# I was making $3-5k a month consistently. Now I'm making less than $400



## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

New to kBoards, seeking advice. I'm an indie author who has over 40 books out and has been publishing since 2011. Since the start of my indie career I've been consistently making $2,500 to $3,500 in YA and NA fantasy fiction. This has dropped like a rock since December of 2017 to around $400 per month and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Last year was a great year. I got a few trad pub deals, made a bestseller list, and got a BookBub deal on a box set that earned me almost $20k. I did very little advertising and did NO AMS, FB, or BookBub ads whatsoever. 

I invested in Mark Dawson's course and read up on Brian Meek's AMS ads book (can't remember the name of it). Both courses/books said that I could be making more money than I currently was, so I changed some of the metadata/blurbs and invested a couple thousand in AMS and FB ads both. Most of my time this past 6 months has been spent learning how to do ads and write better copy instead of writing. 

Since I've started doing ads I've only written and published 3 books (a book a month is my usual pace). So far I've had two BookBubs this year and I've LOST money on both of them (which I've heard is unheard of). My income has sunk terribly since I've followed Dawson's/Meeks advice and changed my model of advertising heavily and writing less.

I took a look at my accounting and saw that the months I did NOTHING except release a new book was when I made the most money. I never advertised before and now I worry that since I started advertising I screwed everything up, but I don't know how to get my sales back up. I'm so burned out from all this ad work it would take me awhile to write another book. 

I don't know what I did wrong. I have professional covers, editing is good and story is great, and a big fan base/newsletter, from trad and indie readers. One thing I d know is I sold a LOT at 0.99 compared to Kindle Unlimited, even though I heard you're not supposed to sell at $0.99. I know I can write well because I consistently get 5 star reviews and lots of praise from publishers and critics both. 

I don't know how this happened. How I could be making a ton of royalties doing nothing and then be pushing these books and end up losing money?

I'm considering making a pen name for erotica and churning out some stuff quickly to save my ass, though I'm male so I feel like this would be really awkward-- not to mention erotica is not my thing in the slightest. 

I really can't afford to go back to my job. I want my indie career back. What do I need to do?


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

I'm so sorry. Without seeing your books it's hard for anyone to give advice. It is really tough out there. You're competing with authors launching with spends of $20K and not breaking even, but feeling alright about it. You're competing with people with pockets deep enough to employ ghost writers and so capable of "releasing" very quickly. (Amanda Lee does it the legit way, but most people can't do it.)

My guess is that people will realize, "I hit the top of the charts--I made $15K ... but I spent $20K ... this isn't working ... " and things will get a little better, but right now ... ugh.

ETA: You're not alone: https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,262724.msg3654845.html#msg3654845


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

I don't know much about this whole publishing thing, but what I do know is amazon loves you to publish often. Which you were doing previously and slowed down doing to play with ads.  This sounds like it was your biggest hindrance. 
You're going to need someone experienced at this whole indie thing to go any deeper.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Sounds like you have your answer. Go back to what worked for you. Steady releases in your genre. Switching to something that seems like it would be easier to do like erotica (assuming you were serious about that) makes no sense.

I don't know your pricing, but I've found that AMS work for me on books priced at $4.99 or up. I wouldn't use them on books priced at 99 cents.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Wow ...  

I hope you get some good suggestions. Total shot in the dark, but maybe your books were embedded in a web of also-boughts that was really working well for them, and the new ads changed the web??

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

idontknowyet said:


> I don't know much about this whole publishing thing, but what I do know is amazon loves you to publish often. Which you were doing previously and slowed down doing to play with ads. This sounds like it was your biggest hindrance.
> You're going to need someone experienced at this whole indie thing to go any deeper.


Yeah, this.

Also, why would you start with FB and AMS? I use those because I've blown through all my other options so many times they make sense. And because I write slow. And because I have a long series where 20-cents a click still earns me money.

They're the most expensive adverts out there. Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, RobinReads, Fktips, Booksends, GenrePulse, ENT, BookBot Bob / BookBot Bill, those are the ads you want before you start hitting up FB and AMS.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

C. Gockel said:


> Yeah, this.
> 
> Also, why would you start with FB and AMS? I use those because I've blown through all my other options so many times they make sense. And because I write slow. And because I have a long series where 20-cents a click still earns me money.
> 
> They're the most expensive adverts out there. Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, RobinReads, Fktips, Booksends, GenrePulse, ENT, BookBot Bob / BookBot Bill, those are the ads you want before you start hitting up FB and AMS.


I disagree. All of those you list require selling at discounted prices and doing promo pushes whereas if you nail AMS and FB ads you can sell steadily long-term. It's harder with fiction than non-fiction, but it can still be done.


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## writerlygal (Jul 23, 2017)

I've recently had a much lower ROI on advertising than I used to & I think that it's not only a result of more competition & more ppl spending more money advertising, but also that Amazon seems to be giving a lot more weight to books w/ organic traction. I find that AMS ads help a lot more than FB ads do these days but AMS ads can also quickly eat up money so it's important to keep an eye on ROI. As others have said, the algos seem to favor frequent publishing so it's best to write more & publish frequently & not spend as much on ads. Good luck.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

C. Gockel said:


> Yeah, this.
> 
> Also, why would you start with FB and AMS? I use those because I've blown through all my other options so many times they make sense. And because I write slow. And because I have a long series where 20-cents a click still earns me money.
> 
> They're the most expensive adverts out there. Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, RobinReads, Fktips, Booksends, GenrePulse, ENT, BookBot Bob / BookBot Bill, those are the ads you want before you start hitting up FB and AMS.


I have been using Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, etc., and while they do give me better returns than AMS, they aren't pulling the weight they need to for me to keep investing in them.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Cassie Leigh said:


> Sounds like you have your answer. Go back to what worked for you. Steady releases in your genre. Switching to something that seems like it would be easier to do like erotica (assuming you were serious about that) makes no sense.
> 
> I don't know your pricing, but I've found that AMS work for me on books priced at $4.99 or up. I wouldn't use them on books priced at 99 cents.


I was at 0.99 and 2.99 before I was advised to raise to 3.99 and 4.99. When that happened sales tanked.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

idontknowyet said:


> I don't know much about this whole publishing thing, but what I do know is amazon loves you to publish often. Which you were doing previously and slowed down doing to play with ads. This sounds like it was your biggest hindrance.
> You're going to need someone experienced at this whole indie thing to go any deeper.


I think you're right. But another big issue is a book a month, well... forever... isn't stable either. At some point I'm going to implode and be unable to write at all, not to mention start making a really shitty product, and that's what worries me.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

activeindieauthor said:


> I was at 0.99 and 2.99 before I was advised to raise to 3.99 and 4.99. When that happened sales tanked.


Well, then maybe AMS and FB ads aren't a good fit for your books because of the price point they sell at. I'd say those are both too costly to run profitably on a 99 cent book unless you have a long series and are getting sufficient sellthrough to the series to justify it.


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## solo (Dec 19, 2017)

Cliffs happen. According to one research, Amazon publishes close to a million new books per year. That's roughly 80,000 per month or nearly 3,000 per day. Unless one is a big-name writer, drops in sales are to be expected.

Amazon does like you to publish often. If only to take advantage of the initial promo stage. Hopefully, it will bring the rest of the books along.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

activeindieauthor said:


> I'm considering making a pen name for erotica and churning out some stuff quickly to save my ass, though I'm male so I feel like this would be really awkward-- not to mention erotica is not my thing in the slightest.


Was reaching for the popcorn to watch the erotica authors rightly take issue with that part, but then I remembered that most of em have been run off already, lol. Good luck with that approach tho.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

You trained your readers to get books for 99c. 

Then you raised your prices, attracting a different type of readers. Effectively, you started over. In the long run, though, a career made with readers who will actually pay a decent price for books is more sustainable. So you may already be halfway there.

Some suggested options:

1. Go back to what you were doing before. It may work, but because you fell out of the algorithms, it may not. I'm guessing the latter.

2. Go back to what you were doing before (forget about the FB/AMS ads), but lower only the price of book 1. Start a mailing list and go wide with your older series. Keep all the other non-book-1s at $4.99.

3. Go back to what you were doing before, do 2., but run some constant/low cost ads on book 1. You lose money on book 1, but make it back on the other books.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Cassie Leigh said:


> Sounds like you have your answer. Go back to what worked for you. Steady releases in your genre. Switching to something that seems like it would be easier to do like erotica (assuming you were serious about that) makes no sense.
> 
> I don't know your pricing, but I've found that AMS work for me on books priced at $4.99 or up. I wouldn't use them on books priced at 99 cents.


Yes, it sounds like you had a strategy that was working. What works for Mark Dawson might not work for you. Same for any other author toting advice. I have a lot of respect for Mark and think his class is a great asset, but that doesn't mean it's the best for you.

I would go back to writing faster, maybe not a book a month, as you feel that's unsustainable, but a compromise. Keep doing what has worked in the past.

Advertising can work very well or it can be a money pit. Are you sure you're optimizing the ads you're doing? Are you getting an ROI on them? I tend to not get ROI on individual books, but I make my money on series sellthrough. The more books you have, the better that works. If you have a backlist of 40 books, you should be able to dabble in ads to your backlist while writing new stuff.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> You trained your readers to get books for 99c.
> 
> Then you raised your prices, attracting a different type of readers. Effectively, you started over. In the long run, though, a career made with readers who will actually pay a decent price for books is more sustainable. So you may already be halfway there.
> 
> ...


I don't know if that would work. I only make money on the first book and the series box sets-- box sets are over 80% of my income. Actual series read through is terrible. They go straight to the bundle.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Crystal_ said:


> Yes, it sounds like you had a strategy that was working. What works for Mark Dawson might not work for you. Same for any other author toting advice. I have a lot of respect for Mark and think his class is a great asset, but that doesn't mean it's the best for you.
> 
> I would go back to writing faster, maybe not a book a month, as you feel that's unsustainable, but a compromise. Keep doing what has worked in the past.
> 
> Advertising can work very well or it can be a money pit. Are you sure you're optimizing the ads you're doing? Are you getting an ROI on them? I tend to not get ROI on individual books, but I make my money on series sellthrough. The more books you have, the better that works. If you have a backlist of 40 books, you should be able to dabble in ads to your backlist while writing new stuff.


I make good money when I do large sales with lots of email blasts and ebook advertisers but doing FB and AMS is like throwing money out the window. ROI IS awful but ive been told it takes 10k+ in tests just to figure the system out


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

activeindieauthor said:


> I don't know if that would work. I only make money on the first book and the series box sets-- box sets are over 80% of my income. Actual series read through is terrible. They go straight to the bundle.


If read through is terrible, I'd look at improving that, because it will immeasurably improve everything else.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> If read through is terrible, I'd look at improving that, because it will immeasurably improve everything else.


Would It? I don't think so. Why would readers pay 2.99 for a book individually when they can just pay 9.99 for a box set? If I raise the price of the set that means my main source of income is taken away for an experiment


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## Scarlett_R (Sep 30, 2011)

If it ain't broke don't fix it. You have to get the data to find out if what you were doing before was a stable, working process.

Can you revert all your blurbs/ads/etc back to how they were and continue to push forward with your usual routine? Could be the books and advice you're following just don't work. It's not the end of the world, it's the way business works. It's all testing and trialling. You know this doesn't work, so go back and figure out if what you _were_ doing works well.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

activeindieauthor said:


> Would It? I don't think so. Why would readers pay 2.99 for a book individually when they can just pay 9.99 for a box set? If I raise the price of the set that means my main source of income is taken away for an experiment


They do.

But I meant read through where readers *want* to read the next book and are happy to pay full price for it. You have book 1 at 99c and the rest at $4.99, or give book 1 for free. Forget the box sets for a moment because they cannibalise your sales. If you can increase read through from book 1 to book 2 by 10 percentage points, it will filter through in everything you do: your ads, your Bookbubs, your freebie giveaways.

But I sense we're talking from two different planets and you are quite resistant to change and/or showing us the books so we can make more targeted recommendations, so there doesn't seem that much more I can say at this point.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

I think you answered your own question: if your best months are when you release, go back to what works. You have your own data. Look at what worked and get back to that - release a book a month. If $0.99 in KU was working for you, then revisit that; I think that's a precarious long-term position to build a career on (simply because you're hyper-dependent on page reads in this scenario, which means if the program changes, your earnings are going to tumble). If what you meant was you were successful $0.99 wide, then do that. Your own data is your best friend; there are many things worth testing, but dollars are the ultimate arbiter of correctness, not a course, forum post, book, podcast, or anything else.

I'd consider trying a $0.99 series starter, then $2.99 for each book therafter, if you've built a readership on lower priced books. $2.99 is still low priced to keep some of these people in the fold. $3.99/$4.99 is a harder sell for people truly interested in bargains.

If you're going to burn out at a book a month, reduce it to a book every six weeks. Or a book every two months.

If you're going to switch genres, I'd pick something other than erotica, just because it always seems to be in a precarious state on Amazon - e.g. you can get sent to the dungeon, and if you want to advertise it in the future, your options are limited. Pick something more mainstream that you'd feel comfortable writing. Or pick up where you left off with the YA/NA.

As for PPC, you can waste a ton of money here. Most authors are better off focusing on other things - promo sites, market research, craft - because it takes a lot of effort to do right. I don't think crunching the numbers and analyzing conversion/CPC play to most authors' strengths. There's also the psychological aspect: often spending (re: losing) a significant chunk of money before ads become profitable. Judging from your own words - "if I raise the price of the set that means my main source of income is taken away for an experiment " - this type of experimentation doesn't seem to mesh with your personality.

Assuming you or anyone else still wants to try PPC, here are some things I've found from spending ~$20k. First: the number one rule is that you need to test everything. Other than that, every piece of advice you read or tactic you acquire is basically a best practice, guideline, temporary tactic, or YMMV type of thing. There are, of course, good and bad ideas to test. Start with the good ones, but know that nothing is gospel.

To start: if you're losing money, turn all your existing ads off. When your ads are unprofitable, the solution isn't to shotgun out more ads (tried it; it sucked) or keep running unprofitable ads in the hopes they fix themselves (also have tried that, also sucked). The solution is to reduce your spend and narrow the scope of your ads. Focus on making one series - whichever your most profitable series was in the past - profitable. If you cannot make one series profitable, then you cannot make the rest of your ads profitable. You will do this by focusing your advertising on Book 1 of the series and tweaking everything until it becomes profitable. But before you embark on this adventure, you need to shut off all the existing ads to know how much you sell without ads. This is your baseline. Log your sales data for your series each day.

If sales nosedive to zero, then you can turn your ads back on (try to make it only your best ads), but otherwise, I'd ride it out and get a clear snapshot.

Word of warning: when you pause a nicely performing AMS ad, it doesn't usually restart in the same way. So a good performer might not do anything upon being toggled back on.

While you wait, make sure your back matter for the to-be-advertised Book 1 is in order - have a link to buy Book 2 right after "THE END" with a one or two sentence blurb. Have an excerpt of Book 2, because PPC ROI is really dependent on readthrough. The excerpt increases sellthrough. Make sure each book in the series follows this format. You need the link, not just the title. Make it frictionless.

If people are bypassing the individual books for the box sets, don't include a link to the box set. Also, look at your pricing: if each book is $3.99, but the box set is $5.99 and includes six books, no one will buy the individual volumes. You might need to adjust the respective prices if you want people to buy the individual volumes more often.

After you have this baseline daily sales data, start advertising at $10/day on _one_ platform, for _one_ Book 1. Why $10? It brings you clear data - you can see a clear increase in sales (or lack thereof) that can be attributed to ads. When you spread everything out across multiple series, or run things at $2, the data is much harder to read. Not impossible, but it's easier to mistake noise for signal. The lowest I'd go is $5/day. Facebook is the easiest for split-testing copy + images/getting clean data, but the interface is the most complicated. If you're better at BB/AMS, use one of those. Don't expand your ads to other books/platforms until you can make that one series profitable.

Log sales/downloads for all books in the series daily, along with your ad spend. If you're not profitable, identify the problem - the three main culprits are:

1) CPC is too high
2) conversion is too low
3) sellthrough is too low.

Sellthrough is calculated as follows: downloads of book 1/downloads of Book X. E.g. 43 sales of Book 1, 20 sales of Book 2 > sellthrough = 20/43 = 46.5%. 43 sales of Book 1, 15 sales of Book 2 > sellthrough = 15/43 = 34.8%. You need to do this for every book in the series, then multiply those numbers by the royalty you receive.

Let's say Book 1 is $0.99 and each book thereafter is $2.99.

That would be $0.35 + (0.465) * 1.70, + (0.34 * 1.70 = $1.73. You'd keep going for every book in the series; in this scenario, we have a trilogy.

That means each sale of Book 1 generates $1.73 in revenue. That's the maximum you can spend advertising per sale of Book 1 before you lose money.

Now, you might get 1 sale of a book for every 20 clicks at $0.99 (5% conversion rate) on PPC. This is if you're pretty good. We'd multiply our revenue number by the conversion rate to get our breakeven CPC (cost per click) number. In this case, 1.73 * 0.05 = $0.0865. We'll round that down to $0.08 for clarity. Getting eight cent clicks is hard on a paid book. Very hard. Getting 5% of people to buy your book off an ad is hard. Very hard. Increasing sellthrough is hard. Very hard.

You would have to improve at least one of these (in this scenario - run your own numbers) to make this series profitable.

Note that sellthrough will be vastly different if your Book 1 is free. E.g. only 5% or 2% of people might go on to read Book 2. Also, to calculate your actual conversion, you need to be running ads. You simply divide the number of sales of Book 1 by the number of clicks. E.g., if you sold 20 copies of Book 1 and you had 300 clicks, that would be a conversion rate of 6.67%. If you're selling some copies without ads (remember our baseline above) you want to subtract those before calculating conversion. So if you're selling 10 copies a day organically, you'd subtract those from 20, and your actual conversion rate on the ads would be 3.33%.

If sellthrough is bad, then people likely aren't getting to the end of the books. Why? This is a difficult - and painful question - to answer. Look for clues in the reviews: slow. Unlikable main characters. Confusing. These are the types of code words that are death-knells for genre fiction books. I wouldn't fix it in existing books; just keep it in mind for the next series you write, and make sure more people are getting to Book 2. If sellthrough is good, hooray - then you need to focus on increasing your conversion or getting your CPC down to a manageable level.

Conversion is affected by four primary factors: the ad itself, the blurb, the cover, and the price. Basically, if you have an ad that advertises swimming suits, then you link them to a book, conversion will be zero. This is called congruence; in that example, you'd have none. No one would do that, but an example would be advertising a sci-fi book to a fantasy audience, or emphasizing the romantic aspects of an all-out thriller. Make sure the book page and the ad are congruent.

The blurb might need to be changed. Use taglines/copy that perform well in the ads and incorporate them into the blurb. You can also try a variety of price points for your Book 1 to see what's most profitable: free, $0.99, $2.99.

CPC varies from platform to platform, but on Facebook, the keys are audience, your image, and your headline. Focus on getting those locked in.

Change one thing at a time, then monitor the effects day to day and keep tweaking. Once you are profitable, either scale up your spend on that series (on Facebook, you can spend basically an unlimited amount; AMS/BB are much harder to scale), or try to expand it to another platform/region/series.

Set time aside each day to monitor/analyze your PPC spend - maybe one hour. This is critical; PPC is not something you can set and forget. Good performing ads are like skittish rabbits that run at the slightest whisper of the wind. You need to be locked in, otherwise your money will go up in smoke. The rest of your time should be focused on writing.

If, after month 1, you haven't found a way to make PPC ads profitable, switch to a different Book 1 in a different series. If that's not profitable after a month, then switch to a new series and platform. If, after three months, you can't get things working, then I'd scrap the PPC ads entirely.

Testing PPC in this manner assumes you have at least $1000 to invest and don't mind potentially losing it with nothing in return. If you don't, then I would use that one hour a day for market research. In fact, unless you're hell bent on getting PPC to work, I'd probably do that first. Scour the Amazon charts. Look at what's popular. Break down what's working in terms of covers, blurbs, and tropes. The fastest way to reverse your earnings slide is to write to trend - what's hot right now. Those books won't necessarily have legs, but money today is sometimes just what the doctor ordered, so to speak. If you don't want to write something hyper-trendy, then market research will still reveal the books that have staying power, and what has been resonating for years (instead of just months).

Then I'd save that $1000 (or whatever you can spare) for the launch of a new series written tightly to the correct tropes/market expectations. You can spend this money on promo sites, which generally have a better ROI than PPC when you use them for the first time (unless you're a PPC wizard, which most people are not). Get some author cross promos and other free forms of promotion going, too.

If you are having trouble getting ROI with good promo sites, you're running into one of three problems: 1) your books aren't a good fit for their list, 2) you've used a site too much, which means diminishing returns are setting in or 3) your sellthrough is poor. The solution to #1 is simple - stop advertising that book/series on promo sites. Some series don't respond well to paid advertising, so don't advertise them. #2, you can give the books a rest (6 months to a year between runs). OR, since you write YA/NA, you can advertise your books to a different segment - say, FreeBooksy's YA list, or their Fantasy list (e.g. whatever you haven't used extensively). This will introduce you to a new crop of readers. #3, you need to adjust your back matter to optimize sellthrough OR you might need to take a hard look at the writing, because people aren't reaching the end/aren't inclined to buy more.

Again, to reiterate, PPC is not a good fit for many people. Even if you're willing to experiment, you can light a ridiculous amount of money on fire, so tread carefully. It's not a magic bullet and won't work for all books/authors, even if you're willing to test and eager to learn. And if it doesn't work, that's fine. Do marketing that fits your psychological makeup/budget. There are plenty of alternatives.

