[jaxonreed]

Welcome aboard. Ask 10 authors and you'll get 10 different opinions. Everything below is my opinion.

Yes, pay for a proof edit. Sounds like you've done a good job on the draft. Look on here for services with flat rates of $150 a book or so. Worth the money.

Formatting is a personal choice. The easy route is to buy Vellum if you have a Mac. Well worth the money. The cheap route is to use Microsoft Word and Calibre. If you go that route be sure and double check Amazon's conversion after it's uploaded.

As for paying for advertising, like NotJohn said your book is a drop in the bucket among millions. Personally, I would limit my ad budget for two reasons. One, as a new author no one will take a chance on you unless your book is free or 99 cents. You can't recoup your ad at that level. If you had more in a series at full price and the free or bargain first in series served as a hook to lure readers in, then it's a different story. But right now you just have the one book. So, ads you buy will not recover the spend (and they often don't anyway).

Somebody once suggested not to spend any money on ads until you have at least three books out. I think that's still good advice. But if you must spend money to get your book in the hands of readers, I would personally set a budget of $100 and stick with top sites. I would start with Bargain Booksy in their UF newsletter, with the book priced at 99 cents. Expect somewhere between 50 and 100 downloads, maybe more maybe less that's just a ballpark guess.

Urban Fantasy is a fine genre with lots of devoted fans. The key to success in genre fiction is volume. Produce, produce, produce. It may not be what you want to hear, but one solitary book with nothing else for readers to sink their teeth into does not typically bring in consistent money. Exceptions exist, as with everything of course. Nail your cover since that's what people look at first. Write a fantastic blurb with lots of action verbs, leaving the reader with a strong desire to purchase the book. Price it at 99 cents so it gets legs. Then start and finish your sequel. Rinse and repeat.

 

[jaxonreed]

First and foremost, thank you for the heart warming welcomes and advice posted. I really appreciate it. Yes, the services I'm looking at are on the cheap side. The main reason being is that from all the research I've done, I'm quite aware that trying to get a single book successful from a debut author in this day and age (no matter how good the book is) is like trying to win the lottery, which makes apprehensive about splurging too much on the book as I'm cautious that the odds are not in my favour of this book doing well so I'm trying limit my losses, basically. I guess this is a bit of a loser mentality, but after doing music for years and not really getting anything from it, my mentality is skewed. So another question, in my position,

1. In my position, is it better to do KDP select?
2. Should I sell my for free, 0.99 or more?
3. I noticed book formatting mentioned, what is that? Is it making the book format to be read on kindles/tablets etc?

I think I should get a good few sales off my work colleagues so that will give me a good start but I couldn't say a solid number. I wanted to sell the book a bit higher (say, 2.99) to help recoup expenses but will that put off potential readers/buyers? I'll post my blurb to get some critique shortly. I'm not sure if I should start a new thread or just put it in here. Thanks again guys.

I'm going to say go into KDP Select and price it at 99 cents. You'll get 35 cents for each sale, but more when someone in KU reads through your book, depending on how long it is.

You can certainly experiment with a variety of things such as different prices and going wide when your 90 day commitment to Select is up. But in my opinion, for a first book I would definitely go Select and price at 99 cents to get it off the ground. You likely won't ever recoup expenses on this book unless and until you write more books under the same pen name and in the same genre.

While in Select, Amazon lets you price the book for free for 5 days. This allows you to get it out there in the hands of people. Hopefully they'll read it and leave reviews. I would not try to go permafree since you have no follow up books yet. Permafree is a strategy to hook readers into a series. They read the first book free then hopefully pony up the cash for the next ones in the series. You will just have the one book, so there's no point in making it permafree at the moment.

Book formatting involves submitting the manuscript to Amazon in a format they can convert to be read by a Kindle. It's also referring to the logistics of the electronic text with things like spacing between paragraphs, division breaks, the way chapter headings look, justified margins or not, etc. Programs like Vellum do it all for you hassle free, and will also format the book for printing if you ever decide to go that route.