Thoughts After Eight Years of Self-Publishing and About What’s Ahead

In the beginning… 

I published my first novel, The Emperor’s Edge, in December of 2010. I’d taken a short stab at querying agents, but at the same time that I was doing that, I got my first kindle, and I realized from a few blog posts (there weren’t that many at the time), that authors were not only publishing straight to Amazon but that they were making money doing it. More money, in some cases, than their traditionally published counterparts, who earned a smaller percentage of the pie and had to sell a lot more books in order to make a living wage.

I abandoned all attempts at querying and jumped in with the two novels I had been workshopping and considered complete. Encrypted was the second and remains one of my favorites, though it was The Emperor’s Edge that I turned into a series, eventually nine novels. (Encrypted did get a sequel, Decrypted.)

There weren’t any podcasts teaching book marketing or self-publishing techniques at the time, and the only sites where you could advertise were Kindle Nation Daily and G00dreads (pay-per-click ads). I didn’t have a lot of money for advertising or high quality covers, not that there was an industry of cover designers for indie authors back then. I commissioned some of my earliest art by contacting artists on Deviant Art.

For authors publishing in those days, there was a lot of stumbling around in the dark and figuring out what worked.

Fortunately, I found readers who enjoyed my work, and by the end of 2011, I was making about $3,000 a month with four books out (Encrypted and the first three Emperor’s Edge books). The income went up and down (making Book 1 free was what gave me my first big boost) when looking at it on a monthly basis, but as I published more books, the trend headed upward over time.

By 2013, I was making more than I ever had at my day job, and I’d long since transitioned to writing full-time. By 2015, I was making a lot more.

It was amazing to get to that point, especially since it had been drilled into my head as a kid that nobody makes a living writing fiction and that I should get a degree in business or computer science. It wasn’t until the kindle and other e-book readers came along, and we could upload books directly to the stores, that it became more viable.

Over the last eight or nine years, a lot of “mid-list” self-published authors have been making a full-time income and then some. Even though things have gotten more competitive, with countless titles now available in the ebook stores, there are still a lot of independent authors making six figures (and some seven).

From two novels to 50+ (becoming more prolific)

These days, I have more than fifty science fiction and fantasy novels out under my name and another dozen-odd under my pen name (Ruby Lionsdrake). “Ruby” publishes science fiction romance novels with more detailed sexy bits on the page.

(In case you’re curious, I started the pen name in part to see if I could anonymously start from scratch in late 2014 and still do well — you could and I did — and in part because a few readers complained when I published Balanced on the Blade’s Edge, which was a fantasy romance adventure with a more graphic sex scene than I’d done in my other series. After that, I decided to make LB a little more chaste and switch to RL if I was in the mood to write sex scenes. That waxes and wanes, I’ll admit, and Ruby’s fortunes along with it. The challenge of starting a pen name is that you need to keep publishing regularly to stay in people’s minds and keep selling books.

My first novel took seven years to finish. As you can see, I’ve learned to write more quickly, and I’ve published ten or more novels during each of the last three years.

Increasing my writing speed started out mostly as a challenge to myself (other full-time authors were writing 6,000 to 10,000 words a day, so why couldn’t I?). Balanced on the Blade’s Edge was the first book I wrote quickly (from rough draft to a manuscript ready for my editor in less than a month). And I loved it.

I loved finishing a novel that quickly (the rough draft in about two weeks), because I really got into the zone or the flow state or whatever the latest term is, and I was able to remember everything that happened early in the novel when I was writing later stuff. (When it had taken me months or even years to finish something, I ended up wasting a lot of time going back to re-read and dither around with early stuff.)

I also enjoyed the characters and the story–you can tell since what was supposed to be a one-off stand-alone fantasy romance, but it eventually turned into an eight-book series (later dubbed Dragon Blood) with a side novel (Shattered Past) and a five-book spinoff series (Heritage of Power).

Even though I’ve published numerous series by now, and my oldest, The Emperor’s Edge, remains a fan favorite, the Dragon Blood series has earned me more over the years than any of my other series. About $900,000 from the ebooks in the original eight-book Dragon Blood series (and the side novel, Shattered Past) since the first book was published in March of 2014. (For those who are curious, this series has never been in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited and exclusive with Amazon. I’ve spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000-$10,000 lifetime for advertising on it, usually pointing pointed toward the Books 1-3 bundle, which I often drop to 99 cents or free for sales.)

I share this as a nah-uh to those who say you can’t write quickly and produce good stories. I’ve written books that weren’t very good that took a long time to pen, and I’ve written books quickly that are favorites of mine (and of fans). This isn’t to say that everything I write quickly is wonderful (after 60-odd novels, I definitely have some favorites, and I have some duds), just that it doesn’t matter a whole lot if a book took a year or a week to write, at least for me.

To stay self-published or to try for a traditional publishing deal? 

This is a question I ask myself from time to time.

When I look back at my path, I’m so relieved I didn’t get a nibble from agents with that original handful of query letters, because traditional publishing is — let’s face it — a slow slog. Even if I’d been lucky enough to get a deal, I never would have replaced my day job income after two years (odds are, I wouldn’t have even seen my books published by then).

But many authors now hybrid publish, meaning they have some books traditionally published (you still get a lot more visibility overall that way), and they self-publish other works on the side, where they take home that 70% of the sales price. It’s a pretty good gig, if you can get it.