Nick


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Nicholas Erik said:


> I think you answered your own question: if your best months are when you release, go back to what works. You have your own data. Look at what worked and get back to that - release a book a month. If $0.99 in KU was working for you, then revisit that; I think that's a precarious long-term position to build a career on (simply because you're hyper-dependent on page reads in this scenario, which means if the program changes, your earnings are going to tumble). If what you meant was you were successful $0.99 wide, then do that. Your own data is your best friend; there are many things worth testing, but dollars are the ultimate arbiter of correctness, not a course, forum post, book, podcast, or anything else.
> 
> I'd consider trying a $0.99 series starter, then $2.99 for each book therafter, if you've built a readership on lower priced books. $2.99 is still low priced to keep some of these people in the fold. $3.99/$4.99 is a harder sell for people truly interested in bargains.
> 
> ...


This is a problem, though. I've done all of this already in the past 6 months of experimenting. I do Write to Market and only write books based on trends and what's popular. At first I just thought the books sucked because the read through is awful, but if you comb the reviews the only bad ones are those that say it's "too generic" or get the info about the book completely wrong. I get told all the time by popular/100k+ a year authors I should be bringing in 20k a month with my books automatically. I just... don't


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## Sparling (Mar 1, 2016)

*sigh*

You sound like me, even down to studying Mark Dawson and Brian Meeks. I made a post similiar to this one not too long ago. I really don't know what to do. I was steadily earning $10,000 a month in YA romance and now I'm lucky to get $2000, and it all went downhill around October 2017 and just gets worse every month. I never had to advertise before and just steadily released new books and had success.

I have zero advice for you. I have been living in a total nightmare for a few months now, watching my savings disappear and my book sales get worse, and I've switched to desperately searching for a day job in addition to writing 5000 words a day in the hopes that my books will start selling again. 

I have tried literally EVERY trick in the book. All the advice that's in this post as well as others, and nothing works.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

I have an odd question. Do you love what you're writing? Does writing it make you happy? Or are you writing what had been making you money, because it made you money?


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

idontknowyet said:


> I have an odd question. Do you love what you're writing? Does writing it make you happy? Or are you writing what had been making you money, because it made you money?


I started by writing what I love. Then in the past year I started writing to Market and it's been slowly sucking my soul away. I started out happy, but I'm not happy anymore.

To note, my bestselling series is the one that I loved the most.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

activeindieauthor said:


> This is a problem, though. I've done all of this already in the past 6 months of experimenting. I do Write to Market and only write books based on trends and what's popular. At first I just thought the books sucked because the read through is awful, but if you comb the reviews the only bad ones are those that say it's "too generic" or get the info about the book completely wrong. I get told all the time by popular/100k+ a year authors I should be bringing in 20k a month with my books automatically. I just... don't


If it's not working anyway, maybe try writing more to your own strengths, writing something more distinguishable and differentiated, making your OWN name. The problem with trend audiences is that they are not author-loyal. You're also competing with all the folks who are throwing tens of thousands a month at advertising in your same exact niche. That trendy spot is crowded, and it's full of folks doing shenanigans--they've moved on from romance now and are infecting different genres, esp urban fantasy and cozy mystery.

My suggestions: very strong author branding. Focusing in hookiness in the writing, particularly strong endings. (The ending sells the next book.) Strong voice. High concept--write a different idea, something that isn't the same as everything else out there. A different setting, a different character, a different kind of story, even some non-genre-specific elements.

If what you're doing is not working, you could try focusing more on that stuff instead and see if you can attract an audience that's loyal to personal-you. I hope that helps.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Sparling said:


> *sigh*
> 
> You sound like me, even down to studying Mark Dawson and Brian Meeks. I made a post similiar to this one not too long ago. I really don't know what to do. I was steadily earning $10,000 a month in YA romance and now I'm lucky to get $2000, and it all went downhill around October 2017 and just gets worse every month. I never had to advertise before and just steadily released new books and had success.
> 
> ...


I read your post. You and I could be twins, it seems. Our stories are almost identical, and I don't have any idea on how to turn things around for either of us.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

activeindieauthor said:


> I started by writing what I love. Then in the past year I started writing to Market and it's been slowly sucking my soul away. I started out happy, but I'm not happy anymore.
> 
> To note, my bestselling series is the one that I loved the most.


Does that answer some of your question?

As a reader I can tell when an author is phoning it in and when an author looooooooves what they are doing. There are many major authors that you can tell are bored out of their mind with a series but they keep going because it makes them money. They lose their true fans that way. Write what you love.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Writing books that are more you will probably help if writing generic books has been failing you.

In general, people can give more specific advice if you include your books. It's hard to say what the problem is without seeing them. Might be an issue with ads, covers, blurbs, content, all or none of the above. Hard to say.


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

Usedtoposthere said:


> If it's not working anyway, maybe try writing more to your own strengths, writing something more distinguishable and differentiated, making your OWN name. The problem with trend audiences is that they are not author-loyal. You're also competing with all the folks who are throwing tens of thousands a month at advertising in your same exact niche. That trendy spot is crowded, and it's full of folks doing shenanigans--they've moved on from romance now and are infecting different genres, esp urban fantasy and cozy mystery.
> 
> My suggestions: very strong author branding. Focusing in hookiness in the writing, particularly strong endings. (The ending sells the next book.) Strong voice. High concept--write a different idea, something that isn't the same as everything else out there. A different setting, a different character, a different kind of story, even some non-genre-specific elements.
> 
> If what you're doing is not working, you could try focusing more on that stuff instead and see if you can attract an audience that's loyal to personal-you. I hope that helps.


This is great advice especially if the OP enjoys writing in a trendy genre.

Good luck, OP. I have no suggestions given I've only been at this for a year but several of these posts have been springing up lately. I'd say give Usedtoposthere's advice a go...maybe sit down and write out what it is that you love about writing, which stories call to your heart. If you say that your best selling series is the one you love the most then maybe do a spin off on that idea or something similar to it. I wish you well...take good care of yourself right now and be easy on your emotions. Stress can take its toll on your health and then you won't be able to write. This happened to me recently with some family issues. Guard against it. Hugs.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Cassie Leigh said:


> Sounds like you have your answer. Go back to what worked for you. Steady releases in your genre. Switching to something that seems like it would be easier to do like erotica (assuming you were serious about that) makes no sense.
> 
> I don't know your pricing, but I've found that AMS work for me on books priced at $4.99 or up. I wouldn't use them on books priced at 99 cents.


That's what I would say. I was having trouble last month even with ads. I released one yesterday morning and my page reads are back to normal when I haven't even done any promoting yet. Releasing often will get you there faster than anything else in my experience.


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## It&#039;s A Mystery (Mar 14, 2017)

activeindieauthor said:


> New to kBoards, seeking advice. I'm an indie author who has over 40 books out and has been publishing since 2011. Since the start of my indie career I've been consistently making $2,500 to $3,500


I'm sorry to hear things have tailed off for you.

I have to say, I'm a bit surprised by these numbers. I would be expecting considerably more money from a back catalogue of that size. If these are in a series I would seriously have a look at read through and ensure that the numbers for books 2,3,4 etc show a decent proportion of book one readers moving on through the books.


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## Simon Haynes (Mar 14, 2011)

Not a solution to the OP's question, just a point.

When I calculate read-through on my series (8 books), I include the box set count once for each title in the box set.

e.g. I have two box sets comprising books 1-3 and 4-6. If I sold 22 copies of the second box set and 10, 8, 5 copies of books 4-6, I would put down 32, 30, 27 copies in my sell-though calcs.

Those readers didn't disappear after book three, they just took a different route to books 7 and 8.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Sorry, but I have to say this: your posts sound like you are trying to blame Mark Dawson and the idea of write to market for your woes. 

Here's the thing: there is advice and then there is how well each of us implements advice. If the advice is not implemented well, the results will not be stellar.

I tried out Mark Dawson's advice on Facebook ads and I made lots of money on my books as a result. In fact, the year I implemented some of his approaches to Facebook ads, I had a stellar year -- the best year of revenues up to that point -- so Facebook ads definitely helped. Building up my mailing list helped with launches and getting early reviews, which I believe helped my brand overall and my bottom line. So you see, I had the exact opposite experience with Mark Dawson's course and the whole write to market approach worked for me - in fact, it turned my career as a writer around.

Perhaps it was your execution that accounts for your lack of success?

The lack of read through in your series is a concern to me. I have boxed sets for my series but I also have high read through from one book to the next despite the boxed set being a bargain. Some readers just want to read one book at a time. Others want that bargain. Having both individual books and a collection means you are providing material for both kinds of readers. 

You could always unpublish your boxed set if you feel it is cannibalizing sales. You would know straightaway if the existence of the boxed set was hurting your read through. If the read through still sucks, I would consider that the issue is with the books themselves. 

And when it comes to write to market, I think you don't really understand the concept. It doesn't  mean churn out trendy crap. It means having a deep understanding of your readers and what they expect and providing it rather than writing whatever strikes your artistic fancy. It means writing a commercial book. That doesn't mean it has to be trendy. It doesn't mean you have to write what you don't enjoy reading. It means finding that intersection between what you love to read, what you love to write and what has a sustainable market of readers.


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

Using facebook/AMS advertising can be great...as long as you do it in conjunction with what was already working for you. Starting to seriously invest in ads is the worst time to change a successful strategy. 

My best guess is that your change in release schedule and pricing is what slowed your sales. 

Young Adult and New Adult are categories that greatly reward a fast release schedule. YA is even one the few categories that I think a fast release schedule can replace almost all advertising. IMO, YA also seems a little harder to reach readers through advertising. 

I agree with what Patty said about the new price point attracting a new audience, too. However, I think you may have priced yourself out of your genre as well. Also, most of the authors in YA and NA that successfully have books at $3.99-4.99 also have the first book cheap or free. 

I would strongly consider taking down the boxset for a month or two. And during that time I would take careful notes of read-throughs. Making all your money on book#1 and the boxset is raising a minor alarm for me. I would investigate it.

My biggest take away from all of this is that you seem to be mishmashing strategies that don't work well together.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

Honestly, I think the entire ebook marketplace has matured and stopped expanding at such a rapid rate that we're going to see a lot of stories like this. No disrespect intended to the OP or anyone else facing the same problem, but the reason things that worked no longer work may have more to do with the bubble bursting in the market than with anything they are or aren't doing.


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## Simon Haynes (Mar 14, 2011)

Maybe future historians will call it the Netflix Effect. Or it could be the rise and rise of mobile gaming.

It wasn't so much of a thing when kindles were dedicated to reading, but how many people use a tablet with a reading app instead these days? Those games and movies are just a click away on the same device.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

You've changed your core readers price wise. You've changed the stories you're writing. You're not releasing anything, and you're chucking money at ads that you don't yet have a handle on. You're basically starting everything from scratch because you didn't manage to take any readers with you or keep your backlist selling.

I used to price everything at .99 and decided about a year ago, when I noted the market was starting to change with the marketers, to up a big portion of my books to 2.99, but I did it slowly and reeled my readers in with me, giving them two series, the older one at .99c and a newer one at 2.99, and at the same time I used AMS and facebook to find new readers. 

I think you've turned your business model on its head and you've done it so extremely that you need to start over again and look at what worked and what hasn't.

You had readers at .99c - you had readers for your old books - can you start a new series that takes up or branches out from where an old favourite left off to test if your readers are still there? Put first in your newer 2.99 series at .99c, and ease up on your ads, you obviously don't have something right in either your covers, blurbs, or newer books that is hooking people to keep clicking. Run baby ads in the background with a low price point on your box sets just so they tick over and get impressions - free advertising.


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## BillyDeCarlo (Apr 11, 2017)

GeneDoucette said:


> Honestly, I think the entire ebook marketplace has matured and stopped expanding at such a rapid rate that we're going to see a lot of stories like this. No disrespect intended to the OP or anyone else facing the same problem, but the reason things that worked no longer work may have more to do with the bubble bursting in the market than with anything they are or aren't doing.


I agree with this. In addition to the other factors mentioned about whether you are engaging the readers and so forth, the landscape has changed a lot in the last year or two. We are fighting off book dumpers, scammers, Amazon's own destructive page-flip feature, authors flooding the market with books, etc. It seems to be a constantly changing landscape. Of course, established authors with a dedicated fan base won't see it as much. Mostly those trying to enter the market and perhaps those who modify a successful platform radically (as it seems the OP did).


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

I'd go back to what I was doing price wise without delay. AMS needs a higher retail price to soak up the costs, but it is difficult to get your book into a top 5 genre chart position that would produce the required sales for continuity, so you are relying on each individual book producing constant results. Though you can get them to produce a profit, my experience is that with the numbers at $2.99-$4.99 you don't get enough sales to give you a top five genre chart position.

I had a similar experience to you in 2011, but on a smaller scale with a collection of shorts  that was selling over 300 copies a month @99c in a niche genre in the UK. Not fantastic bank wise, but for 7 or 8 months it had a top five position in its genre, rubbing shoulders  and changing chart position with Agatha Christie, E.A. Poe, Stephen King, and Leigh Child etc. Like you, once in the top five, I didn't have to do anything marketing wise as visibility ensured sales.

I then had the bright idea of selling the shorts individually at 99c and increased the price of the compilation to $3.99 which I thought would make it a bargain against the individual prices. It took 2 months for sales to go down to zero and the individual shorts tanked. I never did go back to the original price and eventually deleted all the shorts when I moved on to writing full length.

I also think that your readers/fans were conditioned to 99c reads. I would imagine that they are a particular market segment who won't stray from that price level and so deserted you with your new releases at higher prices.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

activeindieauthor said:


> I was at 0.99 and 2.99 before I was advised to raise to 3.99 and 4.99. When that happened sales tanked.


There's an old saying: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Looks like -- by following that advice to raise prices -- you broke something that didn't need fixing.

Your sales possibly tanked because you priced yourself above that which your own personal market wants to bear. Everybody has their own personal target market -- your readers, and potential readers. And they are making economic choices when they buy a book. It appears that the previous price range was that which they were willing to pay for your product. When you raised the price, enough of them apparently changed their mind.

Perhaps you made more because of the royalty -- but it doesn't sound like it.

Just my take on it. I could be wrong.

_Edit to add:_ I re-read the thread. There is a ton of good info and advice here that should help you get back to where you want to be.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

> I took a look at my accounting and saw that the months I did NOTHING except release a new book was when I made the most money. I never advertised before and now I worry that since I started advertising I screwed everything up, but I don't know how to get my sales back up. I'm so burned out from all this ad work it would take me awhile to write another book.


The burnout is worrying, because you need to get back to writing and releasing. Look at it this way: you tried something, but it wasn't for you. You know what did work for you, though, so at least that's something.

I agree with Gene in that the indie book market seems to have matured in many ways, and things aren't really going to work like they once did. Part of this business has always been adapting to new situations, and how well we do that can determine how well our careers go. Add in the cheaters (book stuffing, click farming and all the rest), and it just gets harder and harder.

You could be like me, and basically give up, but I don't think that's what _you_ need. Take a deep breath, get back to writing, and listen to what the folks here have been telling you. Patty, usedtoposthere and the others are smart, and know what they're doing. They won't steer you wrong.


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## lilywhite (Sep 25, 2010)

activeindieauthor said:


> ROI IS awful but ive been told it takes 10k+ in tests just to figure the system out


This is complete BS. I *hate* this, and so many people are saying it. You can get very good, measurable results at a much smaller scale. I feel like the people that say this mostly say it so that when you can't replicate their alleged results, they can say you didn't spend enough.


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

If you can write a book a month, do it! I wish I could. My day job and grandma duties just don't allow it right now.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

GeneDoucette said:


> Honestly, I think the entire ebook marketplace has matured and stopped expanding at such a rapid rate that we're going to see a lot of stories like this. No disrespect intended to the OP or anyone else facing the same problem, but the reason things that worked no longer work may have more to do with the bubble bursting in the market than with anything they are or aren't doing.


I agree.

This occurs in every space that offers commercial opportunity with no barrier to entry.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

I figured out some data:

Conversion rates for series read through is 50% for Book One to Book 2, and 25% for Book Two to Book 3 (this is for all 5 of my series). The remaining 25% go on to buy the rest of the series. I haven't figured out box set conversion but since box set sales are higher I can only assume conversion rates are better. 

My ads were converting at 1:15 when I started. Then Oct-Dec happened and they started converting at 1:300 and I haven't recovered since. 

A couple of people here are insinuating my books aren't very good. I'd be willing to agree with that and start over if I didn't have proof that wasn't the case. If the writing wasn't good, I 1) wouldn't be getting trad pub deals 2) wouldn't be up for multiple awards 3) and I wouldn't be getting fan mail on a daily basis (though it has slowed down a bit due to slowing influx of readers). 

I think there is quite a good bit of advice in here that makes sense as to why my sales are falling. I think I'm going to keep waiting for more advice and seeing what experienced people say and then come back a little later with a fully formed plan. 

As to blaming Dawson/Meeks: I'm not blaming them, only saying that the program didn't work for me, and indies should take the program(s) as a risk when investing in it. I'm not the only author with a story like this. It's also a bit hurtful to say that I don't want to learn and that I'm unwilling to change-- if that was true, I wouldn't have ever tried to change my system and taken risks in the first place. But after all the discussion I think the majority is right and I was doing what I should've been doing all along.


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## cathywalker (Dec 20, 2014)

Okay, my brain hurts from all the information flowing in this thread. One thing I do see clearly is that no one thing works for everyone. Honestly, I think that the publishing industry, marketing strategies, and technology are in such a state of flux that it's nearly impossible for the average person to keep up. One of the best bits of advice is to write, write, write. Without a product to sell, there is no sense in marketing.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

I think you may be calculating readthrough later in the series in a funky way. 50% from book 1 to book 2 is good. 25% from book 2 to 3 seems low. Depending on your price for book 1, you'd expect something like 30%, and then 90% for the rest of the series.

No one is saying your books "aren't good". But if the sellthrough isn't there then there may be issues (that can be wholly fixable), and this is meant in a non-judgemental observation that you should be able to step back from and look at objectively. Is the sellthrough good enough to warrant spending big on ads? If yes, spend on ads. If no, try to fix the sellthrough. Simple as that.


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## Atlantisatheart (Oct 8, 2016)

activeindieauthor said:


> I figured out some data:
> 
> Conversion rates for series read through is 50% for Book One to Book 2, and 25% for Book Two to Book 3 (this is for all 5 of my series). The remaining 25% go on to buy the rest of the series. I haven't figured out box set conversion but since box set sales are higher I can only assume conversion rates are better.
> 
> ...


I don't think it's a question of if your books are good or not, because you were selling at the lower price point. I think you've lost your reader tribe and haven't been able to connect with the newer one, and throwing your savings at ads while not bringing in a monthly wage isn't where any of us need to be. You need to rely on your savings to sustain you now while you get back to writing.

It's not easy for any of us to offer advice when you're not showing us your books, and we can only offer a baseline for how to go forward with what you're telling us. Maybe someone in your genre could pick up on something different if they could see your stuff, but unless they see it then they have to take all possibilities into account. Don't take it to heart - you came here for advice and offered us a pretty blank canvass to work with.


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## Ros_Jackson (Jan 11, 2014)

activeindieauthor said:


> One thing I d know is I sold a LOT at 0.99 compared to Kindle Unlimited, even though I heard you're not supposed to sell at $0.99. I know I can write well because I consistently get 5 star reviews and lots of praise from publishers and critics both.


Price matters a great deal. However, one thing I don't understand is the progression you had in prices. Were you selling all books in the series at .99c, or just the series starters? Typically, how did the pricing progress across a series, and what did you change it to? This could be a key issue, and it's something you can experiment with immediately.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

activeindieauthor said:


> I'm considering making a pen name for erotica and churning out some stuff quickly to save my ass, though I'm male so I feel like this would be really awkward-- not to mention erotica is not my thing in the slightest.
> 
> I really can't afford to go back to my job. I want my indie career back. What do I need to do?


Sounds like you know what you need to do. Your sales tanked after taking the courses and changing your strategy. Ditch the dumb strategy (it might not be dumb, but it is for you). Go back to your method of previous success.

Who says erotica authors are all chicks? Jean Luc Cherie is consistently in the top 100 and with over 250 titles is likely one of the best erotica success stories there is. I know there are others, but he stands out.

I started with fantasy, historical fiction, and scifi in my heart as an author. I reluctantly wrote some erotica for my editor and haven't looked back since. Putting out a book under my real name vs my erotica name? My erotica sales are 500X better in sales units. That is not an exaggeration, either. I'm being conservative with that figure (up to 700X). So imagine, royalties of $2 or $1400 on a title?

What do you think _*my*_ choice was?


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

activeindieauthor said:


> I do Write to Market and only write books based on trends and what's popular.


Okay, that right there sends up a red flag to me. I have no problem with writing to market. I just finished reading Chris Fox's book on the subject and agree with pretty much everything he said.

Now, that being said, "trends" and "what's popular" is an ever changing landscape. That book that pulled in $20K six years ago might not generate $500 from now on because the "trend" has passed through the veil. If your earlier works are languishing and your newer works are bringing in the majority of your income, then it would be safe to say that those older "trends" have run their course. If all of your books have fallen off the cliff, then maybe you're not as adept at reading the trends as you think you are. Maybe you need to take a closer look at what you think is popular and what isn't. Trying to ride the waves can come with bone-crushing results if you catch the wave all wrong.

And one last thing, expecting to catch every single trend and ride it perfectly is a fool's hope. As they say, you will win some and you will lose some. Hopefully you will win more than you lose.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

lilywhite said:


> This is complete BS. I *hate* this, and so many people are saying it. You can get very good, measurable results at a much smaller scale.


Agreed. You don't have to spend $10K before you have ads that generate a profit.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

lilywhite said:


> This is complete BS. I *hate* this, and so many people are saying it. You can get very good, measurable results at a much smaller scale. I feel like the people that say this mostly say it so that when you can't replicate their alleged results, they can say you didn't spend enough.


