On Selling Books: 3 months of THE CORPSE PRIEST

by carson.winter | Jul 1, 2026 | Uncategorized

Writing the book is the easy part. What comes after is much harder—at least for me. All of us authors are always fighting for attention in a saturated market. It’s one of the most difficult things about this journey. Thousands, millions of books are written and released per year. How the fuck do I get anyone to care about mine? 

In the name of transparency, and to open an honest dialogue about real book sales, I thought it’d be fun to talk about my recent release with actual numbers and how they came to be. 

The Corpse Priest has been out for about three months now and I’m ecstatic with how it’s going. For a small indie release, through a friend’s press, where I did everything (including cover, editing, formatting, and marketing), it’s been great. But sales are a never ending game for the author, and I wanted to talk a little about how a modest sword-and-sorcery-and-horror novella has managed to outsell some of my other books. 

Before a layoff this spring, I was a full-time marketer. Now, you might think that makes me good at marketing, but really it just makes me fully understand all the ways I fail. My books have decidedly not gone viral. They have their audience of cool folks who like cool things, but ultimately, I write for a niche within a niche—and that’s okay. 

But I’ve learned a lot over the years and it’s been cool to see this hard-fought knowledge applied during the release of The Corpse Priest and net some results. 

First off though, let’s set some expectations. 

1. I am proud of how The Corpse Priest has sold, but let’s not pretend it’s a massive hit. The average indie book—according to oft-quoted, proverbial knowledge—averages less than 200 copies sold per year, and I’d be willing to bet that in horror, that number is much lower. Anecdotally, many authors struggle to sell even a 100 copies in their first year of release. I know this, because my first novella, Reunion Special, only sold 14 copies in 2020, and 84 copies in 2021. In its entire six year lifetime? A whopping 149 copies. So, 178 copies isn’t earth-shattering, but in three months, it has demolished what I’ve sold in six years. That’s pretty cool, right?
2. The Corpse Priest is a cross-genre horror novella. An author in another genre will likely have a very different experience, and I’d suspect that a full-length novel would sell much more. 
3. Salt Heart Press is P.L. McMillan’s publishing house which she graciously lets me use from time to time to release books. It’s not a full service press with lots of marketing and brand recognition. A larger press (and more famous author!) would undoubtedly have a lot more reach. 

Sales 

The first thing to establish is where I’m selling these books. I published the paperback and ebook through Ingramspark, while also publishing the ebook on Amazon. In addition, I’m selling copies directly from my website (both formats) and occasionally sell books at events too.

So, before I go into everything that I did to help get this book to sell, let’s see if we can draw some conclusions based on the numbers. 

First, Ingramspark accounted for the most sales with 85 total. In second place is my website with 72 sales. Positioning-wise, there’s a very good reason for this. As a small-time author, I collect a larger percentage of profit by selling directly, so in my initial announcement and cover reveal, I did my best to direct people to my website to take advantage of that interest and retain the largest cut of sales. I also incentivized sales at my website by pricing my ebook lower on my website ($4.99 vs. $7.99) and signing paperbacks for the same price as a regular, unsigned paperback on other platforms. 

This led folks to support me directly, not just because of the feel-goods, but because it was a better value offer. 

When I ran out of books from my initial order, I shifted my sales strategy to asking people to purchase it wherever they liked to buy books (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, etc.), while referring ebook readers to my website where the download was still available at the lower price. 

One surprise comes from the breakdown of ebook sales vs. paperback, but it makes sense in retrospect if we divine motivation through a little arm-chair psychography. 

Part of my sales pitch for this book is that I painted the cover myself. I’m no artist, but I think lots of folks in the horror community are absolutely sick of how generative AI continues to pop up in the publishing landscape. I wanted to make something deliberately handmade to counter the idea that anyone should use AI to create a cover to “save money.”

Seeing the breakdown above, it seems a lot of people agreed with me and that the cover urged readers to spring for the tangible copy. 

