Dead Stock

Relaunching the Books You Already Wrote

You have three to eight books earning nothing. They aren't a finished failure. They're inventory.

Dead Stock is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. The writing is done, the file is finished, the money is spent, and the only remaining question is whether the packaging around the words was ever tested. This book covers the recovery.

This is the cheapest action available to any author with a backlist, and it's honest about the limits of repackaging rather than promising a new cover fixes everything.

What's inside:

• How to tell which titles in a stalled backlist are worth reopening, and which are not
• The order of operations for a relaunch, from cheapest test to full commitment
• What a new cover and a new category can and cannot do for an ignored book
• How to turn orphaned standalones into something that reads as a series
• The difference between a book nobody found and a book people found and declined
• What to do with a title that genuinely isn't worth reopening

This is not a promise that a new cover fixes an ignored book. What it will do is show you how to test that question cheaply, on titles you've already paid to write, before you decide whether they're worth the reopening.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.