Totally agreed. I spent a few hundred bucks ironing out my ads in FB. I borrowed a book from the library on the matter and read blog posts by non-Booky professionals.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

activeindieauthor said:


> I figured out some data:
> 
> Conversion rates for series read through is 50% for Book One to Book 2, and 25% for Book Two to Book 3 (this is for all 5 of my series). The remaining 25% go on to buy the rest of the series. I haven't figured out box set conversion but since box set sales are higher I can only assume conversion rates are better.
> 
> ...


It's not about good or bad. It's about effective or not effective. If your goal is sellthrough, then your books are not effective at achieving that goal. Though I do agree with Patty that your numbers sound strange. I've never had sellthrough decrease from Book Two to Book Three. Usually, the biggest drop off is the first jump, then sellthrough is pretty high thereafter.

Look at your books and your reviews--maybe ask some readers too--and try to figure out why you're losing readers. For example, my latest series has a bigger Book One to Book Two drop off than usual. It's also the first series where I didn't set up the couple for Book Two in Book One. I only set up the hero, and he's not the most interesting secondary character in the book. I'm not going to change Book One, because that isn't workable given the timing and plot of Book Two, but I am going to keep this in mind for future series. Always set up the couple and their conflict, not just the hero! That is what gets readers who like my books to keep reading.

If you're not getting sellthrough, you're going to have a hard time making good money with any advertising scheme.

I'd also look at your ads. A 1:300 conversion rate is not an ad that's working. Ads can require a lot of time and testing. That can cost a lot of money if you spend blindly, but you can figure it out at lower budgets too. A $10-20/day ad can give you a ton of information.

I've spent hundreds of thousands in FB ads in the last three years. Some was money well spent. Some wasn't. It's very easy to throw money in the garbage with FB if you don't spend carefully. With KU, especially with new releases, you can be flying blind. But I go into all new campaigns knowing I might not see a return on my money and spend accordingly. I can afford a 10k risk at this point, but not everyone can, and that's fine. You don't need to spend huge. In fact, ROI is better at smaller spends, bc you can't really keep your clicks cheap as you raise the budget.

Mark's class is great, but that doesn't mean all his techniques will work for you.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Deleted


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Okay. With the advice in this thread I think I'm slowly piecing together what's been going on.

So my pricing started at 0.99 for Book 1, and anywhere from 0.99 and 2.99 for the rest of the books. Now I've changed it so it's usually $0.99 for Book 1, $2.99 for Book 2, and $3.99 for Book 3 (and the rest of the series). I've figured out that my readers are low-paying and that I've trained them to get things at low cost, so $3.99 is a huge jump for them and is the reason why the drop off for Book 3 sinks by 25%. Raising the price of my series starter to $2.99/$3.99 really had a bad effect on sales. I figured I would make this back easily with ads, but obviously, that's not the case here, as my readers seem to want to pay a lower cost. 

My books vary in length. Most I wouldn't mind pricing at 0.99 to 2.99 because they're 50k words, but the 150k ones I'm going to have a hard time stomaching lowering over 3.99. But if they buy more books at a smaller price in bulk I'll make more money long term (especially since some of my series are 7 books long).

I like FB ads over AMS ads. I seem to make more money on those, but I'm not spending like I used to. I think a major issue is that I stopped writing and producing to make more ads, therefore, my fan base went somewhere else. I don't think I'd be in this situation if I had kept writing a lot, and that's something I think I want to change.


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

activeindieauthor said:


> A couple of people here are insinuating my books aren't very good. I'd be willing to agree with that and start over if I didn't have proof that wasn't the case. If the writing wasn't good, I 1) wouldn't be getting trad pub deals 2) wouldn't be up for multiple awards 3) and I wouldn't be getting fan mail on a daily basis (though it has slowed down a bit due to slowing influx of readers).
> 
> I think there is quite a good bit of advice in here that makes sense as to why my sales are falling. I think I'm going to keep waiting for more advice and seeing what experienced people say and then come back a little later with a fully formed plan.


I wanted to say that I highly doubt that your books aren't very good. You were doing far too good for that.

I mentioned investigating book 2 and looking at a reason for the drop-off in read-throughs. I was thinking more that there is a call to action in book 1 that's missing in book 2. If people are buying book 1 and the boxset, I'm assuming that book 1 sets up a compelling "world problem" that readers know is going to take several books to fix. Your original success didn't need a good sell-through from book 2 to book 3 and etc. But I'm thinking a minor change might add a far amount of royalties in your pocket.

My other assumption is that book 2 may end too cleanly. It ties too many ends so that readers who buy book 2 don't feel compelled to buy book 3. For example, the heroes need the sword of avalon in book 1 and they get it in the end of book 2. However, they need 5 more objects, but the reader doesn't find out about that complication until the beginning of book 3. This is an incredibly easy fix. All that is needed is to add a call to action at the end of book 2. A really good CTA would be a sample chapter of book 3 and possibly editing it so that it ends with the beginning of a mystery.


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## MQ (Jan 5, 2011)

C. Gockel said:


> *You're competing with authors launching with spends of $20K and not breaking even*, but feeling alright about it. You're competing with people with pockets deep enough to employ ghost writers and so capable of "releasing" very quickly.


I'm curious. How does one even spend $20k for a launch? I understand over a course of a year perhaps, but a launch? (boggles the mind)


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

KateDanley said:


> To the OP, Greetings from another old-timer! I have heard from a bunch of us from the class of 2010 and 2011 noting a similar experience with a BONKERS drop off. Even new releases this year are not getting the New Release Boost. There is a thread here about an also-bought glitch where books in our backlist may feature other people's also-boughts, but our books are not appearing on anyone else's page. I'd rule that out first. I was spending mad advertising money and making NO dent, and it turned out that was my problem.


Good thought on the also-bought glitch, Kate. Here's the recent thread on that: https://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=263029.0 It focuses on a specific incident affecting series with an entry published in late April, but based on what you say, I guess it's happened before that as well.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

The only thing I can add to what the others have said is something I have only seen alluded to by LilyBLily: don't forget the competition -- especially their pricing.

If your competition are pricing their books at .99 to 2.99, and you have similar product and you are pricing it much higher than that, financially finicky readers may gravitate to the less expensive product.

You haven't mentioned the general pricing in your genre. But it is something to consider.

RE: erotica: I have read similar comments here on KBoards before, usually something like "I just had a dive in sales.... Oh ****, I better churn out some erotica!"

Perhaps you've written in the genre before (you don't say), so maybe you'd do OK, but your statements imply that you think you can just phone it in and make money. It isn't that simple.

It is a highly competitive market with a _lot_ of product out there, and a lot of competition, and it is not instant money.

It is similar to ePublishing in general -- there is much more competition overall than there was in 2011. I think the days of people writing eBooks and buying that yacht are out of the picture for the vast majority of us (not saying you are implying this -- just sayin').

PS -- good luck in your endeavors.


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## JeanetteRaleigh (Jan 1, 2013)

This is one of the scariest threads I've seen.  I know it happens but for those of us who are still in full-time jobs and wanting to make the leap, this is the most worrisome outcome.  I wish I had advice for you, but I've never been to the point you have, so you probably know better how to get there.


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## anotherpage (Apr 4, 2012)

"Since I've started doing ads I've only written and published 3 books "

There is your problem.

You can't do that as an indie and make good money unless you are like some breakout star.

You have to pump out books like a machine ( 1 a month )

You slow, the money slows. Simple as that.

The best marketing is a new book. Get back to it.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

thevoiceofone said:


> You have to pump out books like a machine ( 1 a month )
> 
> You slow, the money slows. Simple as that.


No.

Producing a book a month guarantees nothing.

And if you have a deep backlist you can produce less frequently, too.


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## John Etzil (Nov 15, 2016)

More data would help analyze your situation.

How many series?

How many books in each series?

Prices of each book/boxset before and after price changes?

How many wide?

Any book 1 perma free's?

As an aside, why are box sets not considered "read through" from a sales standpoint?



activeindieauthor said:


> New to kBoards, seeking advice. I'm an indie author who has over 40 books out and has been publishing since 2011. Since the start of my indie career I've been consistently making $2,500 to $3,500 in YA and NA fantasy fiction. This has dropped like a rock since December of 2017 to around $400 per month and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
> 
> Last year was a great year. I got a few trad pub deals, made a bestseller list, and got a BookBub deal on a box set that earned me almost $20k. I did very little advertising and did NO AMS, FB, or BookBub ads whatsoever.
> 
> ...


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

activeindieauthor said:


> I started by writing what I love. Then in the past year I started writing to Market and it's been slowly sucking my soul away. I started out happy, but I'm not happy anymore.
> 
> To note, my bestselling series is the one that I loved the most.


This.

Writing to market only works if you (generic you) can do so with heart. You have to love it and believe in it. That's what gives a series longevity, makes it memorable. Nobody recommends flat books without heart to their friends.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

JeanetteRaleigh said:


> This is one of the scariest threads I've seen. I know it happens but for those of us who are still in full-time jobs and wanting to make the leap, this is the most worrisome outcome.


I think a lot of it may come down to many of us not really understanding what market we're selling into (and I would include myself in that, since I mostly just write random stuff that appeals to me at the time). In this case, it looks like the books were selling well in the cut-price market, but if a writer's main selling point is that their books are cheap, they lose that selling point if they increase the price.

Worse than that, if a writer is selling books into the $0.99 market, then all the also-boughts are probably from $0.99 books, so the only people finding their books through Amazon's recommendations are probably looking for $0.99 books. Push the price up to $2.99, and they'll click 'Next' and not 'Buy'.

So I'd say the answer is knowing the market and not messing with success.


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## Gone To Croatan (Jun 24, 2011)

David VanDyke said:


> Writing to market only works if you (generic you) can do so with heart. You have to love it and believe in it.


Yeah, you need to find a market that sells, where you can still enjoy writing the books. I never wanted to write military SF, but my only decently-selling book at this point is military SF and I did have fun writing it. I just need to get my latest book out of the way so I can write the sequel.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Crystal_ said:


> It's not about good or bad. It's about effective or not effective. If your goal is sellthrough, then your books are not effective at achieving that goal. Though I do agree with Patty that your numbers sound strange. I've never had sellthrough decrease from Book Two to Book Three. Usually, the biggest drop off is the first jump, then sellthrough is pretty high thereafter.


As a reader, I usually finish series--but occasionally I've tossed a book 2 or 3 or even 4 or 5 in the trash in disgust and never finished it. This is always because the author failed to follow through on his or her implicit promises, the author-reader contract if you will, established early on.

Veering wildly from the norms and expectations of the reader is a sure way to lose them, no matter if those twists "make sense" or are well done. Here are some things I recall off the top of my head:

- A pointless, explicit sex scene dropped suddenly into a PG-13 series. It was as if the author was told at some seminar that sex sells, so hey, put some sex in there. It was jarring and not to my taste, and it also was too sudden within the context of the plot.

- The protagonist dies suddenly and pointlessly, and the reader is expected to shift focus to a new protagonist. Real death, too--I kept waiting for "it was all a dream" or some other twist, but no, the character I'd invested all my emotion in was suddenly gone. GRRM may be able to pull this off somehow, but most people can't.

- The tone of the stories change, suddenly becoming humorous or losing their humor, turning from light to dark or vice-versa.

- A deus ex machina that's too hard to take. Real life doesn't always make sense, but fiction must.

- Some social or political issue suddenly comes to the fore and becomes the focus or the story, i.e., what was once a drama or mystery or adventure is now the author's pet message fiction on some issue.

- A bad ending--a blatant cliffhanger when the next book is unavailable, a total lack of resolution, an incomprehensible or confusing ending (in genre fiction).

- A sudden lack of proofreading or editing. I remember getting to a book 3 where the rules of written English suddenly didn't seem to apply. The author apparently lost his editor or got a new one or failed to use one, or maybe the book was ghostwritten and not brought into conformance, but no matter what, I couldn't stomach it. This was, but the way, a tradpubbed book.

I'm sure there are many other reasons, but it only takes one to lose a reader--and ebooks are easier to drop, in my experience.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

David VanDyke said:


> Writing to market only works if you (generic you) can do so with heart. You have to love it and believe in it. That's what gives a series longevity, makes it memorable. Nobody recommends flat books without heart to their friends.


Yeah, this is a good point. I think the writing-to-market movement is brilliant, but I've definitely had the experience of reading a book and not being able to remember the characters or what it was about or who the author was even a couple days later. I might read the author's books again, but only if Amazon puts them right in front of me. I'd never remember to go looking for them, even if I enjoyed them during the reading experience.

I think writing to market well is actually quite difficult. Being totally on-genre yet memorably unique ... it's practically a paradox.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Deleted


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## 69959 (May 14, 2013)

There's a lot of great advice in this thread. I don't have anything new to add, but want to chime in with the agreement that a lot of people are making less than last year. I've spoken privately with a number of other authors who are in the same boat. You defintley aren't alone in this.

Get back to what you were doing before. Write what you love. If you don't love it, how do you expect the readers to? Take a look at what could be hindering your sell-through. Do you have a preview of the next book at the end of each book along with a link? Do the reviews give you any indication of what might be wrong? Is there a book in particular that's halting the sell-through? Is your box set significantly lower priced than the individual books? You want to give a slight discount, but not enough that it hurts you. Others may disagree with me, but dropping your production to 3 books a year isn't doing you any favors. Your readers have come to expect more, and they're probably forgetting about you.


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## It&#039;s A Mystery (Mar 14, 2017)

sela said:


> Writing to market is a combination of the following:
> 
> 1. Writing what you read (because then you know it well enough to understand what makes a story good)
> 
> ...


This perfectly sums things up.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

I did notice something when I looked at releases. For the past 4 years my releases were really staggered and random-- months apart with no preorders. When I did constant preorders with consistent releases is when I made the real money. I think this really affected read through in the long run.

I already have a call to action and a funnel at the end of each of my books so I know that's not it. And a few readers who I've asked directly all say they don't buy the ebooks until the series is complete AND they can just buy the omnibus to binge instead of buying individually and/or waiting. It seems my fans love box sets more than anything else. They're like Netflix viewers.


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## Cheryl Douglas (Dec 7, 2011)

activeindieauthor said:


> I did notice something when I looked at releases. For the past 4 years my releases were really staggered and random-- months apart with no preorders. When I did constant preorders with consistent releases is when I made the real money. I think this really affected read through in the long run.


This has also been my experience. I think you're on to something here. I used to work on three series at a time, releasing twelve books a year, so I thought I was doing well in terms of production. I couldn't figure out why my sales were dipping until I realized I was often going six months between releases in the same series. I'd typically stick to the series I favored, released two or three books in that series, and neglect the others. Readers like consistency. I sold the most books when I stuck to one series and released every month. I'd suggest you look at your own track record, figure out what worked for you then, and try to replicate it. Good luck!


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## Lefevre (Feb 1, 2014)

GeneDoucette said:


> Honestly, I think the entire ebook marketplace has matured and stopped expanding at such a rapid rate that we're going to see a lot of stories like this. No disrespect intended to the OP or anyone else facing the same problem, but the reason things that worked no longer work may have more to do with the bubble bursting in the market than with anything they are or aren't doing.


This!


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## Desmond X. Torres (Mar 16, 2013)

I hope the OP continues to share their efforts on this situation. 

Back when I first joined Kboards, new authors regularly shared their victories with releases and establishing their careers (2013 or so). I recalled a few of their names and went hunting online for them to see they haven't put up anything new in two or more years. When I checked the ranks of their books, it was easy to see that pen name isn't making any $. One conclusion is they've left the game, or else they switched to another genre/pen name. 

Currently (well, for the last year or so) situations like this one are appearing on Kboards regularly. Maybe... the current state of the industry has matured as others have said here... 

It'd be great to read about authors who went from riches to rags and back up again. The only one I can think of who's shared their experience in this vein is Annie Jacoby. 

When I first began writing and looked around to see if I could actually make $ at it, I came across Konrath's blog which pointed me here. A theme back then was that if you wanted success at this, you needed to work really, really HARD. And even so, there were no guarantees. Authors like Elle Casey, HM Ward, Konrath etc etc who were killing it were putting in 12 hour days. 

I'm pretty sure that Amanda M. Lee is putting in serious hours right now. With the internet off, and facing a blank page, that's where the hours are spent. 

This game hasn't gotten any less HARD. If anything, kind of worse, b/c the current theme I'm seeing in posts like this is the utter lack of certainty in our income. That lack of security is draining, and yeah, I know; it's always been there. But... to me, it feels even more pronounced. 

A bud of mine blew up in sales last winter, diving into the five fig club deeply. 90 days later, those sales tanked. That's murder on the soul, man... (looks over to Annie...) 

You pulled this off once, OP. Yes, if you don't get discouraged, you'll weather the storm and put those pieces back together. Or, you'll decide there's other things to do with your life; and that would be just as cool, alright?

Either way, keep us posted, k?


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## &quot;Serious&quot; ... but not really (Aug 14, 2017)

Cassie Leigh said:


> I disagree. All of those you list require selling at discounted prices and doing promo pushes whereas if you nail AMS and FB ads you can sell steadily long-term. It's harder with fiction than non-fiction, but it can still be done.


So Cassie, your thoughts would be a novella sized 99 cent non-fic would sell very well before a 99 cent SF&F novella would? I would think so. I am thinking of writing a layman's philosophy/science thing, smallish. My small SF&F novella was flat to nothing and I unpublished it (I may put it back up later - not sure).

So you make sense as my results reflect the same. I know you are a big AMS user. What x factor would you suspect the difference to be if you could guess? I know it depends on how well it is done too. I have read quite a few non-fic science related things. They were actually not so good. A few were. But on the surface to me as one looking for that they are more tempting than fictional SF&F of like wise subject.

Thanks.


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## &quot;Serious&quot; ... but not really (Aug 14, 2017)

Desmond X. Torres said:


> I hope the OP continues to share their efforts on this situation.
> 
> Back when I first joined Kboards, new authors regularly shared their victories with releases and establishing their careers (2013 or so). I recalled a few of their names and went hunting online for them to see they haven't put up anything new in two or more years. When I checked the ranks of their books, it was easy to see that pen name isn't making any $. One conclusion is they've left the game, or else they switched to another genre/pen name.
> 
> ...


I think the same. Prior to 2013 you could have written anything and it would perform. If you were pretty good you would have a following now. Currently, the competition and number of books are a tidal-wave you have to wade through. A new author is up against a lot!

So to see the OP seeing this just validates my thoughts. Things are changing and fast. The critical mass of books being released (and if they are pretty good too) generates this chaos in performance people are getting now. Not all, just some (quite a few?). So I suspect it continues.

Amazon will lean towards the reader, always. That is where the money is. So I hope Amazon will do more for us as a reader. I am a reader more than a writer. And a more robust interactive reader environment I hope is coming. But that means better and more free books. KU and Prime are the wave of the future. Cashflow for Amazon, and rank competition for writers. I think we are seeing that happening.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Max 007 said:


> So Cassie, your thoughts would be a novella sized 99 cent non-fic would sell very well before a 99 cent SF&F novella would?


I think a 20K-word non-fiction title that adequately covers its subject will outsell a 5K-word SFF short story. Or even a 15K-word FF short story. I wouldn't necessarily think the non-fiction title needs to be priced at 99 cents, though. With AMS or FB ads I think you really need more room to work with than that to be profitable. So either that 99 cent title needs to be a lead in to more titles or you need to be priced higher to absorb the number of clicks it takes to get a sale. And if you are covering your chosen topic, I also think that's worth more than 99 cents.

Part of the reason I think it's easier to use those kinds of ads long-term on non-fiction versus fiction is the churn factor. There are simply more titles released in most fiction categories on any given day than there are in most non-fiction categories on any given day so if you release a good product that meets consumer needs and is at a good price point you have more opportunity to stick and stay visible in non-fiction. But the product has to meet the need. The other part of it is the competition for placement. Less books published in that category, less people potentially bidding to advertise to that audience. (Which is not saying there isn't competition to be had even in non-fiction. But in non-fiction I can name my competition whereas in fiction there are thousands of people bidding for the same spots as me.)


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## levolal (Apr 13, 2018)

Look up the subreddit eroticauthors on Reddit. Read their sidebar. Most people in that subreddit have moved on to Romance. I come from writing erotica. I'm one of the people that people on here mostly hate, I employ ghostwriters (but hell, I'm not spending 20k on releases I don't travel in those circles or even have any idea how that would work). But I do and have bought very large erotica catalogs from people who have totally failed and are getting out of the game. _Everyone_ is getting out of the erotica game now, the most common advice you'll get on eroticauthors is don't do erotica. It is a churn and burn game, but it is totally and I mean totally worthless if you just write porn. You gotta find niches, do research, find underserved markets and cater to very particular needs.

What do you think of when you think of erotica? Milf and the handymen? Teacher and the student (ok, ok, we're talking about college here or pretending to, anyway). Firemen? Rough cop stop? Common fantasies don't cut it. Just like you're hitting a wall now, you will hit the same wall there. You need to learn to research, find a real market to write to where you can stand out and not be competing against these insane budgets (or at least, for the love of god, don't release the same day).

The problem with erotica is that things pay per *page* now. When erotica was in its glory days, in kindle 1.0, it paid by borrow so it was worth it. Erotica is *short*, and Amazon *hates* erotica. The shorter your story is, the faster it falls off the "cliff", which means Amazon's algorithm decides you're done and you're gone and you're gonna sink like a rock. Longer works will rank for longer, and it will make you more money, as long as you find your market.

The reason I recommend eroticauthors is because, well, erotica authors tend to be of a different cut and more about business vs pleasure. It is a good community if you want to learn about that. I'm not in erotica anymore technically in the sense I don't write it, but I can and do sometimes buy large catalogs of people running from it because the only time it makes any business sense to be in erotica is if you can literally write 5k words every day for a week and never get tired of writing the dirtiest and weirdest porn out there. I can't do that, but I can buy other people's catalogs who are burned out and release them on a steady schedule.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

Cassie Leigh said:


> I disagree. All of those you list require selling at discounted prices and doing promo pushes whereas if you nail AMS and FB ads you can sell steadily long-term. It's harder with fiction than non-fiction, but it can still be done.


