My Books on Amazon Have Earned Me Over a Quarter of a Million Dollars in Less Than Ten Years

I published my first book in January 2012. After that, I earned almost nothing for three years. Today, I can make a living from writing.

My point in this article is not to brag about my numbers. The numbers aren’t impressive enough for that anyway. Other self-publishers I know make up to $10,000 a month and more. I’m a long way from that.

I am what is called a midlist author today. My income comes from over 100 books (including anthologies and short stories), with the newest one lingering near the top 100 on the Amazon charts for a few weeks at a time before dropping.

In this article, I want to show authors who have been around less time and can’t yet make a living from their art what a typical journey to becoming a full-time author looks like.

When I first started, I had no idea what to expect. There were no numbers of successful authors to guide me. I wish I had known such numbers in the early years of my writing career. Maybe then I wouldn’t have almost given up again and again.

But let’s start at the beginning.

The first 32 months

In January 2012, I published my first urban fantasy novel. It was almost 500 pages thick, the cover was homemade, and I had no editor. I sold most of the copies to family members and other authors whose books I bought in return.

In the first month, I made $24.12 from that book. The month after that brought it down to $4.35, and by March, the earnings had dropped to $0. Later I did some advertising for the book and sold a little more. Also, when I published new books, this first novel was sold every now and then. To date, my first novel has earned me $834.68.

A month later, I published a small Volume of three horror short stories, which brought in $1.37 in the first month. To date, this small, thin book has earned me a little over $160.

Realizing I wouldn’t get far with urban fantasy, I tried a mystery-romance story under a female pseudonym ten months later. Unfortunately, this novel was even less well received by the public than my Urban Fantasy novel. In total, I’ve only earned $329.11 from it to date.

Another collection of horror short stories followed in September 2013. This time the book was thicker, as I packed ten stories into it. I wanted to be successful with horror because I loved Stephen King. I became a writer because of him. No wonder I wanted to emulate him.

In fact, that story collection became my biggest success to that point. In the first month, it brought in $377. For me, that was a spectacular success. To date, that book has added $2263 to my bank account.

In December 2013, one year and eleven months after my first novel, I finally launched the sequel. By now, I had learned a bit more about the business and had more contacts and followers. Maybe book two would surpass book one by far, I thought.

But actually, to date, part two of the urban fantasy saga has grossed less than part one. Depressing? Yes, it certainly was at the time. But in January 2015, I published both novels as an anthology, had a professional cover made, and promoted it heavily. To date, this anthology has grossed $4520.

If I count Volume One, Volume Two, and the anthology together, I come to a little over $5100. But most of that money came much later. So it is not included in the evaluation of the first 32 months.

Between January 2012 and September 2014, I earned a total of $3076.60 as a self-publisher on Amazon. Converted, that gives me monthly earnings of $96.14.

If you’re at this point right now, don’t despair. You’ll see that it’s worth sticking with it. So let’s take a look at the next stage of my career.

The next 32 months

In October 2014, I had my first financial success as a self-publisher. Close to urban fantasy, romance, and horror short stories, I tried a zombie-cyberpunk crossover.

With $2139 in the first month, I surpassed anything I’d managed before. That was, damn it, real money that could do more than buy a coffee and a piece of cake. In total, the book has generated $5338 to date.

If I hadn’t gotten in touch with a group of thriller writers during that time, I probably would have kept writing books like that and been stuck in that limited niche forever. But things turned out very differently.

First, I published a second mystery-romance novel, hoping to find an audience for it after all. I published this novel in February 2015, and it did twice as well as the first novel in the series. Still, I only made $640 with it over time. That’s better than the $329 from Volume One, of course, but still pretty bad.

So more than three years after my first publication, I had little success to show for it. Only my cyberpunk novel inspired something like a glimmer of hope in me for a month. But this outlier was quickly over again.

