We’ve all heard the stories of people who self-publish their first book and become instant millionaires. And of course, everyone knows how Harry Potter was rejected a dozen times before the series went on to sell half a million copies and make author J. K. Rowling a rather large amount of money.
But this is a rarity. I’ve heard that most books, including many traditionally published books, will sell very few copies and that the vast majority (90%) of self-published books will actually sell fewer than a hundred copies. This lines up with my experience. Of the five books I currently have up on Amazon, one has made a little over $10k, one has made a little over $1k, and the other three have probably made less than $100 total between them. Given the time that it takes to write a book, the average author could probably get a much higher hourly wage at McDonald’s. [Also, I should note that these are gross profits — the amount I get paid by Amazon — but don’t take into account the various costs involved in creating and promoting those books. My net profit is quite a bit smaller.]
Yet, there are a number of authors who consistently make decent-to-great money with their books. The self-publishing group I belong to has people who make six figures PER MONTH from their books. How do they do it?
While there are exceptions, most of the highly successful authors have a few things in common:
- They write a lot
- They know how to contact their fans
- They advertise
- They put out books that meet their reader’s expectations
We often have this idea that a good book should take a long time to write, and indeed, we’ve all had the experience of trying to read something that was clearly just rushed out with no attention to quality. My last book (the one that made four figures) took me three years to put together. But writing is a skill, and like any skill you can expect to become both better and faster as you practice. I read a (nonfiction) book this week about an author’s release strategy, in which she mentioned that she planned to release 50 books in 2019. That’s an extreme case (and she writes short romances) but it’s not unusual for prolific authors to release 3-12 books per year. This accomplished several things:
- Out of necessity, they learn to produce quickly, and they get a lot of practice. Do you think you’ll be a better writer after putting down another million words? If you write 5,000 words per day (many do more), five days a week, you’ll hit that in less than a year.
- Many readers don’t like stand-alone books; they want to devour an entire series and often (I’m told) won’t even purchase a book unless it’s part of a series which is already available. Every time a new book in the series comes out, it’s a chance to draw people’s attention to all the books that are already available.
- It’s a lot easier to keep selling books to someone who already likes your work than to find new customers. My book is actually nonfiction, but it’s volume 1 of a 2-part series and I’ve had multiple people contact me to ask about volume 2. For novels, it’s easy to get to the end of one book and want to immediately jump into the next — especially when reading with Kindle Unlimited. I have one SciFi series I’m reading now where Amazon recommended the first book a few weeks ago and so far I’ve read the first three books in the (17-book)series plus the first book in a spin-off series. This author is going to get a lot of page reads from me! The corollary to this is that you can focus your advertising on the first book of the series, and you can afford to do this at a loss (paying more to advertise than you make from that book) if you make it up on read-through.
- New releases get a boost on Amazon, and if you release 30 days apart you can always have a book on the new releases list.
Let’s look at an example. A few months ago I put up the first book of my first-ever science fiction series, How to Create a Galactic Empire. (It’s under a pen name to keep it separate from my nonfiction. I always wanted to write a novel, but the serious nonfiction is my focus) I’ve never written fiction before so I have no idea if it’s any good or not (one thing I’ve struggled with is finding beta readers to give feedback; once I figure that out I’m sure I’ll write about it) but it’s in KU so people can try it out for free.
Now, this is the first book of a planned nine-book series. I actually had the first draft of books two and three written before I published this one; I set a three-month gap between books but had hoped I could actually get them out a month apart. Unfortunately, events conspired to keep that from happening; I’ll actually be uploading book two later today.
So far I haven’t advertised book one at all, or really even told anyone about it, with the results you might expect: it’s had no sales and only a handful of page reads. I’ve been told that in most cases it’s not even worth advertising a book until you have the first three books of the series out.
But let’s say that I get out books two and three and find that the writing hooks the reader reasonably well, so that 50% of the people who buy book one also buy book two and 90% of people who buy book two buy book three (it’s typical for people who get to the second book of a series to keep on buying as long as it keeps meeting expectations). The books are priced at $2.99 each, which means that I can expect to make around $2 per sale. The first book has a KEPNC (the number of normalized pages in the book) of 104, which means that I can expect to make around 45 cents on a borrow if the book gets read all the way through.
Suppose I start advertising the book and pay 25 cents a click to get people to the page. If 10% of them purchase, then it costs me $2.50 per sale and I’m losing money.
But let’s add in the rest of the series. Half of the people who get book one will go on to book two and 90% of those will go on to book three, which means that for every sale of book one I actually get 1.95 sales of the series. If those are all actual sales, then I’ve brought in around $6, for a profit of $3.50 after deducting the cost of advertising. If the person only borrows each book instead of buying I still loose money; if all books were equal in length (they’re not) I’d bring in around $1.35, for a loss of $1.15.
But what if it’s a nine-book series and I continue getting 90% readthrough (which I’m told is actually not very good for books three and later)? Then each sale of book one is actually about 3.85 sales of the series, which is worth between $1.73 for all borrows and $7.70 for all sales. And this is for very short books with relatively poor readthrough. (If you bump the readthrough to the second book from 50% to 70% and for books 7-9 from 90% to 95%, the multiplier is now 5.11), For genres like epic fantasy with high page counts, the earnings for a borrow may actually be higher than those for a sale.
So that’s the most common strategy for financial success — writing a lot of books and building up a base of fans who will keep buying them. Many authors have large mailing lists and can be more or less certain that an email to their list on release day will result in hundreds of sales.
Of course, the alternative to selling a lot of books is to sell fewer books at a higher price. For my computer science book, I charge $9.99 for the ebook and $29.99 for the paperback. This is partially because the market is smaller — there are many fewer programmers who want to learn computer science than there are people who want to read science fiction — partially, because technical material takes a long time to write (there is no plausible scenario under which I turn out a book like this in a month!) and partially because that’s the going rate for this type of material. Each genre will have an expected price point — be it $0.99, $2.99, $3.99, or $5.99 — and deviating from that will likely lead to lower sales.
Of course, whichever strategy you use, step one is to make sure that you’re writing good books!
Part 2: Getting ready to publish