I've actually found some really nice FB audiences for Soul Marked and Magic After Midnight where I can sell at full price, and make a profit. The thing with FB and AMS is you have to monitor it. With a discount on a first in series you can "set and forget" it.

I'm toying with leaving Soul Marked at 99-cents after the most recent BookBub for as long as possible because I don't have to monitor it. Also, although it's making dirt on Amazon, iBooks, Nook, and GooglePlay are paying a higher percentage and my sales on those vendors aren't dropping off at the same rate they are on Amazon--although before the BookBub I was making next to nothing on the smaller vendors.


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## Sparling (Mar 1, 2016)

KateDanley said:


> To the OP, Greetings from another old-timer! I have heard from a bunch of us from the class of 2010 and 2011 noting a similar experience with a BONKERS drop off. Even new releases this year are not getting the New Release Boost. There is a thread here about an also-bought glitch where books in our backlist may feature other people's also-boughts, but our books are not appearing on anyone else's page. I'd rule that out first. I was spending mad advertising money and making NO dent, and it turned out that was my problem.
> 
> And, yes, you also may have borked your also-boughts with the ad course. I did the same thing. I started taking ad advice from a "guru" who wasn't selling as many books as I was (they did well with non-fiction, but not fiction) and suddenly I found myself getting their results.
> 
> The only way I've been able to start to turn this around (and it has just been in the past two weeks I've made progress) is to kick it old skool. Book a single free day on your Select titles every thirty days with a single advertiser who is going to pitch you with other books in your genre to get the also-boughts aligned. Permafree the first book if you're wide. And know you're not alone. Whether it's a glitch or a new seven-year cliff, what you're experiencing is hitting a lot of people.


I'm not OP, but I'm in the exact same position, so thank you for this. It makes me feel better, and I totally agree about going old school. I'll be setting up a free day every month and hoping for the best. I'm done seeing my income cut in half and STILL spending money on ads. No more ads for me.


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## &quot;Serious&quot; ... but not really (Aug 14, 2017)

Cassie Leigh said:


> I think a 20K-word non-fiction title that adequately covers its subject will outsell a 5K-word SFF short story. Or even a 15K-word FF short story. I wouldn't necessarily think the non-fiction title needs to be priced at 99 cents, though. With AMS or FB ads I think you really need more room to work with than that to be profitable. So either that 99 cent title needs to be a lead in to more titles or you need to be priced higher to absorb the number of clicks it takes to get a sale. And if you are covering your chosen topic, I also think that's worth more than 99 cents.
> 
> Part of the reason I think it's easier to use those kinds of ads long-term on non-fiction versus fiction is the churn factor. There are simply more titles released in most fiction categories on any given day than there are in most non-fiction categories on any given day so if you release a good product that meets consumer needs and is at a good price point you have more opportunity to stick and stay visible in non-fiction. But the product has to meet the need. The other part of it is the competition for placement. Less books published in that category, less people potentially bidding to advertise to that audience. (Which is not saying there isn't competition to be had even in non-fiction. But in non-fiction I can name my competition whereas in fiction there are thousands of people bidding for the same spots as me.)


I think the same way. Thanks for sharing. The problem is ... I am not going to write a lot. I may do the science non-fiction book ... then re-release my SF novella ... then do a fantasy/science novella, then I will be done. I just don't want to write much (unless something takes off a bit and I can expand the stories in that genre).

But I really think my SF&F novellas will be flat. There is just too much competition. I see so many new authors here that experience the same thing I did. The reason is there is too much out there competing. To just get read, ROI will be negative. The best thing is run a simple AMS ad for it and live with the cost creep and hope it sells some. But you do need some other books I think. So wait until I can get 4 or 5 in different genres, 2 non-fic and 1 Sf and 1 fantasy maybe 2 fantasy. So I hit Amazon with 4 or 5 books at once. If one gets traction and will roll over into the others, as the style of all will be in my same thinking. But if that fails - I quit writing! ughhh the market is so saturated unless you have established yourself in the past.

Non-fiction, depending on the niche, will probably do much better. I may try the first book and see how it does. If well, I stick to layman opinion type books, reflective on uppity-up type subjects. Seems a lot of Ph D.(s) yammer on about this and that in science or religious thought. I can do the same and garner fellow minded readers.  no one has a clue so what I think is just as relevant, I just have to say it well... everyone looks to the future ... etc, etc,


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## joesmithx (Mar 21, 2018)

I see a lot of authors doing "write to market" and many of them do make good money...for a while. A few of them continue to, but most drop off the cliff FAST and each successive book does poorer than the previous.

The thing is, you may have all the tropes down and give the audience everything they want, but that's it. You're giving them a by-the-numbers book because you have no vested interest to be creative. Yes, there is creativity to a point (if you can finish a book, you're more creative than the average Joe), but it's easy for someone who has read books all their life (especially people who only likes to read certain genres) to tell when the author just isn't *INTO* what they're writing.

I'm sure people will disagree, but to me, if all you're doing is writing popular trends that *you* have no interest in, then you're putting in "work" and there is no "heart." Yes, it's all very abstract, BUT READERS NOTICE. That's why you're not getting read-through. They may taken a chance on your cheap starter book because it fits the bill--from the cover to the blurb and maybe even the few First Look pages--but once they really get into the book they'll know you're just doing it for the bucks. They may not know it right away, but it'll be a feeling they can't shake, and there are way too many authors they feel better about out there.

There are a few Kboards members who have a ton of information and numbers and write really long exhausting posts about their experiments with each new book launch they do. But they almost always never hit it big and it's pretty obvious to see why, even though THEY can't seem to figure it out. I could, though, and I'm sure their readers could as well: They were all writing to market and had zero investment in the genre besides money.

Don't get me wrong. You could be writing the most trendy genre but if it's something you really like or is really into, it COME ACROSS. Even if your output is wholly generic and contains zero surprises, readers won't feel like you're just after their money.

*READERS CAN TELL.*


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## LadyG (Sep 3, 2015)

AWritersLife said:


> I see a lot of authors doing "write to market" and many of them do make good money...for a while. A few of them continue to, but most drop off the cliff FAST and each successive book does poorer than the previous.
> 
> The thing is, you may have all the tropes down and give the audience everything they want, but that's it. You're giving them a by-the-numbers book because you have no vested interest to be creative. Yes, there is creativity to a point (if you can finish a book, you're more creative than the average Joe), but it's easy for someone who has read books all their life (especially people who only likes to read certain genres) to tell when the author just isn't *INTO* what they're writing.
> 
> ...


Like so many others, you're confusing "writing to market" with "writing to trend." There is a difference.


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## &quot;Serious&quot; ... but not really (Aug 14, 2017)

Cassie Leigh said:


> I think a 20K-word non-fiction title that adequately covers its subject will outsell a 5K-word SFF short story. Or even a 15K-word FF short story. I wouldn't necessarily think the non-fiction title needs to be priced at 99 cents, though. With AMS or FB ads I think you really need more room to work with than that to be profitable. So either that 99 cent title needs to be a lead in to more titles or you need to be priced higher to absorb the number of clicks it takes to get a sale. And if you are covering your chosen topic, I also think that's worth more than 99 cents.
> 
> Part of the reason I think it's easier to use those kinds of ads long-term on non-fiction versus fiction is the churn factor. There are simply more titles released in most fiction categories on any given day than there are in most non-fiction categories on any given day so if you release a good product that meets consumer needs and is at a good price point you have more opportunity to stick and stay visible in non-fiction. But the product has to meet the need. The other part of it is the competition for placement. Less books published in that category, less people potentially bidding to advertise to that audience. (Which is not saying there isn't competition to be had even in non-fiction. But in non-fiction I can name my competition whereas in fiction there are thousands of people bidding for the same spots as me.)


Price point is important, but only from a wide perspective with AMS perspective I think - mostly - (99 cents leaves little wiggle room with AMS, but if it is 20k words - and Select - it does not matter if it is $4.99 for a borrow - still no wiggle room). All my stuff will be geared to Select. I feel a paradigm shift may be coming, so stay were you will have some traction.

AMS gets you exposure to all works, impressions are important I think, even with no clicks. The more related works you have the more your name (and books) appears. At some point clicks lead to buys. If they liked your non-fic, they will like your fiction is the hope. But if the fiction is lacking ... un-publish them and stick to non-fic if that does well enough for you.

Don't know. I just know novella sized fiction does not work well by itself so far for me. You need a few of them I bet.


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## &quot;Serious&quot; ... but not really (Aug 14, 2017)

LadyG said:


> Like so many others, you're confusing "writing to market" with "writing to trend." There is a difference.


I know what you mean. But too, trend can equal market, in a way. What is hot people copy.

Meyer could easily stick to her style of vampire with the given characters and continue with other stories there. I would love them I am sure. Even more stuff like The Host.

Other writers have jumped on the vampire wagon. Not that Meyer didn't. She says she didn't - but she knew a huge vampire market existed and wondered if hers would stand out.

Her writing and story set her apart. So she is on my FOLLOW list. But she got goofy and left SF&F ... darn. Maybe she comes back.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AWritersLife said:


> I see a lot of authors doing "write to market" and many of them do make good money...for a while. A few of them continue to, but most drop off the cliff FAST and each successive book does poorer than the previous.
> 
> The thing is, you may have all the tropes down and give the audience everything they want, but that's it. You're giving them a by-the-numbers book because you have no vested interest to be creative. Yes, there is creativity to a point (if you can finish a book, you're more creative than the average Joe), but it's easy for someone who has read books all their life (especially people who only likes to read certain genres) to tell when the author just isn't *INTO* what they're writing.
> 
> ...


I agree. For stickiness, there has to be "more" in a book. KU, wide, whatever.


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## levolal (Apr 13, 2018)

Yikes, all this trends and writing to market and doing what you love crap. To be honest, most successful authors don't hang out around communities like this. We all want to write what you love. Maybe you're lucky and what you love is exactly what your market loves. But odds are, it isn't.

I'm in this for the money, and at the end of the day I know I can identify a trend early and pump out a book if I think it's a good wave to ride or sit it out. Staples of your market are really just trends that never die. But there are _expectations_ that you just have to meet if you want to be successful. You may stand with the 1% of people who had a main character in a romance novel who cheated on her husband but they worked it out...or you can stand with the other 99% who knows most readers will light you on fire.

Read the top books in your genre, self published, explore the subcategories. Find books ranking reasonably high (sales rank, not genre) and see what they are doing and then copy them... creatively. Boom. It's magic, it's annoying, it works. Write something you love on the side to feel fulfilled. Maybe you'll get lucky and that'll be a hit, too.


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## 101569 (Apr 11, 2018)

levolal said:


> Yikes, all this trends and writing to market and doing what you love crap. To be honest, most successful authors don't hang out around communities like this. We all want to write what you love. Maybe you're lucky and what you love is exactly what your market loves. But odds are, it isn't.
> 
> I'm in this for the money, and at the end of the day I know I can identify a trend early and pump out a book if I think it's a good wave to ride or sit it out. Staples of your market are really just trends that never die. But there are _expectations_ that you just have to meet if you want to be successful. You may stand with the 1% of people who had a main character in a romance novel who cheated on her husband but they worked it out...or you can stand with the other 99% who knows most readers will light you on fire.
> 
> Read the top books in your genre, self published, explore the subcategories. Find books ranking reasonably high (sales rank, not genre) and see what they are doing and then copy them... creatively. Boom. It's magic, it's annoying, it works. Write something you love on the side to feel fulfilled. Maybe you'll get lucky and that'll be a hit, too.


Here's the difference between that and your choice. You will always be chasing the next wave. Sticky authors will be searched regardless of advertising because people loved their work. This year last year and in the years to come. There are authors that I have bought their book 5 or more times over the years (pre ebooks). Why? Because the book is a good read regardless. I can rely on the author to meet my expectations. I don't think I've seen a single ad for any of these authors. They don't change their styles based on whats "trending." They write what they love and people will love reading it forever. I'm sure you make money chasing the next wave, but I would get awfully tired that way.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

There are lots of ways to write. There are lots of ways to make money from it. There are lots of ways to be successful. It's an open market and a free world. Plenty of room for wildly different approaches. 

Every single one of them can be effective.


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## Hoop (Nov 22, 2014)

Read this part over and over again...
"*My income has sunk terribly since I've* followed Dawson's/Meeks advice and changed my model of advertising heavily and *writing less*.
I took a look at my accounting and saw that the months I did NOTHING except release a new book was when I made the most money. 
I don't know what I did wrong."


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

AWritersLife said:


> I see a lot of authors doing "write to market" and many of them do make good money...for a while. A few of them continue to, but most drop off the cliff FAST and each successive book does poorer than the previous.
> 
> The thing is, you may have all the tropes down and give the audience everything they want, but that's it. You're giving them a by-the-numbers book because you have no vested interest to be creative. Yes, there is creativity to a point (if you can finish a book, you're more creative than the average Joe), but it's easy for someone who has read books all their life (especially people who only likes to read certain genres) to tell when the author just isn't *INTO* what they're writing.
> 
> I'm sure people will disagree, but to me, if all you're doing is writing popular trends that *you* have no interest in, then you're putting in "work" and there is no "heart." Yes, it's all very abstract, BUT READERS NOTICE. That's why you're not getting read-through. They may taken a chance on your cheap starter book because it fits the bill--from the cover to the blurb and maybe even the few First Look pages--but once they really get into the book they'll know you're just doing it for the bucks. They may not know it right away, but it'll be a feeling they can't shake, and there are way too many authors they feel better about out there.


I agree. Readers may not be able to articulate why a book feels flat, but they do feel it. They'll notice and they won't come back. The best way to have a steady career is to build those core readers who want everything you write. Sure, that's only a small percentage of my overall sales, but I know I can put out a book that's me and get 2-3k people reading it at launch. That goes a long way towards a steady income. And, honestly, that's not a lot. I'm not a big author. Most people have never heard of me. But I have my readers and they love what I do.



levolal said:


> Yikes, all this trends and writing to market and doing what you love crap. To be honest, most successful authors don't hang out around communities like this. We all want to write what you love. Maybe you're lucky and what you love is exactly what your market loves. But odds are, it isn't.


That hasn't been my experience. The authors I know who sell well consistently love their books. Maybe they aren't writing their first choice niche, but they are putting their heart and soul into their work.

I know other authors who do well writing more trendy/less from the heart, but they are not nearly as consistent and they tend to have worse sellthrough.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

The thing is, how many people would admit to writing solely for money and treating it as any other job? They're probably out there though. 

And just like any other group of people there would be a few who could pull it off with great success, a fair few that might be getting there and a mass that will never be financially successful at it. Not much different from any other sub-group of writers, or sub-group of anything.

For the record, I'm not one of them. But I'm pretty sure they exist and that some of them can actually write quality fiction despite not liking what they write. It wouldn't be my thing, but good luck to them.


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

levolal said:


> Yikes, all this trends and writing to market and doing what you love crap. To be honest, most successful authors don't hang out around communities like this. We all want to write what you love. Maybe you're lucky and what you love is exactly what your market loves. But odds are, it isn't.


This is kind of where luck can come into it. If you take two professional authors of similar skill (subjective, I know, but go with me), the luckier one is the one whose voice and style is more commercial. If you are measuring success by that.

That's what I always think of when I think of people like Stephen King or JK Rowling. They've obviously had a lot of hard work, but also a lot of luck. A significant part of their luck is that their style of storytelling just happens to be immensely commercial and widely-appreciated. Michael Chabon, on the other hand, has a style that isn't as widely enjoyed. I wouldn't say I feel sorry for the guy or anything, because he's still by any measure a huge success. But his vibe just isn't as widely enjoyed.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

Interesting that you mention JK Rowling. 

I think the earlier Harry Potter books were great. Then they got a bit too dark for me. But compared to what she wrote afterward and released under a pen name, even the last Harry Potter books were upbeat and hopeful. The cynic in me suspects that the first books were written purely to market. As her success grew, she was able to write more and more toward her natural inclination. 

I feel the same way about the first Hunger Games book. Brilliant. Pretty much had a happy ending. Massive success. Then came greater freedom to write books two and three to the author's inclination...

I could be wrong. I'm only guessing. But the trajectory of the writing style of all those books seems to support my guess.


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## AltMe (May 18, 2015)

Jack Krenneck said:


> I think the earlier Harry Potter books were great. Then they got a bit too dark for me. But compared to what she wrote afterward and released under a pen name, even the last Harry Potter books were upbeat and hopeful. The cynic in me suspects that the first books were written purely to market. As her success grew, she was able to write more and more toward her natural inclination.


I think its more likely the first books were much more heavily edited. They are much shorter, and it could be the publisher decided to pitch them more at kids, and removed all dark side. Later, when the found the series being read by everyone, they left it all in.


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

Possibly unpopular opinion, but I don't think half-hearted written to market (trend) is the primary reason those books don't get sticky. It's the same reason written to market (trend) books that are written with passion and love don't necessarily stick, either.

Craft. 

Trends can get eyes on your work. If you have the craft to pull off something readers can't get anywhere else, they'll come back regardless of the trend dying. 

Written to market books (different from trends because markets are stable. They may wane in popularity, but they remain) from authors who have a level of craft higher than the average author can write and sell books they aren't passionate about or even phone it in because there are still giving those readers the two things they want: the tropes and feelings that a certain genre/trend give them and a story that's above average in the telling.

Craft matters, especially with write to market/trend. It's how you beat the competition and sustain it. 

This is not a 'if you don't sell, you suck at writing'. There are too many factors when it comes to reaching new readers and selling in the first place. No longer selling well when you did previously also doesn't mean you suck because there are other factors that affect getting your book to new readers. 

My point is that craft matters more than loving what you write.


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## boba1823 (Aug 13, 2017)

Jack Krenneck said:


> The thing is, how many people would admit to writing solely for money and treating it as any other job? They're probably out there though.


_Me_, lol! I'm purely commercially focused in my writing - though it's a business, so it isn't really the kind of thing that you can treat as a regular (read: working for someone else who pays you a salary) kind of job.



HopelessFanatic said:


> Possibly unpopular opinion, but I don't think half-hearted written to market (trend) is the primary reason those books don't get sticky. It's the same reason written to market (trend) books that are written with passion and love don't necessarily stick, either.


I would agree with that. I think that the 'written with love/passion' factor is not really the key characteristic when it comes to stickiness - it's probably more a certain kind of quality/depth - though it happens that the two very often go hand-in-hand. Probably because many, though not necessarily all, of the write-to-trend type of authors are in general not super concerned about quality. Certainly true for the ghostwriter-factory strategy: pumping out books that hit the right tropes and trends while managing the minimally acceptable level of competence expected by the readers who like that sort of thing.

I'm in Romance, so I occasionally read some of the hot Amazon written-to-trend books in that category. Mostly out of morbid curiosity, probably. They generally have little if any character development, pretty shallow emotional trajectories, etc. Characters do things, and make decisions, not because it follows naturally from their character but because.. well, the external plot demands it.

Then there are the 'good' Romance books. Sometimes those pop up on the Amazon bestseller list (more often on the Pop list, it seems), or on the NY Times list because it's a big name trad pub author. (Plenty of others out there that aren't on the lists, of course.) Books that are still definitely Romance, but not necessarily written to trend, that have plenty of character development and other general 'quality' elements that differentiate them from the stuff that is, and is intended to be, basically throw-away.

An author who is passionate about what he or she writes is probably more likely to prefer to (attempt to) write the latter type of book, whereas someone who is lacks that passion is more likely the prefer the former - writing high-quality books takes longer and is more work, assuming the same level of talent and skill. But there's really nothing stopping a purely commercially minded author from aiming to produce the good stuff. It's just a different business strategy. I doubt that readers can tell whether an author truly, genuinely, deep down *cares* about the book - though many of them tell whether the author cared (based on whatever motivation) enough to take the time to write a good book. Assuming said author also had the talent to produce a good book, which is quite another issue.


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## Maia Sepp Ross (May 10, 2013)

finchambooks said:


> I'm curious. How does one even spend $20k for a launch? I understand over a course of a year perhaps, but a launch? (boggles the mind)


I do VA services for authors, some of whom are very successful, and I help them with launches. I can see 20k.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

Maia Sepp said:


> I do VA services for authors, some of whom are very successful, and I help them with launches. I can see 20k.


I've heard of people spending 20K for "successful launches" and then heard privately that they wound up deep in the hole--but hey, they made it to above 100 on the popular list.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

TimothyEllis said:


> I think its more likely the first books were much more heavily edited. They are much shorter, and it could be the publisher decided to pitch them more at kids, and removed all dark side. Later, when the found the series being read by everyone, they left it all in.


Could be!

I think she pitched it at kids herself though right from the beginning. After success, the publisher may have decided to enlarge the books to make more money. Both of the discussed scenarios are plausible.


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## Jack Krenneck (Feb 9, 2014)

boba1823 said:


> _Me_, lol! I'm purely commercially focused in my writing - though it's a business, so it isn't really the kind of thing that you can treat as a regular (read: working for someone else who pays you a salary) kind of job.


Good for you! It's a different POV from what Kboarders generally discuss, but the world is big enough for lots of different approaches.



boba1823 said:


> But there's really nothing stopping a purely commercially minded author from aiming to produce the good stuff. It's just a different business strategy. I doubt that readers can tell whether an author truly, genuinely, deep down *cares* about the book - though many of them tell whether the author cared (based on whatever motivation) enough to take the time to write a good book. Assuming said author also had the talent to produce a good book, which is quite another issue.


I think this is spot on.


