Recently an article came across my feed that boldly proclaimed only 40 self-published writers are considered a "success" by Amazon. I scoffed immediately. I have tasted my own measure of success over there, by making more money as a self-published writer than I ever did in a "real job," so I clicked on the link to see how they, and by they I mean Amazon, measured "success."
To them, you haven't really "made money" until you've sold a million books, and in the last five years, only 40 self-published authors have done that.
Full disclosure, I am not one of them. My total for book sales on Amazon is probably about 70K. If you multiply that by the average book royalty of $2.05 (based on the very low $2.99 purchase price,) that puts me at over $140,000 over the past 5 years, which averages out to $28,000 a year. Though that sounds low, consider that 80% of all self-published make $1000 or less annually. Despite what they tell you, replacing a job where you make $13/hour just so you can play in the sandbox all day is, by most definitions, a successful endeavor.
In fact, I only stayed in that 80% for my first year. In my second year, Groupie took off and I saw my earnings grow by 1000%. The next year it doubled again, which continued all the way till 2015. Still, even with that bad year, where I saw my earnings slashed by a very painful 80%, I made well above the average of most. Before you get too excited I should probably tell you that the median writing-related income in 2014 was $8000. (To put this in perspective, earning $11,670 or less qualifies as poverty wages for a single person alone.)
So if you got into this racket to get rich quick, you're very likely going to be very disappointed.
If you got into this gig to have a career, however, I think I can help you. I have a three-step program sure to guarantee your success*, not just in writing but in any endeavor you pursue.
STEP ONE: Redefine what you mean by success*.
Let's be frank. The word "success" is subjective. Everyone has their own metric for it, and really kind of should. What you want out of your writing career may not be what I want out of my writing career. You have to figure out what your ultimate goal is and let that guide your path, not some pie-in-the-sky lotto number that keeps your carrot constantly out of your reach.
I can't guarantee you'll sell a million books. No one can. Some books will do well. Some will bomb. It's up to the reader alone which of your books will be worth their hard earned dollar, and you won't know which is which until they do. You're not only going to have to keep throwing new books against the wall to see what ultimately sticks, you're going to have to wade through tons of crap submitted by hackish folk doing the same thing. When I say hackish, I mean all those people who just want to make a quick buck and figured self-publishing was the way to do it. They aren't storytellers. They have no passion for the art. They just want to make a a lot of money quick and they'll do whatever it takes, including shamelessly plagiarizing other authors word for word, to do it. There are no real hoops to jump through to hit "publish." Once you have a book in your grubby paws, there's only you and Amazon to decide if your book is suitable for sale.
(This is probably why Amazon had to implement a new policy on the quality of said books. I'm tentatively holding out hope this is a good thing, and not just another way to penalize self-publishers.)
Every week dozens upon dozens of new books hit Amazon, so it's hard as hell to sell even one book - much less a million.
If you want to stay sane in this process, you're going to have to redefine your own measure of success. Though the hill you climb is steep, there are a lot of cool milestones along the way where you earn your stripes as a writer.
Milestone One: You finished a book.
This is a huge success when you consider so many people only wish they could finish a book. If you made it through Chapter One all the way to The End, you're already ahead of the game. YOU FINISHED SOMETHING. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but you did the work and managed to create something concrete and tangible out of nothing more than the thoughts in your head. GO, YOU! And since can't sell a book you never finish, finishing that book means you're one step closer to earning money as a published writer. (Pretty cool, huh?)
Milestone Two: You sold a book.
The very first money I ever made was on an Internet article. I earned about $0.03, but, by God, that was money earned because of what I wrote. I did a victory lap accordingly. Remember what I said about how hard it was to be seen and discovered among the tidal wave of books published weekly on Amazon? Selling even one book is huge! It means some reader somewhere managed to stumble across your book in the vast Amazon wasteland. They saw your cover and opened the page, read your book blurb and thought, "Sure, what the hell? I'll take a chance."
