January 2024, marked my third year as a self published author, and second year where it was my primary source of income. Making a living as an author is far from easy, but it’s not complicated or unobtainable.
The easiest and most profitable route is still through Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. With Kindle your options are ebooks, paperback and Kindle Unlimited. While the royalties on ebooks are better than KU, the volume of readers in KU makes it the best path. Offer all three, but realize that 70-80% of your sales are most likely to come from KU.
There are other platforms to use, and in a later article I will cover ‘Going Wide’.
Write something people want to read
The first step is the most obvious: write a book that people want to read. Fiction is going to be your friend here. In the self publishing world it is immensely easier to gain an audience around fiction. Non fiction books tend to come with a lot of baggage around credibility and are often based on topics that fall out of relevance within a year. People will sooner pay $20-30 for a ‘how to’ PDF before paying $10 for a self published non fiction book. Keep this in mind if you’re writing Non Fiction.
Fiction has staying power, and is easier to write.
Easier does not mean easy. You have to select a relevant genre and subgenre. Self publishing doesn't come with the gate keeping associated with traditional publishing, however if you try to start up a whole new genre all on your own you drive your odds of success to near zero. Being too niche just alienates the market.
Your writing can’t suck
Fiction comes with a lot of well earned complaints. Being boring is a sin you cannot commit. Your characters need to have life to them and be believable, your plot has to be more complicated than a Scoobey Doo episode. You need to use spell check (Dead serious, people publish books with more grammatical errors than an autistic twitter post). More importantly, hire an editor.
Editors come in many forms and prices. Stick with a grammar editor as that will be the cheapest to start.
Find one or two Beta Readers. This can be another author or a reader of your genre. Someone who will be honest, brutally honest, but constructive about your writing. You need them to tear your story apart so that you can fix things before it hits readers. They can help find plot gaps, McGuffins, lack of or overuse of detail, etc.
Reader Expectations
You also need to hit reader expectations. Sure, a few authors tried something new in the genre and it turned into an overnight success! That’s rare. Stick with what the readers know and love, and put your own twist on it. Every genre has expectations for themselves.
For example, the main qualifier of romance is that the book ends in a happily ever after. Nicholas Sparks is the best example of this. His often don’t. So he falls into some weird category of sort of romance, but not really. Avid romance readers deny his place in their genre. People who just read occasional romance consider him a part of the genre. For Nicholas Sparks? It worked. He’s famous, sells a ton of books, and is a household name (for women anyways).
For the rest of us? Without a specific genre to gear toward, we’ll get lost in the marketing jungles. If you don’t know what genre to market your book in, how will they know if they want to read it? So if you find yourself categorizing your book as Urban Fantasy, with some Epic Fantasy, and Contemporary Thriller all mixed together, you need to take a hard look at your story and make some changes. Pick a genre. Stick to it. Hit the reader's expectations for that genre, write it well, and your books will sell.
You can’t write just one book
Even trad published authors need to write multiple books to stay relevant and make a living. This is 10x as true for self publishing. The easiest way to keep the reader coming back is to write in a series, but it can be done with standalones as well. Back list is key. Your back list is all the other books you’ve written and for most mid-list authors you will need to have twenty to thirty books in your arsenal to keep your income up, possibly more. The best way to keep selling your old books is to write new ones, ideally as part of the same series or as a spin off. Build up a world and characters that your readers love. When they finish the current book you want them looking through your back list to find what else you’ve read.
If all you write is one book you will never make sales at sufficient volume. It's a commendable achievement to write even one book, and you should be proud of your work. But to make money you need to keep writing.
It’s a success trap
Once you build an audience, have good read through on your back list, and are getting hundreds of pre orders for the next book you may believe that your hard earned success means you can relax a bit.
Wrong. Now more than ever you need to keep writing. New releases are the biggest driver of the algorithms, keeping your series relevant and keeping the attention of your readers. This is why I label it a success trap. If you stop writing your back list dries out and you drop into obscurity. You have to release a book every few months.
There’s only one exception to this, and it’s the authors who find phenomenal success with their very first book. They cracked the code early on with exactly what people want to read and those readers create so much hype around the book their career is set. We all want to be this author. Only .001% of people will be. The rest of us are stuck in the real world and have to work extremely hard to continue to get eyes on our books, new readers into the worlds we create, and will have to scrape to maintain our full-time income.
Writing six books a year, publishing every two months, in a relevant series that is selling well for you, will maintain your organic reach and keep your series flourishing. It can be hard to keep to this kind of timeline, but it’s optimal. Learning to write the same level of stories faster will help you keep up with reader demand.
Book Covers
Pay a professional to make your book cover. There are no exceptions to this rule. If your cover looks like a third grader’s photoshop project you don’t deserve to make sales. Additionally, your cover needs to be relevant to your genre. Many authors cripple themselves by insisting on some artistic nonsense that is not related to their genre and instantly alienates would-be readers.
As they’re scrolling through Amazon, you have a tiny thumbnail to catch their attention. You need to make sure the cover screams whichever genre you’re writing in. That will make them stop, read the title, hopefully then the blurb, and smash that buy button. In order to make sure this happens, pay a professional.
A cover designer in your genre will know the current trends, but make sure you do your homework as well. Go to Amazon, find the categories your book will go in, and see which books are the top. Study the layout, the colors, the text, and what’s on that front cover. You don’t want to put blind faith in a cover designer, so you need to be an expert as well. This will hopefully save you time and money because you won’t have to re-cover your book.
Note: this does not mean bankrupt yourself. A few hundred dollars is all it should take. You can save money by doing the leg work for your cover artist by finding stock photos of landscapes, cities, models, cars, etc.
Marketing-the dread of all authors
No matter how good your writing is you need to market. Even those .001%ers still do some level of marketing, though their readers are the real MVPs there because they do more than one single author could ever do. If people don’t know your book exists it will never sell. Sounds obvious, yet this is where most fail. You have to market and you have to market well.
Yes, every year there is one or two authors that get lucky and breakout on their first book. You’re not that author. Neither was I. You have to learn how to sell or your books will never get in front of readers.
This going to mean social media presence, paid advertising, newsletters, Discord, reader groups, author groups. There’s a lot to it, at least as much work as writing the book.
Click here to read about Marketing for Authors