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## Indiecognito (May 19, 2014)

C. Gockel said:


> I'm so sorry. Without seeing your books it's hard for anyone to give advice. It is really tough out there. You're competing with authors launching with spends of $20K and not breaking even, but feeling alright about it. You're competing with people with pockets deep enough to employ ghost writers and so capable of "releasing" very quickly. (Amanda Lee does it the legit way, but most people can't do it.)
> 
> My guess is that people will realize, "I hit the top of the charts--I made $15K ... but I spent $20K ... this isn't working ... " and things will get a little better, but right now ... ugh.
> 
> ETA: You're not alone: https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,262724.msg3654845.html#msg3654845


C. Gockel, somehow you posting this made me feel better about a few things. I've noticed the same trends and I have the same hope that this unsustainable model of mad spending to earn few dollars (or negative dollars) will end. In the meantime I'm just hanging on while the boat rocks, doing my thing.

Release books. If those are the good months, so be it.

When I was wide last year I think I spent almost more on ads than I made. I make far more just hanging out in KU and releasing regularly. Hang in there. I had a similar experience; i had over 12 months of 5-figure income per month. I'm still consistently in the 4-figure zone, but it's so much harder now. There's SO much competition.

Just try to love what you do. Think about exploring other genres, too. Ones that aren't so saturated. I know YA can be tough in ebook form. Good luck!


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## Maia Sepp Ross (May 10, 2013)

C. Gockel said:


> I've heard of people spending 20K for "successful launches" and then heard privately that they wound up deep in the hole--but hey, they made it to above 100 on the popular list.


I don't doubt it - but that's not what I'm referring to.


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## Dolphin (Aug 22, 2013)

Pat Pflieger said:


> My understanding is that the Harry Potter books were always intended to shift audience as the series went on. The first book was intended for readers around age 11; the last books were to be for older teens. So readers could sort of grow up along with Harry. An interesting idea, but impractical, given that--like adults--kids will binge an entire series; who's going to wait until they're supposedly old enough to read the later books?


That's a great example of how authors can think too small. Ironic, since JK is now the wealthiest author in the world (wealthiest in the history of the world, I'd think). One of the great virtues of this gig is that books retain their value even after you're dead. Launches are important, but in the scheme of things, structuring your series around even a generous 10-year launch window is terribly short-sighted.

The other common mistake this hints at is thinking that YA books are going to be sold to growing young readers. Adults love YA, and their tastes certainly aren't likely to change between book one and book seven of a series. Adults tend to have readier access to customer accounts, credit cards, and advertising too (just ask anybody trying to sell picture books or MG).

Finally, pamper the whales. People who will sit down and read the entire Harry Potter series in a single week may be unusual, but they're also _awesome_. That's the kind of reader who might give you beta feedback, buy your book during a soft launch, and have a review posted before your promos start rolling. You want to delight the whales. They'll be a lot more important to your career than someone who takes 7-10 years to read a single series.

Sorry for the hijacking, OP. Count me in with the people who thought 1) writing more books and 2) writing things you loved were important principles earlier in your career. Get well soon.

(*ETA:* You know what else is interesting about HP? It's flawed! Badly flawed, even beyond the gradual shifts in tone and content! How does Harry _change_ over the course of the series? How does he arc? What about Scabbers/Pettigrew on the Marauder's Map? What's up with the time-turner?! JK wrote in a million different plot holes and blunders, and she's still rich as she wanna be. That perfection is unachievable and unnecessary is something I need to do a much better job of internalizing.)


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

Dolphin said:


> You know what else is interesting about HP? It's flawed! Badly flawed, even beyond the gradual shifts in tone and content! How does Harry _change_ over the course of the series? How does he arc? What about Scabbers/Pettigrew on the Marauder's Map? What's up with the time-turner?! JK wrote in a million different plot holes and blunders, and she's still rich as she wanna be. That perfection is unachievable and unnecessary is something I need to do a much better job of internalizing.)


Charm.

The stories (at least the first book -- I haven't read the others) have a charm to them. That English, magical, anything-can-happen charm.

And the writing is pleasant. It can make up for the deficiencies you have mentioned. If something is pleasant or interesting enough, people will overlook such issues.


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## ET (Oct 23, 2014)

Another observation is that Mark Dawson is an author of male conspiracy/action fiction, along the lines of Lee Child. (I believe he said that Lee Child was his original role model.)

My guess would be that the market for male conspiracy action fiction is very different from that of YA/Romance fiction. So what Mark Dawson suggests for his own genre might not be as applicable in a more saturated genre (?)

This goes both ways, incidentally...

I used to listen to the old Sean, Johnny and Dave SPP podcast. I recall once they interviewed romance author Laurie Starkey. She was basically like a one-person book factory, publishing like 80 books per year, or something unbelievable like that. But she was actually doing it. 

This would be next to impossible for anyone writing say, police procedurals. Or psychological thrillers. Or mysteries.

My point here being that while Laurie Starkey's production numbers are worth noting, they aren't realistic models for all genres. I look at that and say, "Wow, that's amazing, but it doesn't apply to me."

Romance seems to be its own animal, based far more on volume than other genres. In that market, perhaps the economics of FB/AMS advertising simply can't work (?)


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Is 80 books a year even humanly possible without assistance? That's more than one per week.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Paranormal Kitty said:


> Is 80 books a year even humanly possible without assistance? That's more than one per week.


I'd expect it depends on the length. I could publish 80 titles in a year, but they wouldn't be novels. (I'm not that driven to do it, but I could.)


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## Logophile (May 13, 2018)

Paranormal Kitty said:


> Is 80 books a year even humanly possible without assistance? That's more than one per week.


Maybe if they're novellas.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

ET said:


> Another observation is that Mark Dawson is an author of male conspiracy/action fiction, along the lines of Lee Child. (I believe he said that Lee Child was his original role model.)
> 
> My guess would be that the market for male conspiracy action fiction is very different from that of YA/Romance fiction. So what Mark Dawson suggests for his own genre might not be as applicable in a more saturated genre (?)
> 
> ...


Nope. FB ads work really well for romance. Probably much cheaper clicks than for thrillers. That's certainly the case based on Mark's course. But FB ads won't generally make a considerable profit on a single standalone book (stuffing aside). The math just doesn't work. Even a great ad (.25CPC) with a great conversion rate (10%) will only break even on a 3.99 book (2.70 royalty on 2.50 spend).

I don't think people are really being fair to Mark. He'd be the first to tell you to test your ads at small budgets and to only spend money you can afford to lose. I'm retaking his class right now for a refresh. It's really 101, so it's mostly stuff I know, but it does a great job of outlining the basics. The thing is there's no trick with ads. You just have to test and practice.


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## Eskimo (Dec 31, 2013)

Paranormal Kitty said:


> Is 80 books a year even humanly possible without assistance? That's more than one per week.


I would assume that includes ghostwriters. One author churning out more than a book a week -- if that is even humanly possible -- will produce books that will surely be incredibly derivative and boring.


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

Crystal_ said:


> I don't think people are really being fair to Mark. He'd be the first to tell you to test your ads at small budgets and to only spend money you can afford to lose. I'm retaking his class right now for a refresh. It's really 101, so it's mostly stuff I know, but it does a great job of outlining the basics. The thing is there's no trick with ads. You just have to test and practice.


Indeed. There is a reason why "digital marketer" is a full time job.

At least it's not like the old days with marketing where you had to buy ad space in a magazine (for _way_ more money) and never really know if you were hitting the right audience, or whether it was your ad which specifically worked. It used to be that if you wanted to sell, say, an activity in the school holidays to parents, you'd have to spend literally $60,000 on a banner in a newspaper. And you'd have to hope everything would work. Nowadays, you get instant feedback, you can target anyone in the world, and you know instantly whether your ad is doing it's job.

The funny thing about Mark Dawson's podcast is when he talks about the cash he spends on advertising, he of course leads with "don't be intimidated by these numbers, start small and scale up." As he should. But the numbers he quotes are very minor to what the same advertising methods would have costed without Facebook.


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## Ros_Jackson (Jan 11, 2014)

ET said:


> Another observation is that Mark Dawson is an author of male conspiracy/action fiction, along the lines of Lee Child. (I believe he said that Lee Child was his original role model.)
> 
> My guess would be that the market for male conspiracy action fiction is very different from that of YA/Romance fiction. So what Mark Dawson suggests for his own genre might not be as applicable in a more saturated genre (?)
> 
> ...


It may be relevant that young people are leaving Facebook in favour of other platforms, since the OP writes YA and NA. I know a lot of the audience for those genres is mature, but they still skew younger.


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## John Twipnook (Jan 10, 2011)

activeindieauthor said:


> A couple of people here are insinuating my books aren't very good. I'd be willing to agree with that and start over if I didn't have proof that wasn't the case. If the writing wasn't good, I 1) wouldn't be getting trad pub deals 2) wouldn't be up for multiple awards 3) and I wouldn't be getting fan mail on a daily basis (though it has slowed down a bit due to slowing influx of readers).
> 
> I think there is quite a good bit of advice in here that makes sense as to why my sales are falling. I think I'm going to keep waiting for more advice and seeing what experienced people say and then come back a little later with a fully formed plan.


Why not disclose to us these well-written YA/NA books of yours? That way the experts here could give you more specific advice. It's hard to diagnose an illness when the patient won't take their clothes off. If you're asking us to take the excellence of your writing, your covers, and your blurbs on faith, well, nothing personal but there's a lot of authors with trad deals who don't have the greatest of any of those. My gut tells me you should reexamine the fundamentals, but until and unless you disclose your work, it's a moot conversation. Good luck.


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## cecilia_writer (Dec 28, 2010)

Pat Pflieger said:


> My understanding is that the Harry Potter books were always intended to shift audience as the series went on. The first book was intended for readers around age 11; the last books were to be for older teens. So readers could sort of grow up along with Harry. An interesting idea, but impractical, given that--like adults--kids will binge an entire series; who's going to wait until they're supposedly old enough to read the later books?


My younger son, and my older son's wife who are about the same age, did grow up with Harry Potter, and they are still the people who want to do other related things such as going to the HP studios, seeing and reading spin-offs etc, so the most loyal fans.


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

cecilia_writer said:


> My younger son, and my older son's wife who are about the same age, did grow up with Harry Potter, and they are still the people who want to do other related things such as going to the HP studios, seeing and reading spin-offs etc, so the most loyal fans.


That's me. I was 7 when the first book came out. I imagine I'll be a solid fan for years to come.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

AWritersLife said:


> I see a lot of authors doing "write to market" and many of them do make good money...for a while. A few of them continue to, but most drop off the cliff FAST and each successive book does poorer than the previous.
> 
> The thing is, you may have all the tropes down and give the audience everything they want, but that's it. You're giving them a by-the-numbers book because you have no vested interest to be creative. Yes, there is creativity to a point (if you can finish a book, you're more creative than the average Joe), but it's easy for someone who has read books all their life (especially people who only likes to read certain genres) to tell when the author just isn't *INTO* what they're writing.
> 
> ...


This is probably the most helpful comment out of the entire post.

I have come to the conclusion that if you are writing to market, unless you're producing a lot of content you're forgettable to readers, because you're just copying everyone else. You're never standing out or forming an authentic connection with the reader on your own mantels, so they can easily just dump you and move on to someone else.

I didn't start writing for the money. It's my main source of income now but I do know my most loyal fans like the stuff I cared about the most. Which makes sense for me long-term now, I think, to focus on.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

activeindieauthor said:


> This is probably the most helpful comment out of the entire post.
> 
> I have come to the conclusion that if you are writing to market, unless you're producing a lot of content you're forgettable to readers, because you're just copying everyone else. You're never standing out or forming an authentic connection with the reader on your own mantels, so they can easily just dump you and move on to someone else.
> 
> I didn't start writing for the money. It's my main source of income now but I do know my most loyal fans like the stuff I cared about the most. Which makes sense for me long-term now, I think, to focus on.


I agree. Readers can tell when you don't love what you write.


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## raminar_dixon (Aug 26, 2013)

John Twipnook said:


> It's hard to diagnose an illness when the patient won't take their clothes off.


What if it's just an ear infection?


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

raminar_dixon said:


> What if it's just an ear infection?


And I'm guessing that's basically what this is. From everything the OP has said it sounds like s/he got away from the writing, spent a lot of time on energy on something s/he doesn't like (marketing) and did what David Gaughren warns about in his latest stuff- screwed up the also-boughts that fuelled the initial success. I don't know that there's any kind of penicillin developed for this, so it's probably just a matter of getting back to the writing, putting more work out there and waiting for time to do its own healing.


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## Eskimo (Dec 31, 2013)

John Twipnook said:


> Why not disclose to us these well-written YA/NA books of yours? That way the experts here could give you more specific advice. It's hard to diagnose an illness when the patient won't take their clothes off. If you're asking us to take the excellence of your writing, your covers, and your blurbs on faith, well, nothing personal but there's a lot of authors with trad deals who don't have the greatest of any of those. My gut tells me you should reexamine the fundamentals, but until and unless you disclose your work, it's a moot conversation. Good luck.


I have been wondering the same thing throughout this thread, and why this person doesn't simply show us their books. There is something very off about an author with traditional pub deals, consistently making an average of $3k-$5k a month, saying he did very little advertising to get there ... and then radically shifting his strategy. There are indeed some authors who achieve this income level and who have made $20k in a month due to a BB promo -- but they are the exceptions, and they are typically very keen marketers with well mapped-out straegies.

Most authors never get to the level that this author claims to have gotten. Losing money on a BB promo is something I just can not fathom. I've dabbled in FB ads, but after losing $100 a couple of times, I threw in the towel. I do not get how someone could invest $2,000 in FB ads in a month without getting some good initial results at smaller amounts. Sorry to play the role of the skeptic, but something is very odd here. If I ever made $20K in a month I wouldn't change a single thing.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

I believe what the OP has to say about his numbers, and don't have a problem with him keeping his books anonymous. I want to point out that at least once in this thread, he said that he can't keep up the pace he had been writing at-- a book a month-- so suggestions that he drop the marketing plan and just go back to doing that again sound somewhat unhelpful. I read this as "I can't keep this up, let me see if there are other ways to improve things."


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

David Chill said:


> ...Sorry to play the role of the skeptic, but something is very odd here.


Really? To me it seems quite straightforward. Someone who was making a decent living took a look at the next rung up and thought, "If I'm doing this well WITHOUT advertising, how much better will I do WITH it?" and invested in courses and materials to try and step it up a notch. Just because it didn't work out doesn't mean it wasn't a perfectly reasonable assumption to make and it didn't make any sense to try.

As for not using their author name or putting their books up, lots of well-known authors have either stopped posting here at all or anonymised their user names and taking their books down after being targeted by people who didn't like their comments. And even if that were no problem, putting up the books would just encourage people to scrutinize the covers or the writing or the blurbs- none of which are likely to be the problem, since they were selling nicely until the OP took their eye off the writing ball and tried to become a marketer.

For what it's worth I know other authors in the same boat- were selling well, then, for whatever reason, didn't have a new release for awhile and had sales plummet. That's pretty much the way the Amazon algorithms are designed to work, so I see nothing odd about it.


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## notjohn (Sep 9, 2016)

I'm sorry to hear that authors are concealing their books on this forum. The principal reason I was attracted to Writers Cafe, and that I recommend it over the KDP forums, is precisely the sig files showing the authors' books. Before taking anyone's advice, I can easily check to see how that advice worked out for him or her.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Both anonymous and identifiable authors are fully welcome at KBoards, and I see no reason to doubt the OP's presentation of his situation.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Sarah Shaw said:


> Really? To me it seems quite straightforward. Someone who was making a decent living took a look at the next rung up and thought, "If I'm doing this well WITHOUT advertising, how much better will I do WITH it?" and invested in courses and materials to try and step it up a notch. Just because it didn't work out doesn't mean it wasn't a perfectly reasonable assumption to make and it didn't make any sense to try.
> 
> As for not using their author name or putting their books up, lots of well-known authors have either stopped posting here at all or anonymised their user names and taking their books down after being targeted by people who didn't like their comments. And even if that were no problem, putting up the books would just encourage people to scrutinize the covers or the writing or the blurbs- none of which are likely to be the problem, since they were selling nicely until the OP took their eye off the writing ball and tried to become a marketer.
> 
> For what it's worth I know other authors in the same boat- were selling well, then, for whatever reason, didn't have a new release for awhile and had sales plummet. That's pretty much the way the Amazon algorithms are designed to work, so I see nothing odd about it.


But the blurbs and covers might not be good enough for the market today. What worked 2-3 years ago doesn't necessarily work today, not just because things are more competitive now, but because styles change.

OP is free to remain anonymous, but it does really limit the effectiveness of advice people can give. It means we have to respond with general principles rather than addressing OP's specific situation. Same goes for anyone looking for advice. The more info you give people who are advising you, the more they can help.


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## The Deposed King (Mar 18, 2014)

tag


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

GeneDoucette said:


> I believe what the OP has to say about his numbers, and don't have a problem with him keeping his books anonymous. I want to point out that at least once in this thread, he said that he can't keep up the pace he had been writing at-- a book a month-- so suggestions that he drop the marketing plan and just go back to doing that again sound somewhat unhelpful. I read this as "I can't keep this up, let me see if there are other ways to improve things."


Gene is 100% correct. I am extremely burned out on writing a book a month and no longer have any idea on how to make this work. It used to take me 7 days to write an 80k novel. After doing that over and over and over for over a year (with lots of books before that), I'm struggling to get down 2,000 words A WEEK. So I don't know if continuing to produce anymore is going to help me.

Advertising was a bust, I got that. But if I can't produce and advertising doesn't work, what's left for me to try?


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Sarah Shaw said:


> Really? To me it seems quite straightforward. Someone who was making a decent living took a look at the next rung up and thought, "If I'm doing this well WITHOUT advertising, how much better will I do WITH it?" and invested in courses and materials to try and step it up a notch. Just because it didn't work out doesn't mean it wasn't a perfectly reasonable assumption to make and it didn't make any sense to try.
> 
> As for not using their author name or putting their books up, lots of well-known authors have either stopped posting here at all or anonymised their user names and taking their books down after being targeted by people who didn't like their comments. And even if that were no problem, putting up the books would just encourage people to scrutinize the covers or the writing or the blurbs- none of which are likely to be the problem, since they were selling nicely until the OP took their eye off the writing ball and tried to become a marketer.
> 
> For what it's worth I know other authors in the same boat- were selling well, then, for whatever reason, didn't have a new release for awhile and had sales plummet. That's pretty much the way the Amazon algorithms are designed to work, so I see nothing odd about it.


That was my thinking: I was making good money without advertising, so why not try to double it by using advertising? I tried to slow down on the writing and increase my income using ads. Then everything collapsed.

As I said before, I'm a lurker on kboards, so I won't reveal my penname because I've seen how things have gone south on here and won't become a target while looking for help. If I reveal my books I could get better help, but I could also become the target of a smear campaign and end up losing my reputation. People on this post are already accusing me of being a liar or a fraud and they don't even know who I am yet.

I update my blurbs pretty frequently depending on how the market goes and my covers cost over $600 a piece-- they fit the market for sure. And the writing is also good, so I don't see why analyzing the books would help because the product isn't the issue.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

After reading through the thread again, and your response, I think what happened was a lot of competition, which has affected most, if not all of us.

And maybe the algorithm change had something to do with it.

Don't know what to say about the burnout. I've had that before. Going through a bit of that at present. But I try to come up with ways to keep writing. I mean, it's fiction -- you can do what you want (within certain bounds) in fiction. It doesn't have to be a certain formula. If you are used to writing in third person, try writing in first. Something like that might spruce up the process again.

Good luck.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

activeindieauthor said:


> That was my thinking: I was making good money without advertising, so why not try to double it by using advertising? I tried to slow down on the writing and increase my income using ads. Then everything collapsed.
> 
> As I said before, I'm a lurker on kboards, so I won't reveal my penname because I've seen how things have gone south on here and won't become a target while looking for help. If I reveal my books I could get better help, but I could also become the target of a smear campaign and end up losing my reputation. People on this post are already accusing me of being a liar or a fraud and they don't even know who I am yet.
> 
> I update my blurbs pretty frequently depending on how the market goes and my covers cost over $600 a piece-- they fit the market for sure. And the writing is also good, so I don't see why analyzing the books would help because the product isn't the issue.


If you know a successful author or two in your genre who might be willing to give you some of their time, you could ask them to take a look at your books and marketing and give you private feedback. I mean, there has to be _something_ going on: product and marketing are the whole kit and caboodle, right? There's nothing distinguishing one of us from the rest of us that doesn't come under one of those two umbrellas.



activeindieauthor said:


> Gene is 100% correct. I am extremely burned out on writing a book a month and no longer have any idea on how to make this work. It used to take me 7 days to write an 80k novel. After doing that over and over and over for over a year (with lots of books before that), I'm struggling to get down 2,000 words A WEEK. So I don't know if continuing to produce anymore is going to help me.
> 
> Advertising was a bust, I got that. But if I can't produce and advertising doesn't work, what's left for me to try?


Burnout is rough. You probably need to address that in some way because if there's one thing that'll _for sure_ prevent you from rebuilding a writing career, it's not being able to write. I don't see an easy way to address the problem, though. You said in your OP that you "can't afford" to go back to your previous job. I'm assuming it was a low-wage kind of thing, and your writing income has allowed you to establish a nicer lifestyle than your old job could support? That's a real bind. You may be looking at bailing on your current lifestyle to free up some assets and lower your costs to the degree that you can support yourself with a non-writing job for a while and give your brain a vacation. Hopefully the urge and ability to write would come back, with time.

I don't know, active. I can see you feel stuck between about six rocks and hard places. While you're absolutely free to remain anonymous here, a choice many of us make, I do think getting specific feedback from someone knowledgeable would be a good idea. It definitely sounds like you know what you're doing. At the same time, it's just not the case that "advertising doesn't work" in some totalizing sense, and no writer's books are without weaknesses. Getting into the nitty-gritty with a trusted confidante may be the best way to attack this situation. Or the only remaining way, as we're not coming up with much a solution here.