Of course, there’s a lot of guess work here. We can’t know for sure whether it was the cover, or the fact that a lot of people just prefer a real book. But if there’s one thing I know about the horror reading audience is that there’s significant overlap with the horror writing community—and it wouldn’t be out of line to attribute an affinity for something scrappy and DIY to the current zeitgeist. 

Attribution

While I can’t see where everyone came from to buy my books, I can see my website sales’ attribution. This is just one small slice of sales, but it does have some interesting data to reflect on. 

First off, let’s look at the two big elephants in the room: direct links and search engines. We can’t say with 100% accuracy what caused these two chunks to be what they are. But we can probably say that they’re an accumulation of marketing tactics. These are the people who had a link and followed it, or searched for my website and found it. They knew about the book and took action. 

Who are these people? 

A couple of guesses: 

• People who saw the announcement and for one reason or another went directly to my website or searched for it later when they were ready to purchase. 
• Fans! Readers who were already familiar with my work and needed little convincing. 
• Word of mouth sales and link sharing in private messages; recommendations between readers. 

Now, let’s get into the rest of it. 

While Salt Heart Press is a small publisher, we can absolutely see that having a publisher made a difference. It encourages a certain amount of trust with the reader, and also allows the author to collect some goodwill based on association. If someone liked one of the other books published by Salt Heart Press, they might see the release notice for The Corpse Priest and think they might like it too. 

Next, we have social media. I posted the initial announcement on four platforms: Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. To my surprise, relative upstart Bluesky (13.2%) gave me the greatest attributions for my website sales, with Facebook (3.8%) and Instagram (1.9%) following. 

Finally, my newsletter announcement gave me 3.8% of attributed sales. 

Marketing

So, how did these numbers happen in the first place?

Well, in a lot of ways. But it all really boils down to the initial pitch. 

For The Corpse Priest, I wanted to try something different from prior releases. I noticed that there’s a lot of excitement when a book is announced initially, with a lot of fervor especially when the cover is revealed. But, when it came to the release day, the enthusiasm largely felt as if it died down. There’s just too many books. By the time your cover is revealed, another fifty have gone through the same cycle. 

I wondered what would happen if I didn’t do any lead up. No blurbs, no cover, no big hints, and just laid it all out on release day. And that’s exactly what I did. 

For past releases, I’d gotten really positive feedback from doing longform threads on Bluesky where I discussed what a book meant to me—the influences, why I was writing it, genre, plot, everything. A sort of mini director’s commentary to give you, the reader, a sense of why I’m so excited about this thing, and by extension, why you should be too. 

Before the release, I typed out a big long sales pitch telling the story of the release, seeking to communicate everything I thought was cool about it. Touching upon:

• Its genre mashup of sword and sorcery and weird horror. 
• A quick plot description. 
• My history with fantasy fiction and how the initial idea came to be. 
• Comparisons with other media, as well as my other releases. 
• Why I did the cover art. 
• Why I chose to do a surprise release. 

With this information at hand, I think it made it very easy for people to decide if they were in for it or not. If the concept, the DIY behind the scenes hustle, or even the cover art alone grabbed you, I had links ready for the reader to convert that enthusiasm to a sale. 

There’s two bits of advice I received along the way that also guided my approach to this book’s marketing. 

1. Alex Woodroe, from Tenebrous Press, has at least once reminded me that books are out for longer for their release date. We tend to get caught up in first day/year/month sales. But the truth is that books are available for a long time. They’re constantly discovered, read, loved, and shared. 
2. After detailing my anxiety about sales for a different release, Sam Richard (Weirdpunk) told me, “every book sells one copy at a time.” It’s obvious, but it’s the truth. Every book is a relationship, and it requires discovery and nurturing, but most of all effort. 

As an indie author, I knew that I couldn’t afford to go big on my marketing budget, but I also knew there were lots of free or cheap ways to continue to beat the drum and put the pitch in front of people’s eyes. 

