Hi Mr. Howey,
You don’t know me, but my name is Matt Kadish. I’m an independent author, such as yourself, and I just wanted to write you to share a little success story you had a small part in.
Over the last four years, I worked on a Young Adult Sci-Fi Adventure novel called Earthman Jack vs. The Ghost Planet. It was my first novel which I’d tossed around for about a decade, but didn’t start writing in earnest until 2009. That’s when I sat down and said “Dag nabbit, I’m gonna finally write a novel!” I pitch it to people as “Harry Potter meets Star Wars” but it’s really a love letter to all the Spielbergian sci-fi I grew up loving in the 80s.
Anyway, when I finally finished the novel, I started looking for a publisher. Then my mother (who is also my editor) forwarded me a New York Times article on you. That article inspired me to just publish my book independently instead of breaking my back looking for a publisher to give it a shot. I published my book on Amazon at the beginning of July right before I left for a vacation. I didn’t think much about it, in fact, I didn’t even check the stats until last week after my mother kept bugging me about how many copies I’d sold. When I did check it, I almost fell out of my chair.
Without any promotion whatsoever, my first novel will have sold 1,000 copies in July. It’s debuted on 5 of Amazon’s top 100 lists, ranking #1 for Superhero Fantasy and in the 30s for Sci-Fi Adventure, both in the Kindle Store. It’s also #75 in the general Sci-Fi category on Kindle. For all books (e-book and print) it is again in the 30s for Sci-Fi Adventure and last I checked #81 overall in general Science Fiction. All the reviews so far have been 5-star, and people I don’t know are sending me messages telling me how amazing they think my book is. If the trend keeps up, as more of those 1,000 people who’ve bought the book keep recommending it to others, sales should virally increase over time (at least, that is my hope.)
I’m pretty much floored by the response the book has gotten so far. It’s a real inspiration and makes me want to continue to pursue my career as a novelist. It took me four years to write the novel because I had to work at another job while I did it, but now I’d like to focus all my efforts on just writing full time. I’m certainly not getting rich off book sales, but I’m encouraged by the outpouring of support from readers so far that I might actually have a knack for this.
Anyway, I figured you’d like to know you played a small part in this amazing little success story of mine. Your story was an inspiration and helped encourage me to take that leap into self publishing and see what could become of it. So I just wanted to thank you. I know you probably get lots of emails from people, so I’m not expecting you to actually read this or care, but I thought I owed it to you to at least let you know.
Hopefully, someday soon, I can join you in those top charts for the genre. I really enjoyed your Wool Omnibus, and thought it was a great story. Hopefully my work can live up to that level of success. :)
Yours truly,
Matt Kadish
Author: Earthman Jack vs. The Ghost Planet
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