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## Mark Dawson (Mar 24, 2012)

OP - I’d be happy to take a look at your books and ads, discretion assured. Ping me an email if you like.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

activeindieauthor said:


> Gene is 100% correct. I am extremely burned out on writing a book a month and no longer have any idea on how to make this work. It used to take me 7 days to write an 80k novel. After doing that over and over and over for over a year (with lots of books before that), I'm struggling to get down 2,000 words A WEEK. So I don't know if continuing to produce anymore is going to help me.
> 
> Advertising was a bust, I got that. But if I can't produce and advertising doesn't work, what's left for me to try?


I am at a loss. Either you produce bestsellers on a regular basis, or you produce a lot of good sellers on a regular basis, or you rely on lots of marketing and advertising to sell your books. There doesn't seem to be any other options if you want to make a living at this.

I know big name romance authors who write a book every 3 -4 months and hit the NYTs each time. I know small name romance authors who write 6 books a year and do a lot of promotion, making a six-figure income. I know other authors who write a book a month and make six-figures. The other option is not to write at all but live off a big backlist and using promotion to keep selling.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

If you don't/can't/don't want to release a book a month, advertising is absolutely a way to keep your sales alive.

But as with everything, advertising that's most effective for your genre, that you don't mind doing and that works for your books needs to be learned. A lot of people go out gung-ho on the advertising and some do well, but we don't hear that many stories about people that fail. I suspect the latter is much more common. But it's kinda embarrassing to admit that you spent $150 (that's only $5 a day) on Facebook and got nothing to show for it.

Mark's offer is very generous and I would totally take him up on it.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Patty Jansen said:


> If you don't/can't/don't want to release a book a month, advertising is absolutely a way to keep your sales alive.
> 
> But as with everything, advertising that's most effective for your genre, that you don't mind doing and that works for your books needs to be learned. A lot of people go out gung-ho on the advertising and some do well, but we don't hear that many stories about people that fail. I suspect the latter is much more common. But it's kinda embarrassing to admit that you spent $150 (that's only $5 a day) on Facebook and got nothing to show for it.
> 
> Mark's offer is very generous and I would totally take him up on it.


Yes, definitely take Mark's offer.

IMO, marketing can work for anyone. It's just a matter of testing and tweaking.


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## meh (Apr 18, 2013)

TOS.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

This is the sort of thing I feared would happen with all the publish a book a month folks. I'd look at those posts, and nearly cry, because I knew I couldn't do it, and I was sure those would did wouldn't last long. Now, as I prepare for the pitchforks and torches, there's nothing wrong with people who can write and produce fast. I can actually write pretty "fast", i. e., get some good word counts, but it's nothing like what would be required to keep up that level of publishing. My life is far too, um, screwed up, for that.

The way I see it, you can either keep producing at the rate readers have been trained to expect, even if it kills you mentally and/or physically; slow down to a level you can maintain and learn what ads work for you; or hire ghostwriters. And still there's going to be ads involved somehow.

If it was me, I'd take Mark up on his offer, and also do as others have suggested and have someone you respect and trust look at your catalog. You may be changing blurbs, and getting expensive covers, and have good reviews and trad pub deals, but that doesn't mean you haven't gone off track somewhere. Trends change, the market changes.


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## Simon Haynes (Mar 14, 2011)

I generally work on 2500 words a day, which is less than two hours writing. That's almost 20 novels per year _in theory_.

This year I'm planning 10 novels. If I aim for 10 and 'only' manage 6, I'll still consider it a major win.


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## Rob Martin (Nov 15, 2017)

I've been wait-listed for Mark's classes forever. OP, take him up on his offer.


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## Eskimo (Dec 31, 2013)

activeindieauthor said:


> It used to take me 7 days to write an 80k novel. After doing that over and over and over for over a year (with lots of books before that), I'm struggling to get down 2,000 words A WEEK.


I am still working to get my head around writing an 80k word novel in a week. And then doing it again and again. Is anyone else here doing that? On my best day, I once wrote 5k words -- and then I needed a couple of days to recalibrate. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

David Chill said:


> I am still working to get my head around writing an 80k word novel in a week. And then doing it again and again. Is anyone else here doing that? On my best day, I once wrote 5k words -- and then I needed a couple of days to recalibrate. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.


I write 9K a day and edit another 9K a day five days a week. That's pretty much 49 weeks a year (I take a few weeks off for trips). It's all about discipline. I can write 9K in about four hours including short breaks between chapters. I edit 9K in about an hour. I usually have a few busywork tasks to do, too, but never more than an hour's worth.


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## Sparling (Mar 1, 2016)

I 100% believe OP because the exact same thing is happening to me. I was a 6 figure indie author in 2016 and half of 2017 and then my sales slowly started going down, down, down, down, and I went from earning $10-13k a month with no advertising at all to around $4k-5k a month. I write and release new books every month. I also have an agent and traditionally published books under my real name (this is my pen name) so I'm not a total hack at writing. When my sales slowed, I panicked and took Mark's course, which is informative and very educational, but yet I've done nothing but lose a few thousand dollars in ads that haven't paid off or sold any books for me, all while my income is still dropping. As of the last few months, I'm lucky to earn $40 a day. 

I write YA romance and I don't think ads work well for YA books. I think ads in general are now over saturated. I also think indie books are over saturated and Amazon's algorithms and page flip disaster are all working against us. But I don't think much of anything lately because I'm too busy trying to find a job while still writing 1-2 books a month in the hopes that maybe I'll bounce back to the author I used to be.


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

> I write YA romance and I don't think ads work well for YA books. I think ads in general are now over saturated. I also think indie books are over saturated and Amazon's algorithms and page flip disaster are all working against us. But I don't think much of anything lately because I'm too busy trying to find a job while still writing 1-2 books a month in the hopes that maybe I'll bounce back to the author I used to be.


You are preaching to the choir. Most people are experiencing the same thing and the situation is not likely to change.


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## Marchie (May 10, 2018)

Sparling said:


> I write YA romance and I don't think ads work well for YA books. I think ads in general are now over saturated. I also think indie books are over saturated and Amazon's algorithms and page flip disaster are all working against us. But I don't think much of anything lately because I'm too busy trying to find a job while still writing 1-2 books a month in the hopes that maybe I'll bounce back to the author I used to be.


This is also another big part of the issue. The golden days of YA were when book blogs were a HUGE influence in the book community. Book blogs losing steam is what I think caused the decline in YA. The indie books that seem to be hanging on are the ones that are geared to an almost New Adult audience or are fantasy/science fiction.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I write 9K a day and edit another 9K a day five days a week. That's pretty much 49 weeks a year (I take a few weeks off for trips). It's all about discipline. I can write 9K in about four hours including short breaks between chapters. I edit 9K in about an hour. I usually have a few busywork tasks to do, too, but never more than an hour's worth.


Thanks for sharing. It's impressive. Do you also include research in those hours? I find what stops me from writing more/faster is primarily that I have to research so much in my writing. My stories are very much set in reality unfortunately. Then there's the fact that I'm writing in a second language, though that's not as much of a problem any longer.


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## sisley (Oct 2, 2017)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I write 9K a day and edit another 9K a day five days a week. That's pretty much 49 weeks a year (I take a few weeks off for trips). It's all about discipline. I can write 9K in about four hours including short breaks between chapters. I edit 9K in about an hour. I usually have a few busywork tasks to do, too, but never more than an hour's worth.


It's not all about discipline. Maybe you're younger but I can't type that much. I've gotten arthritist syndromes in both my hands and sore wrists for typing too much each day trying to finish my books. Had to see my doctor for prescription pain meds because of it. My doctor thought I was crazy the rate I was typing and anyway I had to cut back because of the pain. Sitting too long gives me back pains too, and I have stamina to last for hours. But at some point your age affects your body. I tried dictating but that gave me a sore throat after doing it for 2 hrs straight. Eye strains also become an issue. Some of us simply can't no matter how disciplined we are.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I write 9K a day and edit another 9K a day five days a week. That's pretty much 49 weeks a year (I take a few weeks off for trips). It's all about discipline. I can write 9K in about four hours including short breaks between chapters. I edit 9K in about an hour. I usually have a few busywork tasks to do, too, but never more than an hour's worth.


You're an awesome example, but...

I think at this point, it would be wise to point out that by far the majority of people can't do this, or can't do this long-term, and that it's not about "being disciplined" or "training a muscle" or some such, and moreover, that there is nothing wrong with you if you can't do it, and moreover no. 2 that you can still earn a a good living not writing thousands upon thousands of words a day and publishing once a month. There are countless people doing it. Production in and of itself is not the only answer.

Having been on the boards since 2011, I've seen many people push the write, write, write write model and... er. For most people, it just crashes somewhere. If you find a way to make it work long-term, great, but the OP clearly isn't making it work, I personally gave up trying after a month (because I can't plot stories that I'd be happy to release at that speed) and most importantly, if you aren't enjoying it and you feel you're rushing, it's not worth doing long-term.

A balance between writing new stuff that hits certain points and promotional activities that keep your backlist selling is the best way if you don't want to write a book a month.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Patty Jansen said:


> You're an awesome example, but...
> 
> I think at this point, it would be wise to point out that by far the majority of people can't do this, or can't do this long-term, and that it's not about "being disciplined" or "training a muscle" or some such, and moreover, that there is nothing wrong with you if you can't do it, and moreover no. 2 that you can still earn a a good living not writing thousands upon thousands of words a day and publishing once a month. There are countless people doing it. Production in and of itself is not the only answer.
> 
> ...


I actually wasn't suggesting anyone do it. I was responding to the guy who asked "Is anyone doing it?"


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

Sparling said:


> I went from earning $10-13k a month with no advertising at all to around $4k-5k a month.


Surely it was your $10-13k months that were the anomaly? Just a lightning strike. $4k-5k is a living wage- and way beyond what most writers have made as a wage throughout history.

Millions of writers are trying to work their way _up_ to $4k-5k a month. It's all about perspective. When the lightening strike hits, save for the future. It won't last. It never does. But if before or after the lightning strike you can maintain a living wage, you are truly blessed- and one of the very privileged few.

Only one in a million people ever get a lightning strike.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

CatParker said:


> Surely it was your $10-13k months that were the anomaly? Just a lightning strike. $4k-5k is a living wage- and way beyond what most writers have made as a wage throughout history.
> 
> Millions of writers are trying to work their way _up_ to $4k-5k a month. It's all about perspective. When the lightening strike hits, save for the future. It won't last. It never does. But if before or after the lightning strike you can maintain a living wage, you are truly blessed- and one of the very privileged few.
> 
> Only one in a million people ever get a lightning strike.


Of course it can last. (Which doesn't mean you shouldn't save.) I've made well into six figures for almost six years in a row, since I started publishing, netting mid-six-figures for all but the first year, when it was low six figures. I know many people who've been in 7-figure territory for years. Doesn't mean it isn't unusual, but certainly it can last, if it's based on something real and sustainable. (Having a community of readers who love your work.) Writing to trends, advertising a ton, and publishing super-fast, I think, is a harder thing to maintain, but certainly people do that long-term as well.


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> Of course it can last. (Which doesn't mean you shouldn't save.) I've made well into six figures for almost six years in a row.


The post which started this thread is by an author who had been making six figures for _seven_ years in a row. So making six figures for _six_ years in a row doesn't disprove the OP's experience that it doesn't last.


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## Sparling (Mar 1, 2016)

CatParker said:


> Surely it was your $10-13k months that were the anomaly? Just a lightning strike. $4k-5k is a living wage- and way beyond what most writers have made as a wage throughout history.
> 
> Millions of writers are trying to work their way _up_ to $4k-5k a month. It's all about perspective. When the lightening strike hits, save for the future. It won't last. It never does. But if before or after the lightning strike you can maintain a living wage, you are truly blessed- and one of the very privileged few.
> 
> Only one in a million people ever get a lightning strike.


Yes, it was a 2 year long lightning strike, built up from 5 years of self publishing, knowing my market, and releasing constantly to keep them happy. I knew it wouldn't last forever, and planned accordingly, but I didn't think it'd drop off so quickly. The only thing I did differently was start paying for ads, but of course I didn't start that until after my income dropped to $5k a month and I tried to boost it back up.

Now it's down to $2k if I'm lucky, even with 60+ books out and a new one being published each month. I wish that lightning strike would find me again.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I write 9K a day and edit another 9K a day five days a week. That's pretty much 49 weeks a year (I take a few weeks off for trips). It's all about discipline. I can write 9K in about four hours including short breaks between chapters. I edit 9K in about an hour. I usually have a few busywork tasks to do, too, but never more than an hour's worth.


You are my hero. Seriously!

I keep writing out a schedule for working for 4 hours, writing 7000 words in that time, which is totally doable. Then I wimp out and only write 4500 or 5000 and I feel like I've run a marathon. The next day, I get nothing written so it evens out to about 2500 words. UGH!

It is discipline.


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## kathrynoh (Oct 17, 2012)

sela said:


> You are my hero. Seriously!
> 
> I keep writing out a schedule for working for 4 hours, writing 7000 words in that time, which is totally doable. Then I wimp out and only write 4500 or 5000 and I feel like I've run a marathon. The next day, I get nothing written so it evens out to about 2500 words. UGH!
> 
> It is discipline.


It's all about finding what works for you. I've done a lot of experimenting and found that my happy point is 2 x 2K sessions per day. I usually do morning and evening then spend afternoons doing all the other writing related stuff or on fun.

I've also started keeping a record of my average daily word count per book from when I start to when I publish so I can realistically schedule my time. I used to go on guessimates but, with hard data, found they were way off base because I wasn't taking into account editing and that mid-book freak out, things like that.


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## crow.bar.beer (Oct 20, 2014)

CatParker said:


> So making six figures for _six_ years in a row doesn't disprove the OP's experience that it doesn't last.


How could her experience disprove his experience anyway? That's not what she said.


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

Sparling said:


> Yes, it was a 2 year long lightning strike, built up from 5 years of self publishing, knowing my market, and releasing constantly to keep them happy.


Did you build up an email list during that time? I have a theory (built from experience) that email lists have stopped delivering the way they used to, so I'd be interested to know if that has happened to you too.


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## Sparling (Mar 1, 2016)

CatParker said:


> Did you build up an email list during that time? I have a theory (built from experience) that email lists have stopped delivering the way they used to, so I'd be interested to know if that has happened to you too.


That's a good question. Up until my sales started tanking, I did have a mailing list that was all organic, from people signing up with the link at the back of my books. It was only about 600 people, and I got a good sales boost each time I sent out an email for a new release. I also used to see a significant sales increase whenever Amazon sends out their email saying I have a new release. Now their email does absolutely nothing for me. Over the past 7-8 months of my sales tanking, I started using Instafreebie and FB ads to get more subscribers, but it hasn't helped me with sales. I get fewer opens (around 20%) now and see no sales bump when I send out a NL. I have around 2000 subscribers now, but they're hardly quality subscribers anymore.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

Sparling said:


> That's a good question. Up until my sales started tanking, I did have a mailing list that was all organic, from people signing up with the link at the back of my books. It was only about 600 people, and I got a good sales boost each time I sent out an email for a new release. I also used to see a significant sales increase whenever Amazon sends out their email saying I have a new release. Now their email does absolutely nothing for me. Over the past 7-8 months of my sales tanking, I started using Instafreebie and FB ads to get more subscribers, but it hasn't helped me with sales. I get fewer opens (around 20%) now and see no sales bump when I send out a NL. I have around 2000 subscribers now, but they're hardly quality subscribers anymore.


It's not just the Instafreebie lists or FB lists. Hotmail and Gmail (and probably others) now segregate email by whether it is "Focused" or "Other" and "Primary" or Promotions." This means that our emails are half as likely to be seen. My open rate was cut from 45% to 22.5% and I'm almost sure this is the reason. I'm thinking of changing my sign-up form and double-opt in email to say something about, "Be sure you see my newsletter--add me to your contacts," or some such.

I've used FB pretty successfully to get people to buy books and download freebies. It is expensive, but can pay out over a long series. (And it's one reason I'm lengthening my Archangel series.)

That said, with 60 books it seems like you should be able to use ad sites and focus on a different book every month AND STILL only have to advertise a book once a year at any one place ... you shouldn't NEED to use FB or AMS.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

CatParker said:


> The post which started this thread is by an author who had been making six figures for _seven_ years in a row. So making six figures for _six_ years in a row doesn't disprove the OP's experience that it doesn't last.


The post that started this thread talked about 2.5 to 5k a month, so I am not sure where you are getting six figures for seven years? They were talking more like 40k a year unless my math is seriously off. I was talking about people making ten to fifty times that much. I know many people who have been at six and then seven figures since 2011. Others whose income spiked then fell. Either thing can happen. If you study them, there are similarities to people who have consistently sold great.

That said many are reporting that it is harder now, especially in romance. Some are not. They are the ones with huge fan bases who write very distinctively and keep up a consistent high quality output. Personally I am at the low end of that but I see what they are doing.


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## L_Loryn (Mar 1, 2018)

C. Gockel said:


> It's not just the Instafreebie lists or FB lists. Hotmail and Gmail (and probably others) now segregate email by whether it is "Focused" or "Other" and "Primary" or Promotions." This means that our emails are half as likely to be seen. My open rate was cut from 45% to 22.5% and I'm almost sure this is the reason. I'm thinking of changing my sign-up form and double-opt in email to say something about, "Be sure you see my newsletter--add me to your contacts," or some such.
> 
> I've used FB pretty successfully to get people to buy books and download freebies. It is expensive, but can pay out over a long series. (And it's one reason I'm lengthening my Archangel series.)
> 
> That said, with 60 books it seems like you should be able to use ad sites and focus on a different book every month AND STILL only have to advertise a book once a year at any one place ... you shouldn't NEED to use FB or AMS.


What service do you use for a mailing list?

I have one mailing list as mailchimp (goes to promotions) and one mailing list from convertkit (goes straight to inbox). Convert kit is selective about who they let sign up for their mailing list. They check previous stats and etc, but verifying website email addresses, having a high open rate, and some other mumbo-jumbo I don't understand means convertkit is more likely to hit people's inbox and not their promotions tab.

I don't know about mailerlite, but I do know convertkit boosts about that particular thing and a lot of my subscribers have mentioned it to me, too.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

L_Loryn said:


> What service do you use for a mailing list?


I use MailChimp for Instafreebie integration, but port users over to Sendy. I used to get the same open rate with Sendy as I did with MailChimp--but when the Promotions and Other tabs rolled out it fell precipitously. I just checked, ConvertKit is even more expensive than MailChimp.


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## L_Loryn (Mar 1, 2018)

C. Gockel said:


> I use MailChimp for Instafreebie integration, but port users over to Sendy. I used to get the same open rate with Sendy as I did with MailChimp--but when the Promotions and Other tabs rolled out it fell precipitously. I just checked, ConvertKit is even more expensive than MailChimp.


Yes, it is. For what I use it for, it's worth it (I use it for landing pages, multiple opt in options, and automated email chains). My open rate and follower rate jumped quickly with convert kit because of the flexibility, but it's not useful for everyone. I just figured I'd mention it.

I use mailchimp for my author mailing list because I don't need landing pages, automated email sends, or varied opt-ins.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

L_Loryn said:


> I use mailchimp for my author mailing list because I don't need landing pages, automated email sends, or varied opt-ins.


MailChimp provides automated email sends, too, and, I believe varied opt-ins. I use it from Instafreebie in order to create customized Welcome emails. I'm going to start adding customized workflows to the mix as well.


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## L_Loryn (Mar 1, 2018)

C. Gockel said:


> MailChimp provides automated email sends, too, and, I believe varied opt-ins. I use it from Instafreebie in order to create customized Welcome emails. I'm going to start adding customized workflows to the mix as well.


It does provide some automation, not as detailed as convertkit. And I think now offers a few options for landing pages? I switched to convertkit over six months ago so I'm not 100% on what mailchimp now does. As far as varied opt-ins, not so much. One opt-in per list (but you get different ways to imbed said opt-in). Say if you want to offer a free chapter, everyone on the particular list gets the chapter no matter what. You can't, say, offer some people a free chapter and others a free book and have them be on the same list.

Convertkit allows varied opt-in options per list, like offering different rewards for each sign up. I have opt-ins that offer different downloads that all get dumped into the same list. That was the main reason why I switched. Before I switched, I had like 4 separate mailchimp lists and I would have to shuffle email addresses around, subscribers would get confused if they no longer had access to downloads because I had to periodically delete them from one list when I moved them to the other to avoid going over my subscriber amount since mailchimp allows people to be on multiple lists--- and they count as one person per list. Same subscriber, on three lists counts as three subscribers. Convert kit gives you one "master" list with no duplicate names and allows you to divvy up them by groups.

That was probably confusing, but yeah.

Customized workflow is gold. I do have my ARC team as a group on my mailchimp list and I send them a different selection of emails. I only use mailchimp's automated email sends for when I write an email in the middle of the night and schedule it for the next morning. I don't use their workflow options. I don't remember why, but I want to say I thought they were a PITA to use.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

L_Loryn said:


> It does provide some automation, not as detailed as convertkit. And I think now offers a few options for landing pages? I switched to convertkit over six months ago so I'm not 100% on what mailchimp now does. As far as varied opt-ins, not so much. One opt-in per list (but you get different ways to imbed said opt-in). Say if you want to offer a free chapter, everyone on the particular list gets the chapter no matter what. You can't, say, offer some people a free chapter and others a free book and have them be on the same list.
> 
> Convertkit allows varied opt-in options per list, like offering different rewards for each sign up. I have opt-ins that offer different downloads that all get dumped into the same list. That was the main reason why I switched. Before I switched, I had like 4 separate mailchimp lists and I would have to shuffle email addresses around, subscribers would get confused if they no longer had access to downloads because I had to periodically delete them from one list when I moved them to the other to avoid going over my subscriber amount since mailchimp allows people to be on multiple lists--- and they count as one person per list. Same subscriber, on three lists counts as three subscribers. Convert kit gives you one "master" list with no duplicate names and allows you to divvy up them by groups.
> 
> ...


