Indie Summary for 2025

TL:DR Past blog posts:

After wrestling the rights to The Dredes series out of my failing publisher’s hands, I went on a Self-Pub spree and rapid released horror books that have been stacking over the years.

And here’s how it went…

I started with The Night Dredes in August and The Day Dredes two weeks after that. I had promos lined up for The Night Dredes. A BookBub promo (not the good one, just one of their newer promos), I did a new book promo and free book promo later that month with Written Word Media. They are by far the easiest to work with and have the most reasonable prices. That being said, Not a whole lot happened.

The Night Dredes got the free book promo and I was able to give away 900 copies and it resulted in a whopping two reviews for The Night Dredes and one review for The Day Dredes. No one has yet to buy the third in the series yet.

I realize success doesn’t happen overnight so I’ve been working on my Instagram platform and plan on building a Facebook platform in 2026.

After The Dredes came out, I released Husk! Which has yet to sell a single copy. Due Diligence and The Ivy Noose followed in the months after and here are my takeaways…

Rapid Release was a popular method at some point and maybe still is in other genres, but unfortunately for horror, it’s not helpful. And it makes sense. As a horror reader, I don’t read a horror book then go and buy all the others from the same author. I don’t know why I don’t do this, since I do it with fantasy, but here we are.

Also, readers wanting a ghost story may not want a monster story or a dark academia, so this also tracks.

The other thing I learned is that you never know which story will take off. While the free book promo didn’t help with The Night Dredes, I did the same promo for Due Diligence and over 1900 copies were downloaded. Since then, readers have been going on Kindle Unlimited and reading it as well as the Ivy Noose from there.

Even after the free promo ended, people were buying the book at full price and I’ve accumulated over a thousand pages read in December alone. Currently, it’s my third most rated book, and those reviews only happened this month!

Six months and seven books later, I’ve determined there isn’t much of a reason to rush future releases. So instead of rapid release, I’ll be building anticipation and cultivating ARC reviewers on Instagram. It’s something I wanted to try but wasn’t possible with rapid release. This gives me time to acquire more reviews on my current books as well.

That also gives me more time to query my latest project, The Cuckoo’s Nest. Who knows, maybe this is the year…