They took a chance on you. They didn't have to. The competition is steep, with many more successful writers tilting the odds more in their favor by paying for PR and having a legion of fans to support them. You, little no-name you, SOLD. A. BOOK. If we aren't allowed to stop and celebrate that as a huge fucking win, what does that say to that one reader? That they don't count because there aren't a million more like him/her? Good luck building a career on that kind of ingratitude. Your readers are the only bosses that count in this business. They're the ones who, if you've done your job right, will tell other people about your book and do all your selling for you, just by word of mouth. The best PR I've ever had in my life I never had to pay for. I just got one reader passionate about the story, who then passed it on to a book blogger, who became even more passionate about the story, who shared it with all her followers and BOOM. The door opened.
Book bloggers are responsible for almost all of my coverage. These readers took a chance to read/review me even though I wasn't already sitting on a goldmine, sending my little babies out into the reader universe like ripples in a pond. You want to sell a million books? You can't sell a million without starting with the one. Never, ever lose sight of who is important in this equation.
Milestone Three: You got a review.
Reviews sell books. Plain and simple. You need em more than ever in an saturated market. But here's where it gets tricky for far too many writers. Though you want everyone to love your book, realistically that's not going to happen. Nobody reads the same book, and it's inevitable you're going to find those who hated every word you painstakingly typed. Whether they loved it, or whether they hated it, every single review you get is a win. You started with a blank page and you made someone FEEL something, even if it's anger that they wasted their time on your book. Your success isn't dependent upon a positive review. If people are talking about it, you're already ahead of the game. The death of any book is the dreaded "DNF," - or "did not finish." It's the indifference that you need to worry about, indifference towards you, indifference towards your story. In the end, "meh" will do more damage to your career than "OMG she's wonderful!" or "OMG she sucks!"
Believe it or not, those lower-rated reviews can help you sell a book. Readers are savvy, and they know that there are writers out there who know how to game the system, who set up sock-puppet accounts to give their own books glowing reviews, or worse... pay for them. If a book doesn't have a FEW stinker reviews, that looks suspicious. And plenty of readers will read those 1-or-2-star rated reviews FIRST, just to see what someone else hated about it. If that reader demonstrates personal biases in the review, many will shrug and think, "That's not a big deal," and dive right in.
A very small percentage of readers actually leave reviews. Though I've sold 70K books (and given away a significant chunk on top of that,) I only have 1,311 reviews on Goodreads. Amazon is even lower, because they have a very strong oversight on who can and can't leave reviews for your work. Ratings are much easier. Click a star and go. But reviews? That takes time, and to take that time the reader must care. If you get a review... that's pretty darned huge no matter how it sorts out in the end. It is one step in the right direction towards the ultimate goal of success.
No one sold a million books without reviews, good, bad or ugly.
Milestone Four: You've earned fans.
This is probably one of the cooler milestones, even though you can't cash it in at the bank. But as far as I'm concerned, you can't put a price on that writer/reader connection. One of the best "author" moments I ever had was when I went to my first book-signing in Las Vegas. After one of the parties, I was sitting at a slot machine, just happily playing like I always do in Vegas, when I heard a gasp behind me. I turn to see this woman cautiously approach me. "Are you Ginger Voight?" she asked. I smiled and said yes and this woman had the very same reaction I've had when I've met famous people. She was practically beside herself to meet me. ME. Little ol no-name, no-million-books-sold me. At that time I had only sold about 20K books, but she made me feel like a rock star. You simply can't put a price on that, and no one - and I mean NO ONE - gets downplay how successful that made me feel. Every single time I publish I know there are fans out there who don't even have to read the blurb to buy my books. They may be smaller in number than some of my more "successful" peers, but the fact that they consider me a #OneClickAuthor is mind-blowing and humbling. Any email you get, any kind of follower you earn on social media... ALL of that is fucking incredible. The more you appreciate THEM, the more successful you'll be, simply because they'll make you feel like a success even when the world around you wants to dismiss you.
Milestone Five: You are lucky enough to repeat all these milestones again with your next book.