Just so that you know, you can do all of that in Mailchimp and Mailerlite as well. It's just that each service is very different in how it treats lists and subscribers and may involve (a lot of) mental gymnastics to get it to do what you want. But possible, yes, it is. Not with Sendy, though. Which is why I dropped that.


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## L_Loryn (Mar 1, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> Just so that you know, you can do all of that in Mailchimp and Mailerlite as well. It's just that each service is very different in how it treats lists and subscribers and may involve (a lot of) mental gymnastics to get it to do what you want. But possible, yes, it is. Not with Sendy, though. Which is why I dropped that.


Yeah, I know. I ended up having 4 separate lists with mailchimp because I wanted different opt-in incentives. Unless you know a way to have different incentives and it all go to the same list, there's no way to do it without downloading CVS and manually adding subscribers to your master list once a week, right?

Incentives. That's the word I needed a post ago.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

L_Loryn said:


> Yeah, I know. I ended up having 4 separate lists with mailchimp because I wanted different opt-in incentives. Unless you know a way to have different incentives and it all go to the same list, there's no way to do it without downloading CVS and manually adding subscribers to your master list once a week, right?
> 
> Incentives. That's the word I needed a post ago.


Of course there is. It just requires some lateral thinking.


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## L_Loryn (Mar 1, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> Of course there is. It just requires some lateral thinking.


Yeah, I'm asking you what that lateral thinking is if it's different from what I just described.

Do you know a way to do different incentives on the same mailing list (with different opt-in forms) on mailchimp, besides the way I just described?


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

L_Loryn said:


> Yeah, I'm asking you what that lateral thinking is if it's different from what I just described.
> 
> Do you know a way to do different incentives on the same mailing list (with different opt-in forms) on mailchimp, besides the way I just described?


Tthis is seriously off-topic, but this is how I do it in Mailerlite, and I'm 100% certain you can do something similar in Mailchimp (except I can't remember how because I haven't used it for two years):

Someone subscribes using incentive A: subscriber enters two lists: list for incentive A and main list.
The main list automation does nothing except just put them there, and maybe trigger an automation a couple of weeks in the future.
The list A automation sends them book A. 
Once that email has been sent, the list A automation removes the subscriber from that list.
Now the subscriber is only subscribed to the main list.
Repeat for book B with a different form.

Please start a new thread if you want to discuss this further.

/off-topic


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## L_Loryn (Mar 1, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> Tthis is seriously off-topic, but this is how I do it in Mailerlite, and I'm 100% certain you can do something similar in Mailchimp (except I can't remember how because I haven't used it for two years):
> 
> Someone subscribes using incentive A: subscriber enters two lists: list for incentive A and main list.
> The main list automation does nothing except just put them there, and maybe trigger an automation a couple of weeks in the future.
> ...


Yeah I'm only about 67% certain you can't do anything like that in mailchimp.  I'd play with it more but I pay for convenience.

And indeed it's off topic. The point was, my subscribers have commented that convertkit also goes straight to inbox, not in promotions or "other". When I email regularly (like every 1-2 weeks), my open rate is 40-50%, but keeping that in mind. It's not an author list, it's an artist/crafter list that discusses things like the best way to add an accent wall and isn't usually targeted towards selling.

My mailchimp author list gets about 35% open rate, but it's a lot smaller at around 300 subscribers.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

crow.bar.beer said:


> How could her experience disprove his experience anyway? That's not what she said.


Yeah was just responding to, "It won't last. It never does." Only because that is not actually a super helpful way to look at things. Yes, it's good to save AS IF it won't last (or to pay down your debt), but also to plan for how to make it last. When I look at authors who are killing it year after year (which truly is the test in writing--not having a great year, but having a great 10 years--there aren't nearly as many authors who do that)--it's helpful to look at the commonalities between them. They tend to be writing at a good if not furious pace (at least 4 books a year), consistently, and to maintain quality. They have a distinctive voice, if not a distinctive little space within their genre they've carved out for themselves. They have an enthusiastic fan base. They may be marketing whizzes and they may just satisfy the heck out of their audience and keep doing it.

So I'd say--if you have some great months--pay down your debt, don't do anything stupid like buy a house you couldn't afford on your previous earnings, and cultivate that fan base. Personally, I didn't start a mailing list for at least two mid-six-figure years, and, yeah, that was a mistake. There were Reasons, but, yes, I should have done that. I should also have written more than two books last year, but--Life Happened. As it can. (I still had my best year ever by a 25% margin, but it started falling off as that low productivity started catching up with me.) People who I watched making huge money during that time, meanwhile, were publishing 4-10 books a year and, mostly, promoting them to their 20K+ organic mailing list and with serious ads, often doing some cross-promotion, and all sorts of things I wasn't! And writing books their audience loved.

Doesn't mean I have to do those things, just that it's good to look at them realistically. It's not magic. It's lots and lots of good micro-decisions along the way, including productive responses to publishing's many changes (including a minimum of whining and obsessing about conspiracy theories), a more-than-fair dose of really hard work, a rigorous pursuit of excellence, and sheer talent. The last one is harder to "get," but the rest are possible.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Usedtoposthere said:


> So I'd say--if you have some great months--pay down your debt, don't do anything stupid like buy a house you couldn't afford on your previous earnings,


Oh lord, so many people have done something like this. They think the best month(s) must be the new normal and spend accordingly, and suffer for it later. Hurts my heart.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

sela said:


> You are my hero. Seriously!
> 
> I keep writing out a schedule for working for 4 hours, writing 7000 words in that time, which is totally doable. Then I wimp out and only write 4500 or 5000 and I feel like I've run a marathon. The next day, I get nothing written so it evens out to about 2500 words. UGH!
> 
> It is discipline.


I don't think so. I think it's just that authors write at different paces. I write rather slowly, pick my words carefully, and edit extensively as I go. For the kind of book I write, my way seems to work. I have always written at about the same pace, and I've written full-time for 6-1/2 years now. Before that, I was self-employed for a number of years, and I've always been a very disciplined person, so I don't think it's that, either. If anything, I'm a bit slower now, but no question, my books have more layers. (Whether that's more or less commercial is another story, hah.)

I can write up to 8K edited words a day at the end of a book, but my absolute max speed is 1,000 words per hour. Generally, those 8K days are about 12-14 hours of writing/editing time. When I write that much, it is very hard to turn my brain off enough to sleep, even with exercise, so that's not really a sustainable pace. I am hoping to reduce my anxiety levels though so I don't have to "climb the mountain" every day in order to work, and thus to raise my speed to 4K/day of fully edited work, even if it's still 8 hours/day, 7 days a week! That would be cool. (But I might have to know how the story's going to play out to do it, and I don't have enough imagination to think it out ahead of time.)

From what I've seen--authors are different. I work every day. My minimum is about 2,000 words per day unless it is a very bad day. But it also takes me weeks to come up with a story, and that one, I don't see changing. You either have that fertile imagination or you don't. I'm almost 60. If I don't have it now, I don't think it's gonna show up! C'est la vie.


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## John Twipnook (Jan 10, 2011)

Usedtoposthere said:


> If it's not working anyway, maybe try writing more to your own strengths, writing something more distinguishable and differentiated, making your OWN name. The problem with trend audiences is that they are not author-loyal. You're also competing with all the folks who are throwing tens of thousands a month at advertising in your same exact niche. That trendy spot is crowded, and it's full of folks doing shenanigans--they've moved on from romance now and are infecting different genres, esp urban fantasy and cozy mystery.
> 
> My suggestions: very strong author branding. Focusing in hookiness in the writing, particularly strong endings. (The ending sells the next book.) Strong voice. High concept--write a different idea, something that isn't the same as everything else out there. A different setting, a different character, a different kind of story, even some non-genre-specific elements.
> 
> If what you're doing is not working, you could try focusing more on that stuff instead and see if you can attract an audience that's loyal to personal-you. I hope that helps.





Usedtoposthere said:


> Of course it can last. (Which doesn't mean you shouldn't save.) I've made well into six figures for almost six years in a row, since I started publishing, netting mid-six-figures for all but the first year, when it was low six figures. I know many people who've been in 7-figure territory for years. Doesn't mean it isn't unusual, but certainly it can last, if it's based on something real and sustainable. (Having a community of readers who love your work.) Writing to trends, advertising a ton, and publishing super-fast, I think, is a harder thing to maintain, but certainly people do that long-term as well.





Usedtoposthere said:


> I know many people who have been at six and then seven figures since 2011. Others whose income spiked then fell. Either thing can happen. If you study them, there are similarities to people who have consistently sold great.
> 
> That said many are reporting that it is harder now, especially in romance. Some are not. They are the ones with huge fan bases who write very distinctively and keep up a consistent high quality output. Personally I am at the low end of that but I see what they are doing.





Usedtoposthere said:


> Yeah was just responding to, "It won't last. It never does." Only because that is not actually a super helpful way to look at things. Yes, it's good to save AS IF it won't last (or to pay down your debt), but also to plan for how to make it last. When I look at authors who are killing it year after year (which truly is the test in writing--not having a great year, but having a great 10 years--there aren't nearly as many authors who do that)--it's helpful to look at the commonalities between them. They tend to be writing at a good if not furious pace (at least 4 books a year), consistently, and to maintain quality. They have a distinctive voice, if not a distinctive little space within their genre they've carved out for themselves. They have an enthusiastic fan base. They may be marketing whizzes and they may just satisfy the heck out of their audience and keep doing it.
> 
> So I'd say--if you have some great months--pay down your debt, don't do anything stupid like buy a house you couldn't afford on your previous earnings, and cultivate that fan base. Personally, I didn't start a mailing list for at least two mid-six-figure years, and, yeah, that was a mistake. There were Reasons, but, yes, I should have done that. I should also have written more than two books last year, but--Life Happened. As it can. (I still had my best year ever by a 25% margin, but it started falling off as that low productivity started catching up with me.) People who I watched making huge money during that time, meanwhile, were publishing 4-10 books a year and, mostly, promoting them to their 20K+ organic mailing list and with serious ads, often doing some cross-promotion, and all sorts of things I wasn't! And writing books their audience loved.
> 
> Doesn't mean I have to do those things, just that it's good to look at them realistically. It's not magic. It's lots and lots of good micro-decisions along the way, including productive responses to publishing's many changes (including a minimum of whining and obsessing about conspiracy theories), a more-than-fair dose of really hard work, a rigorous pursuit of excellence, and sheer talent. The last one is harder to "get," but the rest are possible.





Usedtoposthere said:


> I don't think so. I think it's just that authors write at different paces. I write rather slowly, pick my words carefully, and edit extensively as I go. For the kind of book I write, my way seems to work. I have always written at about the same pace, and I've written full-time for 6-1/2 years now. Before that, I was self-employed for a number of years, and I've always been a very disciplined person, so I don't think it's that, either. If anything, I'm a bit slower now, but no question, my books have more layers. (Whether that's more or less commercial is another story, hah.)
> 
> I can write up to 8K edited words a day at the end of a book, but my absolute max speed is 1,000 words per hour. Generally, those 8K days are about 12-14 hours of writing/editing time. When I write that much, it is very hard to turn my brain off enough to sleep, even with exercise, so that's not really a sustainable pace. I am hoping to reduce my anxiety levels though so I don't have to "climb the mountain" every day in order to work, and thus to raise my speed to 4K/day of fully edited work, even if it's still 8 hours/day, 7 days a week! That would be cool. (But I might have to know how the story's going to play out to do it, and I don't have enough imagination to think it out ahead of time.)
> 
> From what I've seen--authors are different. I work every day. My minimum is about 2,000 words per day unless it is a very bad day. But it also takes me weeks to come up with a story, and that one, I don't see changing. You either have that fertile imagination or you don't. I'm almost 60. If I don't have it now, I don't think it's gonna show up! C'est la vie.


Usedtoposthere offered the best advice on this thread.

Or any thread, really.

[list type=decimal]
[*]Focusing in hookiness in the writing, particularly strong endings
[*]Strong voice
[*]High concept--write a different idea, something that isn't the same as everything else out there. A different setting, a different character, a different kind of story, even some non-genre-specific elements
[*]attract an audience that's loyal to personal-you
[*]Having a community of readers who love your work
[*]cultivate that fan base
[*]writing at a good if not furious pace (at least 4 books a year), consistently, and to maintain quality
[*]have a distinctive voice, if not a distinctive little space within [your] genre [you've] carved out for [yourself]
[*]lots and lots of good micro-decisions along the way, including productive responses to publishing's many changes (including a minimum of whining and obsessing about conspiracy theories), a more-than-fair dose of really hard work, a rigorous pursuit of excellence, and sheer talent. The last one is harder to "get," but the rest are possible
[*]certainly [7-figure territory] can last, if it's based on something real and sustainable
[/list]


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

C. Gockel said:


> Hotmail and Gmail (and probably others) now segregate email by whether it is "Focused" or "Other" and "Primary" or Promotions." This means that our emails are half as likely to be seen.


This is one of the biggest changes for people who were making a lot of money before, and aren't making so much now. And yet hucksters are still trying to sell courses on how to build a mailing list. Podcasters and self publishing 'gurus' are still trying to build careers by punting that information.

Buyer beware!

If you are putting a lot of money into building a mailing list, hoping it is an investment in the future- please take the above quote into consideration.

I truly believe the email list is on its way out as the number one promotional tool.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

I just want to say, I write one to two books a year, and generally two short stories that get published in anthologies.

I've still managed a livable income--not 100K!--for the past couple of years. I've had two releases that were less than stellar and it is hurting, but I'm still doing okay really. Last year I made a lot more than we needed and we saved it. Still not sure we'll need to dip into that fund THIS year, I mean, it could happen, but I'm optimistic that the plans I have will carry me through summer and I always have a "re-ignition" plan for fall.


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## notjohn (Sep 9, 2016)

Twenty years ago, the internet was exciting. I signed up to a lot of mailing lists in fields that interest me; I still get them, because it's easier to direct them to the spam folder than to unsubscribe from them.

My mailing list was similarly new and exciting to some people, and they were willing to buy from its links (not just to my books, but to other books and videos etc that I review).

And people needed a guide to the mind-boggling internet, so they were glad to click through advertisements on my websites, giving me a good month income from Google AdSense and Amazon Associates. I still make maybe a hundred dollars a month from Amazon referral fees, half what I was making in 2000, but I don't bother with Google ads any longer. I advertise my own books instead. People can find their own way, with the help of a search engine or two; they don't need me any longer.

Really, it was so exciting! I made friends in Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland. I wrote magazine articles based on people's reponses to "newsgroup" discussions in various hobby fields. (I think Newsgroups still exist, but I don't inhabit them any more.) When a friend and her boyfriend were flying into Uruguay to support a boat in a round-the-world race, I sought and got advice from a lad in Punta del Este. In the end, he met them at the airport and drove them to Punta. Can you imagine doing that today?

That's all gone now, or mostly gone. The internet is mass entertainment, much as broadcast TV used to be, except that it is anarchic instead of owned by three and a half corporations. And fun! (How horrified we were when AOL was allowed into the internet: oh no, the masses are coming. And indeed they did.)


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

CatParker said:


> I truly believe the email list is on its way out as the number one promotional tool.


It definitely is for _some_ people. But that's been the case for 20+ years.

I have a lot of friends from the old days (late 90s, early aughts) who burnt out their lists. I also have friends whose lists continue to be an integral part of their marketing.

The difference is in the approach.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

Anarchist said:


> I have a lot of friends from the old days (late 90s, early aughts) who burnt out their lists. I also have friends whose lists continue to be an integral part of their marketing.


It still is an integral part of my marketing. They still work, though not as well. I am going to start changing my welcome emails, and my after signup message to make sure I wind up in more people's personal/priority inboxes.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

activeindieauthor said:


> Gene is 100% correct. I am extremely burned out on writing a book a month and no longer have any idea on how to make this work. It used to take me 7 days to write an 80k novel. After doing that over and over and over for over a year (with lots of books before that), I'm struggling to get down 2,000 words A WEEK. So I don't know if continuing to produce anymore is going to help me.
> 
> Advertising was a bust, I got that. But if I can't produce and advertising doesn't work, what's left for me to try?


Do you have series? Have you made the first in series permafree? If not, do that, and use cheap promos now and again for the permafrees. Keep applying for BookBubs every month. Go wide if you haven't already. That's what's worked for me.

If the cheese moved, don't stay in the same place.

And re: Discipline--disipline can take you to the top of your own game, but your own underlying abilities are different from others. Think of it like distance running. Some people can run tens of miles a day and win marathons. Part of it's discipline, but part of it is aptitude. But most people will never reach that level no matter how disciplined they are. They simply won't have the physical aptitude. They won't be built right for it.

So, yes, training your "mental muscles" and using disciplined techniques will make you better, but there's always a bell curve. The outliers are never good examples of what to expect. By definition, the outliers are not the norms.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

I see a lot of mention of email lists.

The problem is that younger people increasingly don't use email. They use social media messaging.

Just another change in the cycle of publishing.

I'm sure email lists work for those who have enthusiastic fans, though. And still use email.


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## JeanetteRaleigh (Jan 1, 2013)

> Do you also include research in those hours?


While I'm not anywhere nearly as efficient as Amanda (working on it), I have a suggestion for research. If you're writing and get to a place that would stop you, highlight it as a question in yellow and move on.

For example, let's say I couldn't think of a specific type of dessert, I would type "Look up fancy dessert" and move on. I have the Oxford Thesaurus on hand and will use that or a dictionary for some of the basic words a writer needs, but if the research would require going to the internet, I save it for later.


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## Simon Haynes (Mar 14, 2011)

I just chuck 'TK' into my wip wherever I need to go look something up. Supposed to stand for 'to come', and apparently 'tk' is a letter combo you don't see in English so it's easy to search for.

I never stop typing to look something up. That way lies 30 minutes of time wasting.


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

Anarchist said:


> It definitely is for _some_ people. But that's been the case for 20+ years.


It hasn't been the case for twenty years that hotmail and gmail limit who sees emails from mailouts in a way that will impact on ALL authors.

Don't be silly now.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

CatParker said:


> It hasn't been the case for twenty years that hotmail and gmail limit who sees emails from mailouts in a way that will impact on ALL authors.
> 
> Don't be silly now.


I didn't say that.

You said "_I truly believe the email list is on its way out as the number one promotional tool._"

I replied that that has been the case for 20+ years.

It sounds to me like you're seeing decreasing effectiveness in your emails and blaming it largely on Gmail and Hotmail's filters. I've been mailing a long time. My metrics have _improved_ since Gmail introduced filters.

As I said, the difference is in the approach.


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## Eskimo (Dec 31, 2013)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I've made well into six figures for almost six years in a row, since I started publishing, netting mid-six-figures for all but the first year, when it was low six figures. I know many people who've been in 7-figure territory for years.


You obviously know some very wealthy people.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

jb1111 said:


> I see a lot of mention of email lists.
> 
> The problem is that younger people increasingly don't use email. They use social media messaging.
> 
> ...


My house is full of young people of the type that you want to attract: with new jobs and few other financial commitments.

They use social media for catching up with friends and keeping up with news etc., but everything serious is through email. The mostly use their phones or other mobile devices to read it, and they use webmail services, not mail clients, but they use email a lot. Just not for talking to friends. You're not their friend. You're a business.


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

Going Incognito said:


> Was reaching for the popcorn to watch the erotica authors rightly take issue with that part, but then I remembered that most of em have been run off already, lol. Good luck with that approach tho.


My only issues are that if it's not your thing in the slightest you'll quickly find it's not so easy writing something you hate and that these days starting an erom name is probably a better way to save your ass. My erotica earns me money because I wrote a lot of it in KU1 so I have several huge catalogs. As for being male, that's why you see so many authors with neutral names. There's no need to tell readers what you are if you feel it's awkward. As for someone saying it kills your visibility for other genres just having it on your account, I can't be sure. It never seemed to hurt me when I switched to romance, or maybe it did and I never knew it because I met my income goals. Maybe I'd be bigger if it wasn't on there. I just can't speak to that.


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## Mark Dawson (Mar 24, 2012)

My email list is still the most important part of my business. Bar none. Second place is a very, very distant second. If you’re not cultivating a list, you’re at a significant disadvantage. I can launch new books into the top 50 and sell thousands of copies (at $5 a pop) because of my list.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

JeanetteRaleigh said:


> While I'm not anywhere nearly as efficient as Amanda (working on it), I have a suggestion for research. If you're writing and get to a place that would stop you, highlight it as a question in yellow and move on.
> 
> For example, let's say I couldn't think of a specific type of dessert, I would type "Look up fancy dessert" and move on. I have the Oxford Thesaurus on hand and will use that or a dictionary for some of the basic words a writer needs, but if the research would require going to the internet, I save it for later.


Thanks for chiming in. I didn't mean that type of research. If it's just a word or something, I would just write XXX or something and come back to it later. I meant much more intricate research like legal stuff and diseases and police procedures, you name it. I write thrillers firmly set in reality. Often, a scene/plot point is very much dependent on this research and will effect the rest of the story, so I have to look it up. Yes, I sometimes do look up stuff like that before I start the book, but being a pantser--in my humble opinion the only way to write a mystery that's hard to solve and has lots of levels and also makes sense---I wouldn't know that plot point would occur until I got to, say, the middle of the story.

I'm thinking it would be easier to write fast if you write fantasy stories--I mean, what's there to look up?---but I could be wrong. Also, romance. I used to write romance and there wasn't much for me to research. I just had to be inspired


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

juliatheswede said:


> Thanks for chiming in. I didn't mean that type of research. If it's just a word or something, I would just write XXX or something and come back to it later. I meant much more intricate research like legal stuff and diseases and police procedures, you name it. I write thrillers firmly set in reality. Often, a scene/plot point is very much dependent on this research and will effect the rest of the story, so I have to look it up. Yes, I sometimes do look up stuff like that before I start the book, but being a pantser--in my humble opinion the only way to write a mystery that's hard to solve and has lots of levels and also makes sense---I wouldn't know that plot point would occur until I got to, say, the middle of the story.
> 
> I'm thinking it would be easier to write fast if you write fantasy stories--I mean, what's there to look up?---but I could be wrong. Also, romance. I used to write romance and there wasn't much for me to research. I just had to be inspired


This is probably why I'm much faster at the end of a book (up to 8K edited words a day) than at the beginning, which is more like 2K. Especially as you say with more intricate suspense stories. I find the research, though, whether it's a beautiful dress or an esoteric detail about the foster care system, can help me take the story in the direction it needs to go. So I embrace it. Besides, it's one of my favorite parts--it's just FUN. And if the job isn't fun for me, it's just a job, and I've done enough of that!