• I continually posted on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to share updates about the book, including positive reviews. 
• I asked Matt Blairstone from Tenebrous if he’d include a short pitch for The Corpse Priest in Tenebrous’ newsletter.
• I ran a FB ad for $50.
• I booked an interview with Arwyn Sherman’s newsletter.
• I designed graphics featuring my book tropes, sales celebrations, and review quotes to offer something new when I posted about my book.
• On the Dead Languages Podcast, we did an episode where I talked about the creation of The Corpse Priest from ideation to release. 
• I created a promotional video with me reading an excerpt using stock images. 
• Salt Heart Press owner P.L. McMillan hosted a digital release party and interview where I chatted about the book and gave away free copies. 
• RSL interviewed me on Fantasy-Hive. 

And the battle is never truly over. There’ll be more opportunities, more graphics, more interviews, more of everything. But one thing I can say right now is this—every little thing helped. 

In Marketing, there is a Rule of 7. It’s a pithy little reminder that repetition is part of the game. Apparently, it takes seven touchpoints before someone decides to pull the trigger on a purchase. This could very well be false—it might be anywhere between eight and a million. But the point stands, that when someone is ready for what you’re selling, they need to know about it before they can click Add to Cart. 

And you never know when someone is ready for your book. Maybe a fantasy-horror about a man named Corpse wasn’t someone’s idea of a good time on release day, but maybe it will be in a year, or two, or thirty. The best you can do is give it every chance to stick as you can. 

I hope this breakdown of The Corpse Priest’s first three months are illuminating and helpful. As an author, sales can be a scary subject. There’s little idea of what normal is or isn’t, but hopefully this will help you when it comes to the release of your own book. 

In true marketing form, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a link to where you can buy The Corpse Priest. Grab the ebook from my website, or traverse the wilds of the internet to buy it wherever you prefer to shop. 

Review: PRE-APPROVED FOR HAUNTING by Patrick Barb

by carson.winter | Sep 15, 2023 | Uncategorized

For many fans, the horror genre transcends the roller coaster-thrill of sitting in a dark theater, white-knuckling the arm rest. Given enough time, horror has a way of seeping into your bones and forming the lens of your perspective. Conversations on bodily autonomy reflect The Exorcist, consumerism becomes a re-enactment of Dawn of the Dead, and of course, death and human frailty loom over it all.

Horror becomes a tool, a series of building block-shaped tropes that fit together in such a way that we can assemble our own worlds and test our own dark hypotheses. We have no choice but to write horror—we know no other way. It’s become a part of us. 

I don’t know that Patrick Barb considers himself a postmodernist, but it’s worth noting that in his debut collection, Pre-Approved for Haunting, the lens applied is twofold—to that of the story and to that of its structural foundation. I’ve long been a fan of Barb’s unique take on horror fiction (read “Haunting Lessons,” please), because as an artist he is not only at ease with the fundamentals of the craft, but also: the reader gets the impression that he’s having fun while traipsing through the graveyard. Barb’s stories are full of human, lived-in moments, but these moments flourish in often absurdist distortions or deconstructed echoes of the genre itself. 

This is all to say that Patrick doesn’t just write horror stories—he also writes about horror stories. 

Pre-Approved for Haunting is an excellent collection of weird and dark fiction that explores both the genre and more immediate themes of violence, found family, and the supernatural. To say the collection is any one thing would be to discredit it—as there are a handful of stories in here that have little to say about the horror genre itself. But its heights are when Barb feels like a kid in a sandbox, a mummy in one hand and a vampire in another. The glee borne from this imaginative process is contagious. 