As I said, I was already in loose contact with a group of thriller authors at that time. The two most successful of them earned many thousands of dollars a month with their books, and they urged me to try the thriller genre. Moreover, they promised me that I could be successful because the target audience for this kind of book was huge.

My first thriller was ready by the end of April 2015, and I uploaded it to Amazon without much expectation. It shot into the general top 100 in the German Kindle Store and stayed there for 21 days within a few days.

Until then, the best ranking I ever had was somewhere in the range between 700 and 1000. After that, I was like in seventh heaven.

I only made $1,339 in the first month because I sold the book for only 99 cents, but it stayed on the bestseller lists for ten months and provided a steady stream of money.

To date, this book has grossed $18772.

I’ve stayed true to the thriller genre ever since. I published a new thriller every two to three months from then on. That first thriller became the start of a series that now has eighteen volumes. Then, in August 2016, after that series had five books, I launched a second thriller series in parallel. So I now reliably published a new novel every two months, alternating between the two series.

In June 2017, the next 32 months of my career were up. During that time, I earned $63,822.ap from my books, bringing my monthly average to $1994.44.

So compared to the first 32 months, I was able to more than twentyfold my monthly average earnings.

Are you excited to see what happened next? Then stay with me because it continues right now.

The next 32 months — my all-time high

Within this period, there was a point where everything fell into place perfectly for me. So let’s jump forward half a year and land in December 2017.

In that month, nothing initially suggested that anything significant was going to happen. Nevertheless, I published Volume Eight of my first thriller series and hoped that this book would do as well as the previous ones.

But what happened next was utterly unexpected. Suddenly, not only was the new book successful, but all the previous Volumes were suddenly selling like crazy. In the first month, my income jumped to $6302, and the following month it jumped to $6360.

I was walking on air and thought it couldn’t get any better. But then came March 2018. The books in my series had pushed each other up so high and carried the second series along that I occupied more than half of the first page of the charts in numerous subcategories.

By the end of the month, I had sold 10,717 books and earned $8664.

I quit my full-time job because my earnings never fell below $5,000 for the next four months. I had six months’ notice and couldn’t wait for that time to pass.

When the time came, I wrote and published books for seven years while working a regular job. Many days I could barely keep awake at night to write, and more than once, I was about to throw it all away.

Today I’m grateful that I didn’t give up. It’s now almost three years since I last had to go through rush-hour traffic to get to the office.

Of course, the numbers didn’t stay the same as they did in March 2018. The third 32 months of my career weren’t over until March 2020, and I had a rough few months until then.

In 2019, I was due a back tax payment for the fat year of 2018 that nearly broke my neck. But I got through that, too.

Today

I started diversifying my income so I wouldn’t be too dependent on my thrillers and Amazon.

In the last 18 months, between April 2020 and September 2021, my average earnings from Amazon were $2821.67 a month. Outside of Amazon, I still make about $1000 extra, and that percentage is growing steadily.

On Amazon, meanwhile, I’ve started publishing erotic short stories under a pseudonym in addition to my thrillers. If you’re interested in this project, you can follow my journey here:

https://renjunge.medium.com/list/making-money-with-erotic-short-stories-bd08b9355c6f.

To not have to publish every two months, I have meanwhile raised my prices from 99 cents to 3.99 per book. This way, I can afford higher advertising costs per sale via Amazon Ads and make good profits.

I am currently focusing on selling my entire catalog regularly rather than relying only on new releases. With 30 thrillers in three series, several anthologies, and dozens of erotic short stories, my portfolio is now large enough to bring in enough money per month overall, even with just a few sales per title.

My next thriller will be released in December. By then, five months will have passed since the last publication. I couldn’t afford such long breaks for many years. However, the fact that this is now possible shows me that I have entered a new phase in my career.

Don’t lose heart if you have just published your first novel and no one wants to read it. Instead, keep writing, keep publishing, and keep learning. Seven years may seem like a long time, but in retrospect, you’ll hardly know where the time went.

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René Junge a published author writing on The Full Time Writer

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