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

L_Loryn said:


> Yeah I'm only about 67% certain you can't do anything like that in mailchimp.  I'd play with it more but I pay for convenience.
> 
> And indeed it's off topic. The point was, my subscribers have commented that convertkit also goes straight to inbox, not in promotions or "other". When I email regularly (like every 1-2 weeks), my open rate is 40-50%, but keeping that in mind. It's not an author list, it's an artist/crafter list that discusses things like the best way to add an accent wall and isn't usually targeted towards selling.
> 
> My mailchimp author list gets about 35% open rate, but it's a lot smaller at around 300 subscribers.


You can do different drips for the same list with MC. You need to add sign up location tags to your different sign up forms, then create one drip for each sign up location. It takes a bit of work setting up, but once it's set up the list runs smoothly.



Mark Dawson said:


> My email list is still the most important part of my business. Bar none. Second place is a very, very distant second. If you're not cultivating a list, you're at a significant disadvantage. I can launch new books into the top 50 and sell thousands of copies (at $5 a pop) because of my list.


Mark, I hate to thread jack, but I have to ask: last time I looked, all your books were in KU. Are you still doing a lead generation campaign with your books on KU?

I only write series so with all my books in KU, I really have no proper lead generation giveaway, so I've never really tried running leadgen campaigns (or even taken that part of your course). I'm at the point where I'm willing to take some older stuff out of KU for leadgen purposes, but I'd still rather not. I've also gotten unclear answers from ECR about giving KU books directly to subscribers.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

Usedtoposthere said:


> This is probably why I'm much faster at the end of a book (up to 8K edited words a day) than at the beginning, which is more like 2K. Especially as you say with more intricate suspense stories. I find the research, though, whether it's a beautiful dress or an esoteric detail about the foster care system, can help me take the story in the direction it needs to go. So I embrace it. Besides, it's one of my favorite parts--it's just FUN. And if the job isn't fun for me, it's just a job, and I've done enough of that!


Yes, I'm also way more efficient toward the latter parts. And, yes, research is kind of fun, especially when I do it watching a few movies about the subject(I find watching a few well-plotted movies to be great when I'm stuck and don't know what should come next.) Also, you do become very knowledgable about the world reading up about all the stuff related to different subjects. It's all good, but it does slow you down...


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

Anarchist said:


> It sounds to me like you're seeing decreasing effectiveness in your emails and blaming it largely on Gmail and Hotmail's filters.


Don't be silly now.


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## CatParker (Sep 17, 2015)

Mark Dawson said:


> My email list is still the most important part of my business. Bar none. Second place is a very, very distant second. If you're not cultivating a list, you're at a significant disadvantage. I can launch new books into the top 50 and sell thousands of copies (at $5 a pop) because of my list.


My bet is that you're getting less of a return on your list per head than you did in the past though, no?

I've been selling to organic, highly engaged, email lists since 2003, and you can't deny that in recent years the percentage of opens, click-throughs and sales is lower than it was in the golden years, can you?


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

CatParker said:


> Don't be silly now.





CatParker said:


> Don't be silly now.


Fair enough. Keep winning, Cat.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

Anarchist said:


> Fair enough. Keep winning, Cat.


 I was thinking the same thing.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

David Chill said:


> You obviously know some very wealthy people.


I do. It has helped me see the insidiousness of comparing myself to others, unless it motivates me to be better. Which it does in terms of craft, but that is about it. I am in a recalibration period, personally. It is important to know what you are in this game for. Also to realize why some people do better than personal-you. In most cases, I have realized that they simply ARE better or more motivated, or understand the market better. Such is life!

As a somewhat humorous example, I was recently trying to fix covers for my worst selling series. Reviews were great on book 1; sales were not. I was explaining that it was set in Montana and everybody said that I needed the cowboy theme. I said, it is nothing to do with cowboys. They said, here is what small town romance covers should look like, and I said, no, it is not that kind of book. They were nonplussed. I in my usual dopey innocence had no idea that Montana was a trope and it should be cowboys. Or the rules about small town romance. To me Montana is a state a couple hours away from me with a similar sort of mindset and has beautiful mountains, and small towns are how I grew up. Cowboys and sweet romance never figured into it. I ended up doing a completely different kind of cover that is pretty cool, but it sure as heck has no cowboys!

On the other hand I have a pretty good hold on a corner of the market that likes my particular tea blend. I like writing it and some people really like reading it. Nora Roberts is not glancing anxiously in the rearview mirror however and never will be.


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

This has probably been mentioned in this thread, but a real key to any form of content marketing is actually providing superb value. I mean, Mark is really a fine example of that. That’s what his podcast is. 

I’m actually going through this at work at the moment. We’re putting together a lead generation content marketing strategy and my boss (bless her) keeps wanting to start doing something next week. Like, “we’ll just put together some management tips!” type of thing. I keep having to put my foot down and say “no, we have to provide genuine value above and beyond what people are expecting or could get elsewhere.”

Funnily enough we are actually going to be doing a podcast. But only because I noticed it’s a popular podcast topic and we have a USP (as well as access to some legit impressive people).

But anyway, not that I really know anything, but I kind of suspect that a lot of people’s email-related woes are down to not providing adequate value.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

RightHoJeeves said:


> This has probably been mentioned in this thread, but a real key to any form of content marketing is actually providing superb value. I mean, Mark is really a fine example of that. That's what his podcast is.
> 
> I'm actually going through this at work at the moment. We're putting together a lead generation content marketing strategy and my boss (bless her) keeps wanting to start doing something next week. Like, "we'll just put together some management tips!" type of thing. I keep having to put my foot down and say "no, we have to provide genuine value above and beyond what people are expecting or could get elsewhere."
> 
> ...


You mean you should offer, say 3-5 free books instead of one as your reader magnet? Or what would "superb value" mean otherwise?


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

juliatheswede said:


> You mean you should offer, say 3-5 free books instead of one as your reader magnet? Or what would "superb value" mean otherwise?


People's struggles seem to be more with dwindling open rates than acquiring subscribers, so I don't think I mean the reader magnet. As for superb value... I don't totally know what it means. It's the thing that makes people want to actually get an author's emails, rather than just opening them because they signed up on Instafreebie six months ago. Might be a new free short story. Might be just a great email. That differs from reader to reader, and author to author.

I, like most people, am signed up to many email newsletters. I regularly open maybe... four? One is a local independent cinema that often does Q&As for weird films (I recently saw _The Disaster Artist_ with the bloke who wrote the book doing a Q&A). One is an event promoter that tells me when big acts like Bob Dylan etc are coming to town. One is Goodreads, that tells me new books by authors I like. The last, at a stretch, is probably a boutique glasses place near me that always has incredible photography and neat designs and I just like looking at it because it's pretty. But they are all providing some kind of value. I'm not just opening them because I ticked a box once. For some reason, I'm still send newsletters from a hostel I stayed at in Amsterdam like 3 years ago. They know I'm Australian and they know I stayed there for 3 nights in 2015, so why are they bothering sending me newsletters.

Incidentally, the worst retail and newsletter targeting (in the sense they don't seem do it at all) is from the Book Depository. I've probably bought 500 books over the years through that website. When I sign in, why on Earth do they try and sell me _The Barefoot Investor_, _Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls_, _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_, or _The Little Book of Hygge_? All good books I'm sure, but from the amount of data I've given them, they should be throwing me up some seriously targeted products.

/rant


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

juliatheswede said:


> You mean you should offer, say 3-5 free books instead of one as your reader magnet? Or what would "superb value" mean otherwise?


Offering more books or stories doesn't help. I had an autoresponder sequence of three or four novellas/stories. Didn't increase engagement.

Most readers don't want free or cheap books so much as they want entertaining books. Most of these reader magnets are marketing tools that offer little appeal to the reader.

Value is such a nebulous term as to be almost meaningless, but I think the shortest answer is this: the reader magnet should be your absolute best work. What I see, instead, is authors giving readers a blah free story, then wonder why readers don't come back for more (often accompanied by a proclamation lamenting "freebie hoarders"). Sturgeon's law states that 90% of everything is crap (tongue in cheek, of course), but I'd suspect that rate is more like 99% for the reader magnets I see. Your magnet has to be a pro-quality product that you could charge money for, and I don't see that with most of them. If we are being honest, most of them are written because some person on a forum or book said we needed one, and it was just a little thing to tick off on the massive to do list. This is generally not a recipe for compelling fiction.

Even if you deliver a dynamite story, you have other problems to solve - most reader magnet stories don't have a cliffhanger or any pressing need to buy the main series. Or the magnet is some sort of spinoff/prequel that doesn't introduce the main characters/setting of the core novels. I have a prequel set in 1812 that converts poorly to the main urban fantasy trilogy because of this issue. With a prequel, you also run the risk of gutting your Book 1's backstory by accident (guilty), thus leaving some people confused who haven't read the prequel.

Optimally, I think, an effective reader magnet should end in a whopping cliffhanger that doesn't affect the main narrative arc of the series, but still demands answering (I haven't tested this, but it should increase sellthrough), while having the same vibe/characters as the main series - just in a novella format. If one could write a novel as a lead magnet, I suspect that would perform better, but this involves a tremendous amount of time and additional production costs - and thus, added risk.

You're also going to need a solid autoresponder behind the reader magnet if you're giving away your reader magnet via Facebook or Instafreebie et al. to engage your new readers.

Thus, upon further examination, "write a valuable reader magnet" quickly becomes a fairly time-consuming and complex strategy to A) be profitable and B) generate a steady stream of readers who like your work. It's not so much that it's an impossible strategy to pull off; it's just more difficult than most people suspect, and the market is really, really saturated at this point.

After writing ten or so reader magnets over the past three years, I think most authors would be better served directing those words toward novels they plan to offer for sale. Then, later on, you can use these novels as freebies - permafree, BookFunnel, Instafreebie et al. - thus repurposing them into reader magnets. This is the path forward I'm taking for 2018. If you're KU-only, and need a magnet to build subs, then I'd make sure it matches the vibe of the main series exactly - and gives readers a really compelling reason to press BUY on Book 1.

Nick


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

juliatheswede said:


> You mean you should offer, say 3-5 free books instead of one as your reader magnet? Or what would "superb value" mean otherwise?


People can't tell you what "superb value" means because it's one of those "I'll know it when I see it" things. Also, it means different things for different people. One person's "must open" is another person's "why do I need this annoying crap?"

You can never be everything to everyone. Just be genuine to the people you want to attract.

About this whole "reader magnet" thing, I just roll my eyes at the tactic of deliberately writing a prequel to lure people in. Seriously, readers can smell that BS a mile off. Either write a full series and simply give book 1 for free, or write a novella that explains something about book 1 and put the signup at the end of book 1 where it's an incentive to sign up once they have bought and read book 1. Caveat: to make the latter tactic work well, you need to actually sell a lot of books.

Giving out "value" usually means it hurts or takes something from you, in a metaphysical kind of way. You don't want to give this whole book away because you slaved over those words. Or on a different front: you make yourself vulnerable when you share personal information. I believe it's the sense of "it costs me something to share this with you" that represents the beginnings of value to the people you want to attract.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

Mark Dawson said:


> My email list is still the most important part of my business. Bar none. Second place is a very, very distant second. If you're not cultivating a list, you're at a significant disadvantage. I can launch new books into the top 50 and sell thousands of copies (at $5 a pop) because of my list.


When did you start your list? What year? Just curious.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> People can't tell you what "superb value" means because it's one of those "I'll know it when I see it" things. Also, it means different things for different people. One person's "must open" is another person's "why do I need this annoying crap?"
> 
> You can never be everything to everyone. Just be genuine to the people you want to attract.
> 
> ...


I do think the Book #1 permafree tactic is really silly. At least, it is for me. I had a series starter on permafree for a year and it only gave away 1,000 copies and led to little sell-through, but I've had 10k sales for it at 0.99 and good read through for those paid buys.

Out of all the BookBubs I've had, the permafree one was the worst. I gave away 20k copies of Book #1 in a day and significantly more afterwards, but read-through was awful. I think I sold around 100 copies (if that) of Book 2 months afterward. It messed up my also-boughts with a bunch of books that weren't even related to my genre. This was a book that was on the bestseller lists consistently at 0.99. If I could, I would take it back and try a BookBub for it at 0.99.

I think by giving a full book away you're just encouraging the reader 1) not to read it and 2) not to continue the series, because they got #1 for free and therefore don't want to invest. I do have a free short story offer for my mailing list that my readers love and want me to expand on into a full novel, but I don't think I'm going to.

So... yeah. Permafree BookBubs are a total let down.


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## activeindieauthor (May 8, 2018)

I also want to add that readers can't see value anymore in a free book, even if it does hurt the author to give it away. Free books are a dime a dozen and every author is expected to offer at least one. You're not gifting the reader anything, you're just setting them up to take advantage of you later, expecting free or 0.99 books. Many readers of mine refuse to read the rest of my sequels unless it's in KU, it's free, or it's 0.99 (and I even have people protesting the measly 0.99). Books have become cheap products. And I think that's one of the downfalls of writing to market: if you have something unique that can't be found anywhere else, readers will pay to get that, but if you're trying to sell your standard generic vampire novel that has a billion copies of it out there, readers won't be concerned with paying for your story, as you can get a cheaper or free one that's nearly identical to it somewhere else.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> My house is full of young people of the type that you want to attract: with new jobs and few other financial commitments.
> 
> They use social media for catching up with friends and keeping up with news etc., but everything serious is through email. The mostly use their phones or other mobile devices to read it, and they use webmail services, not mail clients, but they use email a lot. Just not for talking to friends. You're not their friend. You're a business.


I'm sure they still use postal mail for serious correspondence at their place of work, too -- and sometimes even use stamps. But does that also have a future in business-style marketing?

I understand that a lot of you use email lists, and it works for you. My point was that it seems like diminishing technology.

But you still think email lists will have such great returns in 2025, even for authors?


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

jb1111 said:


> But you still think email lists will have such great returns in 2025, even for authors?


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Anarchist said:


>


LOL Thank you. Made my day.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

Anarchist said:


>


LOL.

But, either way, 2025 is only seven short years away, which can be a half-lifetime in tech.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

jb1111 said:


> I'm sure they still use postal mail for serious correspondence at their place of work, too -- and sometimes even use stamps. But does that also have a future in business-style marketing?
> 
> I understand that a lot of you use email lists, and it works for you. My point was that it seems like diminishing technology.
> 
> But you still think email lists will have such great returns in 2025, even for authors?


Post vs email is actually a cost and effort non-comparison. As soon as something becomes cheaper and easier, people will do that.

The rest of the argument, I have to admit to caring very little about. I've used email marketing since 1996. Over that time, it has seen many different reincarnations. Ugly text-based emails read on programs like Eudora. Remember Eudora? Then webmail. Facebook messenger can be made to act like email but it belongs to Facebook and not everyone is on/uses Facebook. Same with the awesome Whatsapp, which blurs the line between email and phone, except it belongs to Whatsapp. Whatsapp uses your phone no and not everyone is OK with giving that out to randoms. Your email address belongs to you and no, I don't believe that people will ever stop contacting each other in some shape or form based on the use of an email address.

But in any case, when I plan marketing, I think of two things:

1. What's working right now
2. How can I do what's working in step 1. with as few intermediaries as possible and in a manner where I can use the same contacts again.

Email (in whatever shape or form it will be used in the future) is an ideal way of contacting people now and forever in the future. The tools you do this with will undoubtedly change. Your email address does not belong to Facebook or Amazon or anyone else. The other day I found a box with a CDRom with Eudora on it. Remember CDRoms? But the email address I use as my main address has been my main form of contact since 1998.


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## Dean Kutzler (May 16, 2016)

activeindieauthor said:


> They go straight to the bundle.


I think there is a lot of good advice in this thread. But...When did you do the bundles? As another commenter said, you trained your tribe to look for a discount. It's inevitable...we all want a bargain and why not? This may sound risky, so, I'd advise thinking it through carefully first, but, maybe you should pull those bundles. Use them more effectively for sales when launching a new series so new readers can get a taste, and only offer the bundles for a limited time. Also, writing/publishing quickly has always been toted to "tickle the algo" so definitely get back to that. Also, consider doing a test on "relaunching" one of you series so you can have a fresh "tickle" on the algo.

I truly hope you're able to make this work & I wish you the best.


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## jb1111 (Apr 6, 2018)

Patty Jansen said:


> Post vs email is actually a cost and effort non-comparison. As soon as something becomes cheaper and easier, people will do that.
> 
> The rest of the argument, I have to admit to caring very little about. I've used email marketing since 1996. Over that time, it has seen many different reincarnations. Ugly text-based emails read on programs like Eudora. Remember Eudora? Then webmail. Facebook messenger can be made to act like email but it belongs to Facebook and not everyone is on/uses Facebook. Same with the awesome Whatsapp, which blurs the line between email and phone, except it belongs to Whatsapp. Whatsapp uses your phone no and not everyone is OK with giving that out to randoms. Your email address belongs to you and no, I don't believe that people will ever stop contacting each other in some shape or form based on the use of an email address.
> 
> ...


Fair enough. Thanks for the response and the info.

I remember Eudora. Didn't last very long where I worked. Neither did my first five email addresses, which -- if I included the one I had on a bulletin board in 1991 would probably make six.

Either way, your point is well taken.

PS I remember CDroms. I wonder if those encyclopedias on a CD still play in today's computers? Woops, most of them don't have a CD/DVD included anymore.


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## Simon Haynes (Mar 14, 2011)

jb1111 said:


> Fair enough. Thanks for the response and the info.
> 
> I remember Eudora. Didn't last very long where I worked. Neither did my first five email addresses, which -- if I included the one I had on a bulletin board in 1991 would probably make six.
> 
> ...


I still have all my CDs stored on my drives as ISOs. (I mean ALL my CDs, back to the early-mid 90's. Office '94, Encarta '94, Corel Draw 5, you name it!)

You can install Virtualbox (free), stick Windows 98 on it (still have my CD ...) and then install just about any old software. If you want to go further back to the good old DOS days, DosBox is the answer.

Sorry, a bit off topic that. I get very strong nostalgia where computers are concerned.

Back on topic, my primary series of novels went wide on the 20th after my one and only 90 day period in KU. Looking forward to tracking figures, and hey, now I've got three different sites to refresh all day instead of just one ...


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## JustAnotherAuthor (Oct 7, 2018)

activeindieauthor said:


> New to kBoards, seeking advice. I'm an indie author who has over 40 books out and has been publishing since 2011. Since the start of my indie career I've been consistently making $2,500 to $3,500 in YA and NA fantasy fiction. This has dropped like a rock since December of 2017 to around $400 per month and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
> 
> Last year was a great year. I got a few trad pub deals, made a bestseller list, and got a BookBub deal on a box set that earned me almost $20k. I did very little advertising and did NO AMS, FB, or BookBub ads whatsoever.
> 
> ...


I had a similar experience - did the visible star rating on any of your books drop? For much of 2018, I was cruising along on $10k per month royalties. It was amazing. Then in June, it all went down the toilet. I can trace it back to the very day it changed. All year long, Amazon had been deleting reviews. Unfortunately, their deletions were outpacing my new reviews. Eventually the unthinkable happened - my book fell below a 3.75 average (that happens when Amazon only deletes positive Verified Purchase reviews). Why is that special? That means it no longer displayed 4 solid gold stars on Amazon. Instead it displays 3.5 stars. The Amazon algorithms work on the visible star ratings. If your book doesn't show 4 stars, people don't want it and Amazon won't promote it. Also, many book promotion sites won't promote it either. My daily sales fell 95% over the next 90 days. I went from selling 200 per day to 10 per day.


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## time was (Sep 1, 2018)

C. Gockel said:


> Also, why would you start with FB and AMS? I use those because I've blown through all my other options so many times they make sense. And because I write slow. And because I have a long series where 20-cents a click still earns me money.
> 
> They're the most expensive adverts out there. Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, RobinReads, Fktips, Booksends, GenrePulse, ENT, BookBot Bob / BookBot Bill, those are the ads you want before you start hitting up FB and AMS.


Thank you for that list of alternative ad outlets. My AMS ads have been doing nothing for me, but then my books are in the bottom price range. I think I'll try some of those sites listed above and see how they go.

For the original poster, I think I''d return to what was working for me which appears to have been publishing often. Certainly picking up my publishing pace is a top priority for me. Best wishes on finding your way out of this slump.


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## OldCrank (Sep 15, 2018)

My sales have stayed consistent for the past two years. I don't run ads, very occasionally do free days (when I remember, or as a tie-in to something) and have never pursued a book bub. My stable includes consistent earners and best sellers. I _do_ write in several genres, but no matter what, I write all.the.time. 
No matter what claims of success a coach or guru is putting out there, I'll never trust the advice to do less of what makes you the money: *writing*. Every three months I'm putting out something new in one of my genres, which means I work a fifty hour per week schedule, but it's better than my old career, and each month something is upping my top-of-mind for readers in one of those genres...and then the next genre...and the next. I've gotten away with going four months, but since I enjoy writing and try to keep consistent, three works best for my flow. 
You were on a good track. Don't let a big name knock you from your course no matter what results (sometimes genuine results, for a handful of people) they claim with their methods. There's no one-size-fits-all and your method was working. So it sounds like you know what you should be doing


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