Despite modest successes over the years, I’ve never hit it really big and had a book or series stick at the top of the Amazon sales charts for months and months (though Dragon Blood and Fallen Empire had good runs!), but I’ve had a few series do well enough to be noticed, at least insofar as literary agents go.

I’ve talked to someone who had read my books and seemed like a genuine fan, and I’ve been contacted by someone who saw my books were selling well, read a couple of chapters, thought they seemed okay, and wanted to represent me. You can guess how fast I said no thanks on that one. I can’t say that a Big 5 publisher or Hollywood producer has ever come knocking, so I haven’t had to wrestle much with temptation.

Yes, there’s still some temptation. I know I’d never make as much with a traditional deal (and I know I’d bristle at how slow the process was, how much they’d want me to edit, and that my fans would have to pay $9.99 or $14.99 for an ebook instead of $5 or less), but I still have my imposter syndrome moments and admit it would be nice to have one trilogy out there available on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Especially now that I’ve made enough money to buy my house outright and sock away some extra.

I’m pretty nonchalant about it, though, and have filed this in the “someday” category. It’s possible that something appealing will come my way, and I’ll say yes, but I’m not so enamored with the idea that I’m pursuing it.

I do have a publisher for a lot of my audiobooks. Since those cost a lot more to produce, I’m generally happy to foist the work off on someone else and just get a quarterly bank deposit. I’ve done some of my series on my own (hiring a narrator and producer through ACX), and it’s time-consuming and so far hasn’t paid off in a big way for me.

Concerns about the future?

I’ve always had a bit of a glass half-full outlook and expected things to get harder for self-publishers, basically since the day I started. Believe it or not, when I published at the end of 2010, I thought I’d missed the boat. Amanda Hocking and a lot of huge success stories had already come and gone, and the secret was out. Self-publishing had become viable, and hungry authors were flocking to upload their trunk novels.

But I believed then, as I believe now, that it’s possible to gain enough fans that you can make a living as a creator. So long as you’re willing to work on your craft and also be a bit of an entrepreneur. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing to market (though it’s certainly OK if you enjoy what the market is craving), just learning a little about marketing and writing books with enough commercial appeal to find an audience.

I’m not a write-to-market person, mostly because I’ve never enjoyed what’s popular. One of the reasons I started writing was because I struggled to find the kinds of stories that I enjoy. What I do try to do is mesh what I want to write with what has a chance at selling.

It’s possible to make a living selling to fans of a niche, but if that niche gets too small… well, you’re only making a few dollars per sale. So, doing the math suggests your fans need to be in the thousands, not the hundreds or dozens, at least if you want to make a living.

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen more and more ebooks coming into the market (traditional publishing has gotten more backlist stuff out there, self-publishers have gotten very efficient and are publishing more and more novels, and then you’ve also got people hiring ghost writers to publish books by the dozens), and we’ve seen a rise in the cost to advertise and “gain visibility.”

On Facebook and Amazon, we’re bidding against each other and being encouraged to spend a dollar or more for a click (which may or may not turn into a sale). Some folks are speculating that we’ve entered a pay-to-play market where it’s not going to be possible to get seen and find a readership if you don’t have money to invest.

I agree that there is more competition. The books available have increased exponentially, but most of the English-reading markets are considered mature, meaning there probably won’t be more ebook buyers this year than last.

But do you have to come into this with piles to spend on advertising? Enh, I think there are still ways to be seen and find readers without dropping thousands a month on Amazon ads. Ads give you a brute force option to get your book seen. Which can be great. I’ve certainly started spending more on launches in the hope of gaining new readers with new series.

But when I started, there was barely anyplace to advertise. If you were writing in a smaller genre and didn’t know what you were doing with cover art (this was me), you probably struggled just as much to be seen back then as you do now.

I believe that you can still make a Book 1 in a series free and use social media, group promos, and small inexpensive ads to get readers to find and download your book. After that, it’s really up to you and the job you did with the story as to whether those readers will want to continue on (and are willing to pay to do so).

I do think it’s getting tougher for new authors to jump in with a full price book and find readers (if they don’t have much money for advertising). For the last few years, KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited (and Amazon exclusivity) has been a place where new authors can launch a full-price book and gain some traction (since people could borrow unlimited books with their monthly fee), but we’ll see if that continues indefinitely.

As a new author today, I would expect to have to write a series and make the first book free or 99 cents in order to (one hopes) suck people in. And then I’d expect to write another series. And another. If lightning strikes, and you get some massive hit, that’s awesome, but expect to work (write) year in and year out to make a living at this, and you won’t be disappointed if that’s what the future has in store.

The good thing is that you don’t have to sell piles of your first book or rank in the Top 20 for your category on Amazon to be a successful author.

I usually have a more recently published series that’s selling well enough to be on a chart somewhere, but I make good money every month from books that aren’t charting anywhere. Readers find my free Book 1s (I usually have at least three free series starters at any given time, which I pay to run promos on now and then, or put into inexpensive boxed sets with other authors, so we can take advantage of everybody’s reach), and enough of them go on to buy subsequent books in this series for me to continue to make up stories for a living.

Which is amazing.

The pessimistic part of me doesn’t think self-publishers will always be able to make as much as they can now, but I do believe that creators will always be able to find a way to reach their fans and earn an income from doing it. I’ve seen a lot of marketing tactics come and go over the last eight years, but the free sample continues to work. The free sample just has to be exactly what at least some readers are looking for.