May I Help You to Surpass My Biggest Success as an Author?
In my most successful month as an author, I earned 8600 Euros. At the end of the year, I had generated 58381 Euros. In this article, you will learn how you can outperform me.
I never had a book in the top 10 on Amazon, and I never got more than 1500 Euros bonus in the Kindle Unlimited program. I am what you would call a midlist author.
My thrillers were not really mainstream back then. The most successful authors write psycho-thriller about serial killers, while I produced action stories in the style of Jason Bourne.
And yet I managed to earn 8600 Euros (over 10.000 dollars) in a single month. I only made this money with ebooks that I sold for 99 cents.
My talent is enough to tell exciting stories and invent original plot twists. But I am certainly not one of the most gifted writers. I can rarely think of really fitting analogies or words. I also don’t revise my stories more than once. So I am not a perfectionist either.
So if you have a writing talent, you can easily outperform me. You just have to do a few things that I have done, and some of those things you have to do better or differently than me.
Write to the market
To a certain degree, I have done that too. I knew that thriller and romance were the most lucrative genres of all if you wanted to be successful as a self-publisher. I chose thrillers because I could not write credible romances with the best will in the world.
But the thriller genre is a broad field. The most successful are serial killer novels and psychological thrillers. When I wrote my first thriller, I wrote neither one nor the other. My book was a pure action thriller with lots of chase scenes, shoot-outs, and a lot of speed.
Nevertheless, I made it into the Top 100 of the German Kindle Charts on the first go.
If I had written a psychological thriller or a serial killer thriller, I probably would have made it into the Top 10.
Lesson number one, if you want to have more success than me: Write in one of the most lucrative genres and choose the most lucrative sub-genre there.
Write a series
The month in which I earned over 8000 Euros was one month after the seventh part of my series. All seven parts were self-contained novels. Only the characters were the same in all parts.
Why did it happen after the seventh novel of all things? On the one hand, the month was a month in which there was a lot of reading in general. Also, part one was offered in a Kindle deal that month. So I had a new release, and at the same time, Amazon advertised part one massively.
That’s why the rest of the series also picked up a lot. And let me remind you again that the whole series was still action thrillers.
Lesson number two
- Write a series in which every book is complete.
- Do not write a sequel.
- Write the whole series in the most popular subgenre of a prevalent genre.
Publish a new novel every two months
Amazon will promote your book for exactly two months. That’s how long it stays in the hot new releases. During this time, Amazon will send advertising emails for your book to the readers. Your advertising measures and those of Amazon reinforce each other during these two months.
After the two months, your book will inevitably continue to fall in the charts. Fewer sales of your new book also mean fewer sales of your old books. So after two months at the latest, your income will fall again if you don’t do anything about it.
I haven’t always been able to keep this pace throughout the series, so I’ve been giving away potential and income.
Lesson number three, if you want to be more successful than me: Publish a new part of the series every two months and don’t make exceptions.
Start a new series before your old series reaches its peak.
I would better have followed this advice when there was still time. After my month with over 8000 Euro, I assumed that I just had to go on as before. I thought that success would then stay or even get bigger.
The opposite happened. Every new release was a little less successful than the previous one. Moreover, the older books’ sales in the series did not increase as much when I had a new publication.
My income gradually sank until I finally hit rock bottom, earning only 1600 Euros in one month. Unfortunately, this was a few months after I quit my full-time job.
To make matters worse, I had to pay taxes from the year that had been so successful. Suddenly I had no more job, decreasing income and 7000 Euro tax debts.
Since then, I have started a new series, and very gradually, my payments are recovering. But it will be many months before I will have a month with over 8000 Euro again.
I should have known that a series will reach a peak at some point, and then it will only go downhill. If I had known that, I would have started something new much earlier.
I would have continued my old series, but at the same time, I would have worked on the first three volumes of the next series to be able to react quickly as soon as the descent of the first series became clear.
Lesson four: When things are going really well, double your efforts and work on a new series in parallel without neglecting the old one.
Conclusion
Writing good books is an essential requirement that you have to fulfill if you want to be successful as a writer. I cannot teach you this part.
But not every good writer is financially successful. This article can help you with that because I was and am economically successful as a writer.
I started from scratch, had a peak, a subsequent crash, and am now on my way back up again.
Everything I have learned from this is in this article. In short, you should:
1. write in a popular genre and use the topics that are best read there.
2. write series in which each book works without the others.
3. publish every two months to always be in the hot new releases.
4. start a new series before the old one reaches its peak.
That’s all you need to know to quickly outgrow me when it comes to financial success as a writer.
René Junge a published author writing on The Full Time Writer
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