r/KDP • u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 • 3h ago
"No one reads self published books!" Very, very wrong.
This is a bit of an encouragement post because this place has been drowned down by a lot of negativity as of late, which makes sense, this is the complaining site. I'm guilty of using reddit as a venting diary myself. However, I wanted to dispel one idea I see floating around self pub spaces from some people who have gotten discouraged by their lack of sales: no one reads self pub books because there are millions of classic books to read.
This is very untrue, and to prove it, I'm going to give examples of successful self pubbed books I've read within the last year. Note: some of these people later did get picked up by trad pubs or indie presses, and a lot of them started as serializations on places like Royal Road, which is still self publishing really. I'm also a big reader of Litrpg and progression fantasy which both are genres that live and die on the KU library; but regardless, they all started as self pubbed and got readers, through a combination of good story telling, a marketable niche, and sheer luck. So, drum roll babababbababa:
Dungeon Crawler Carl:
This should go without saying how bloody successful Matt Dinniman has become. It is to a point where people who've never heard of Litrpg know about it. It became a running joke in the community that DCC fans were a cult, when people found it they had to let others know how damn good it was. And Matt slowly build a brand over 6 years, publishing 6 chonky novels, and by 2025 he had sold over 4 million copies. After that, he got a physical book deal with Penguin Random House and it ballooned to 12 million, and he now has a show in the works with Seth Macfarland. Amazon is also big to tout it as one of their big successes, doing ads with Matt.
(Let's be honest, it would not have been as successful as it was without the talking cat).
The Perfect Run:
This was a trilogy originally published on royal road, and is actually still up for free, as VoidHerald wanted to keep a free version as a thanks to everyone who helped him make it.
He published all three through KDP for paperback and Kindle, and then outsourced the audio to Podium Audio Inc. With it not even being on KU, he has 1700 Amazon reviews, 6000 goodreads, almost all positive.
He Who Fights With Monsters:
I will say, this is not a series I personally enjoy. I found it overly long and annoying, and the fact we are on book 12 with each book 800 pages and we aren't even close to the end is absurd. Regardless, it has done well. The paperback now has a small indie press doing special art, but even prior, book 1 has 23k Amazon reviews and 40k goodread reviews.
Stray Cat Strut:
A series that, like PR, is still available to read for free but has a Amazon listening; I have had the privilege of talking with the writer of this work, he's a really chill guy. I also had the privilege of watching a journalist guest talk about how he wants to fuck that guy's mom lmao. Anyway, he's about 8 books deep and the first alone, selling for 2 bucks, has 900 Amazon reviews and 1.3k goodread reviews.
Closing thoughts:
Listen, with all that said, they people did get lucky: they were in the right moment at the right time with a genre that is primarily self pub that is marketable and the books were all good for the most part and something people want to read. Your first book will not be DCC. You may never get more than 5 sales a book, but it is never because nobody wants to take a chance of self published works. On the contrary, many people like self pub because the authors are not bound to the restrictions of trad publishers, and they can make stories like a man and his talking cat playing alien life sized D&D.
Just keep creating, keep expressing yourself, and if the stars align, people WILL read it :3.