How To Build Success With KDP Writing Fiction

The not so obvious ways to get on the right road to making money

Since launching in 2007, KDP has helped over a million of us realise their dreams of becoming published authors. It has allowed us to see our names (or pseudonyms) in print and sell our hard work to friends, family and strangers. One of the biggest obstacles people encounter with KDP though is this: they publish one, two or maybe three books, sell to their friends and family and then they can’t get the momentum going to sell more to strangers. The books simply don’t shift. That’s why I wanted to share with you some of my top tips for building a career based on KDP.

Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee success with any of this advice and because it has worked for me does not mean that it will work for everyone. However, I do recommend trying some of these things because I had success with each and every one.

The first and most important lesson is: Visibility is everything

Visibility is the most important thing on KDP. Some people go straight for paid advertising or push their books hard on social media but there are other ways to make yourself visible. Also, social media is where you’ll build relationships with your readers and more likely, other writers, not where you’ll sell books. I recommend the following:

First of all, pick a genre that has it’s own chart. There’s no point in writing tentacle porn because although it’s niche, and everyone tells you to be as niche as possible, there is no chart for that. I chose cat sleuths because back in 2013, there was a dedicated cat sleuths chart on Amazon dot com.

Check the overall chart positions of each book in the top 10. If books in positions around 50,000–100,000 of the overall Amazon chart are making it into the top 10 of this dedicated chart, you’re onto a winner.

Second, write that book. If I sound like I’m being obvious, it’s because I am. You can’t make money unless you actually write the bloody book. Don’t hang around waiting for perfection because you’ll never achieve it. Even the most experienced editors miss things at times. Run it through Grammarly, do another spellcheck on your own software too, have it read the book aloud to you and if it sounds ok, you’re good to go. Get it formatted, get a pretty cover and put it out there. Don’t be afraid. Some wise person once said “Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will” and I fully believe that to be true.

Next, make sure you have at least three books about that same group of characters. Release them one month apart. That’s what works best for the algorithm. Avoid pre-orders though. People buy the second and third in a series, get over the sadness that they felt when the book ended and by the time it shows up on their Kindles, you’re forgotten. You’re playing the long game.

Make sure you get your friends and family to buy the book, preferably within the same 3–5 day period so that it gets in the chart, stays in the chart and is visible enough for people looking at that chart to buy it. They’ll hopefully keep the book in the chart for a few weeks.

Then, when the second one comes out, promote like a machine. Find a great website featuring authors in your specific genre and make sure you befriend them. Get busy on social media, befriending the people who bought your book. Don’t be fake, people see through it, but you already have common ground with these people. You have the exact same taste in books!

Then, either keep the series going or repeat. Move to a new genre if you like, with a new pen name and get the ball rolling again. I did it with various branches of romance and it worked well for those too, although I do not recommend romance as your first port of call. It’s a massive market and difficult to stand out.

Example

Here’s how I used this system to generate success with the Leger Cat Sleuth Mysteries.

June 2013:

Wrote the first book in five days. Put a little “Leger will return in Leger’s Curiosity — coming August 2013” at the end of the story. People buying it knew they had another coming. People who loved the book followed me on Amazon to get the updates.

Published and told all my friends to buy it. Sold 15 copies in the first 48 hours through that alone.

Alerted a cozy mystery book blogger to my book’s existence. She didn’t buy it but she did add it to her blog of new releases.

Sales trickled in that summer and I managed to get an interview with Jungle Red Writers through networking with some of them on Twitter.

August 2013:

Released the second book on Black Cat Day. Promoted it heavily on social media. Sales still trickled in. It was nothing to write home about yet.

October 2013:

Released the third book with a seasonal Halloween cover. Do not underestimate the power of seasonal books! I know a romance author who bases her whole book series on different a book for each season for the last six years. People tend to want to read about beaches and sunshine in summer and cosy log fires and snowball fights in winter.

Released a boxed set of all three books in one volume, priced slightly lower than buying three individual copies.

November 2013:

Released Leger’s Winter. Again a seasonal book. Kept adding “Leger will return in…” to the final page instead of writing THE END like some authors do.

People who had kept buying each book were now getting alerts on Amazon that my books were released because they had followed me. I was also showing up in “People who bought this also bought…”

February 2014:

I quit my job to write full time. I can’t claim to have been making millions but I was miserable in my day job and only working 21 hours per week. Leger, my blog and my mystery shopping side hustle were able to replace that income and give me time to care for a disabled family member.

September 2014:

I did my first radio interview and had my first book signing. Dreams achieved!

Since then:

It’s been up and down, I can’t lie. Success isn’t a straight line and things have quietened down in the last couple of years since I stopped writing fiction to concentrate on my studies. It requires maximum effort 80% of the time to be successful. But the series went as far as 44 books. I made friends all over the world, and I’m working on a spin-off novel at the moment.