“A Portrait of the Artist as an Angry God” is an early standout that takes a haunted painting and runs it for the touchdown by emphasizing its father and son relationship, the idea of legacy, and some interesting insights into low and high art. “I Will Not Read Your Haunted Script” is a mind-bending monologue of sorts, as meta as the title announces, but extremely enjoyable nonetheless. The title story, however, might be the crown jewel of the collection, a brilliant deconstruction of the haunted house tale that asks poignant, yet simple questions of the reader to get them to consider what makes a house haunted. By the end, the story transforms from a playful romp through hallowed ground, into an exercise in inevitable dread. 

The final, and perhaps the most extravagant genre-experiment is “The Giallo Kid in the Cataclysm’s Campgrounds,” where Barb weaves together several disparate horror elements—the giallo, slasher, and apocalypse—to create a sort of Cabin in the Woods riff starring a killer in a Homer Simpson mask. It is, in a word, batshit. But in the good way. Barb excels when he’s juggling horror iconography, letting the pieces fall where they may, and then sketching in the sinew. 

My favorite story in Pre-Approved for Haunting though, breaks this mold in favor of bleaker subject matter and the elimination of genre navel-gazing. “Melvin and the Murder Crayon” is a dark tale about the death of a child by a trigger-happy resource officer and how the tragedy takes shape after the child’s death. The story is told across five pages, with plenty of scene breaks, creating the feeling of witnessing a flip book of snapshots—the initial violence, the press conference, the clean-up, and, of course, the titular crayon which takes on symbolic (perhaps supernatural) relevance. It’s a brilliant piece of horror fiction that is confrontational, empathetic, and sadly reflective of real life. 

As a whole, Pre-Approved for Haunting moves quickly. There’s a fair amount of flash fiction, and most stories run less than fifteen pages, giving the reader a sense of breathless revelation as they turn from one to another. I’m a big proponent of leaving novellas out of collections because of the dead stop they put on the pacing and I was happy to find that Barb’s debut is a well-sequenced sprint, rather than a stuttering crawl. 

Pre-Approved for Haunting is a book of horror stories written for horror fans. Barb dumps out his play-chest of slashers, hauntings, and monsters and asks you to see your own life built from the remnants of shrieking music stings and half-remembered direct-to-video rentals. Pre-Approved for Haunting shows us that horror, above all else, is a language. 

Review: HOUSE OF ROT by Danger Slater

by carson.winter | Jun 5, 2023 | Uncategorized

Weird fiction, so often, is a marriage between the supernatural and the absurd. It’s through this lens that we see some of its most striking works. Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes to mind, where a man becomes a bug and from that unreality blossoms a story that interrogates reality. This, ultimately, I like to think, is the goal of Weird fiction—to dismantle our surroundings with a soundly strange aberration. If you imagine your immediate world, and make one thing wrong, it necessarily calls into question the rightness of everything around it. Danger Slater’s House of Rot works in this vein, although to say it is a comrade of Kafka’s is to also say it has kin with Cronenberg, the bizarro movement, and many others who make ooey-gooey horror with social commentary. Ultimately though, most readers will just be satisfied with a fun, readable story, with gross-out moments to spare. House of Rot excels here as well. 

Slater’s novella centers around a young (but not that young) couple who have just moved into a new apartment. The first chapter explodes off the page with voice to spare. It is immediate, irreverent, funny, and slightly sinister. And really, I think it is Slater’s voice that is the unofficial third main character of House of Rot. He provides asides, dashes of humor, prophetorial exposition that makes the novella feel like it isn’t just a story, but an old story. A modern fable coming from the lips of an omniscient, streetwise smartass who’s seen it all before, and knows what horrors lurk beyond our immediate comprehension.

The crux of the story is our young couple coming to grips with the sheen of mold that at first appears as a disappointing flaw in their new living space, but then becomes its defining feature—locking them into their new apartment as the fungus spreads and spreads. All the while, their neighbor provides cryptic amusement while slamming down six packs of Hamm’s from a window. From there, things get gorey and gross as bodily functions are undermined in extravagant fashion. 

