What Should I Do?

I spent a lot of time in 2014 and early 2015 working card to collect real-life paranormal stories from regular people from all over the world. Some of the people were students, teachers, librarians, firefighters, ex-military, and one was even a former KGB agent!

I didn't want to make a book that only had ghost stories, I didn't want all of the stories to be from the United States either. I wanted to make the book as interesting as possible, I wanted to give readers the chance to read about all different kinds of amazing paranormal things from all over the world, many of which I had never heard of until I started meeting lots of new people and did a lot of research.

In late 2014 I contacted a renowned book agent in New York. I told him about my book and he told me to email him a "sell sheet". So I quickly started putting one together, making it as good as I could. At that same time I began hearing some really interesting stories. I already had 50 and thought about saving the newer stories for a future book, but I decided to put them in "Cliff's Mysteries" so the book would have 60 stories and be even better!

I emailed the sell sheet to the agent, and he quickly responded, telling me that while he thought it was interesting, he said it sounded like a typical book full of ghost stories, and that he as a well known agent was looking for something different. But I haven't been abducted by aliens so my book wasn't what he was looking for. Even though he had only seen the sell sheet and never actually looked at the stories!!!!! Now I can see how JK Rowling had such a tough time trying to publish her first book in the "Harry Potter" series.

That got me down a bit so I contacted some successful authors. I was surprised with their response. All three of them told me that my best option was probably to self-publish my book, because agents aren't nice people, they're in it for the money, and it's hard to get published unless you have a lot of connections are are already well known professionally.

I listened to their advice, self-published my book, gave a few copies to my family who said that they liked it......but that's what family always say! They're not going to say anything bad even if it was the worst book ever.

Since it was published in early February 2015, people have only bought a handful of copies. The book cost a little over $10 each and I get around $2 per sale, so since February I've only made around $10 from book sales, far less than the $100 needed for the publisher to send me a check.

I started posting the stories and others onto my paranormal blog and here on Cosmo Funnel, and from the number of views each of the stories receive and the great comments people write, it seems like my book is good. Lots of strangers like the stories so I don't know why nobody ever wants to buy my book. Do you have any suggestions as to how I can possibly increase my book sales?

-Should I give away some copies in exchange for reviews?