win-win situation.

11. And remember, interact! you need to keep up with all your promotions by interacting with people. Use all your social media to talk to potential buyers, post on websites so your name is out there, and talk to fans. It really does help. Don't slip up now. Try at least to work an hour a day on promotions and you should do great.

Good luck everyone and I hope this helped.