If this sounds strange, it’s because it is. House of Rot is a weird fucking book. But it’s also so grounded in the millennial experience it’s hard not to find it relatable. There’s lots of commentary in here about millennials growing older and still struggling to make good on the American dream. Our characters in House of Rot are in their thirties and still living in apartments. They shroud their frustration and insecurities with endless irony, even as they’re literally falling apart. Because of this, in spite of its exceeding weirdness, House of Rot feels deeply relevant. The rot here is imbued with a sense of time and place—namely, now—and through it we gain a thoughtful exploration of aging millennial malaise. 

But more importantly than all of that—House of Rot is plain old fun. I finished it in one sitting (In my apartment, two weeks from my thirty-third birthday. Yikes.) and found it to be lively and compulsively readable. It’s the sort of book that swallows you up, where you’re helpless to do anything but say to yourself: well, okay—maybe just one more chapter. 

House of Rot is a fast-paced, thoughtful, and hilarious novella that is an ode to a generation’s shared depression. Propelled by its author’s inimitable voice and energy, it manages to take the fun of body horror and elevate it into economic discourse that never feels like a righteous diatribe, or worse: an afterthought. 

Come for the Weird, stay for the ride—House of Rot drags its readers through a shared fever dream of apartment-sized proportions. 

SOFT TARGETS is coming March 22

by carson.winter | Mar 6, 2023 | Uncategorized

I am so excited to announce that SOFT TARGETS will be coming out via Tenebrous Press on March 22. This is a very personal book that is filled to the brim with strangeness, alongside some very person subject matter.

About SOFT TARGETS:

You know that office bromance: two of a kind, always taking their lunch together, always wearing the same sly grin. Only ever a hair away from a cold joke about how spreadsheets are a living hell; about taking a bullet if it means going home early on Friday. Sometimes in these fantasies, they’re heroes being hauled out on a stretcher. 

Sometimes they’re the ones pulling the trigger. 

Now, say these guys discover a loophole that makes some days less real than others—less permanent—and start to act out their violent fantasies without fear of reprisal. Why shouldn’t they? Tomorrow, everything will go back to normal, with no one the wiser but them. 

They’ll always remember what it felt like to act on their basest impulses. They’ll know how it could feel to do it again. 

Maybe you don’t know these guys. Maybe you don’t want to. 

SOFT TARGETS is a reality-bending novella about malignant malaise; the surrender to violence; and the addictive appeal of tragedy as entertainment.

Praise for SOFT TARGETS:

“A hell of a story…and damned funny—one of the most difficult things to pull off in a horror story, let alone one with such grim and taboo subject matter. I already knew Carson Winter was one of the best newer writers of the Weird, but with Soft Targets my admiration and expectations of his work have skyrocketed. Read this book.” 

• Jon Padgett (author, THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM)

“Carson Winter has crafted a stunning, darkly funny, and intensely disturbing look into the psyche of two young men barely getting by. At times, it feels like Fight Club for a new generation. Other times, it feels like the evening news…will make you laugh, cry, gasp, and scream HOLY SHIT.” 

• Joshua Hull (Screenwriter, GLORIOUS)

“SOFT TARGETS is a story about the power of friendship—a sickly force unmoored from reality. Steeped in alienation and despair, Winter skillfully details this diseased folie à deux until it finally ruptures.” 

• Andrew F. Sullivan (author, THE MARIGOLD and THE HANDYMAN METHOD)

“A cautionary tale about the dangers of staring too long into the abyss and of becoming self-righteously in love with your own pain. [Carson] Winter gives us a narrative that is truly transgressive—it’s shocking because it reveals something fundamentally wrong with reality, a level of normalized sickness and violence that we put out of our minds to function in the day-to-day. The result is a story that is haunting, stomach churning, and will sit with you for a long, long time when you’re done.”

• Jolie Toomajan (editor, ASEPTIC AND FAINTLY SADISTIC)