If you want a career, you're going to have to treat this like a job. Even for those 40 indies who have sold a million bucks, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Allow yourself to bask in the glow as it comes, but don't dawdle. Get back in that saddle pronto to repeat these steps with each new book you write. (Because you WILL need to write more books.)
And that brings us to...
Step Two: Develop Your Plan According to Your Desired Success.
The main difference between a goal and a dream is that one of them has a plan. You don't just trip into the kind of success it takes to sell a million books. My son Tim has a saying. "Your discipline must match your ambition." Since I am a very ambitious person, I know the work I put in has to meet my goal for success in equal measure. Every year I have the same goal: Sell a million books. It's lofty, sure; made loftier by the idea only 40 indie writers have managed to do it. But I don't look at it from the perspective that ONLY 40 have done it, so I shouldn't try. I look at it as 40 broke through and made it happen. If they can do it, I can, too.
I just have to be willing to do the work.
This is the attitude you have to have if you want to make ANYTHING a success, by the way. You have to believe that you have it within you to do it. But it doesn't stop there. You've gotta be willing to turn up the heat and make it so, defy the odds, conquer the impossible.
I don't just write a book and throw it up on Amazon and let it go at that. I'm constantly working, strategizing, marketing, writing, plotting, developing... to the point that if I have a free minute to spare, I'm filling it with "work." I have to, because whether I succeed or fail is completely up to me. It's not going to fall into my lap just because I want it. It's not going to rain money from the sky just because I happen to be talented. This is a business and I have to treat it as such. I'm not going to become a professional basketball player just because I can sink a basket. I have to learn the game, I have to practice. I have to put in the time and effort. I have to take the falls and learn from failure. Good is not good enough. I strive to be great.
To sell a million books, you have to be great. More people want to be great than put in the work to become great, which is why the odds are so slim of such big things happening in any career, much less a creative one.
Here's the painful truth. No one owes you anything. If you have a dream, it's up to YOU to make it come true. Even if you get really strong, talented, go-getters behind you, 95% of your success depends 100% on what you do. This is a job where you are going to hustle. There's no way around it. You're not going to sell a million books just because you want to. You're going to sell a million books because you set forth a very deliberate plan to make it so. Do your research. Some books make money. Some don't. Read bestsellers. Find out what the market demands. Constantly be learning, honing your craft. Study those people who HAVE made a career for themselves. Find out how they did it. Learn from the masters. This is a crazy business that is set up to swiftly weed out those who can't cut it in the long haul. The "thick skin" this profession demands isn't from the barbs of critics - it's for the constant sting of inherent rejection you face every single time you publish. Most people will reject you first and foremost by not buying a book.
But guess what? They "reject" some of those bestsellers the very same way.
This is a career you'll hear no way more than you'll hear yes no matter who you are. Lace up your boots and keep walking.
Stop treating success like some random lottery win. People who make this their careers put in the work, plain and simple. And when I say career, I mean something more substantial than one best-selling title. To me, the measure of success is that I have never gone a day without selling a book in four years. When you consider that most books drop off the map after a release-day push, the fact that a series released in 2014 still has "legs" (in that I sell dozens of copies per week per title) is fucking mind-blowing.
Can I retire on it? Nope. Not by a long shot. That's why I have to keep working. To have a writing career, I have to approach it like a job. There's no shortcut around it.
And I'll take it a step further, as word of warning for all those folks who have "make enough money I can quit my day job" as one of their own personal markers of success. The minute you become a full-time writer, you cease having value in the "real world" job market no matter how well you do. When the market fluctuates, and it will, and you end up needing more money than your sales generate, you WILL have to to supplement your income just to make ends meet. Any sales job is a matter of feast or famine, depending on the market. My husband used to sell real estate, cars, furniture and cell phones. His income was anything but stable. Some days we lived like kings. Other days we robbed Peter to pay Paul. If you want to be a writer, then you have to accept this as part of the deal. The minute you cut ties with Plan B, you are literally going for broke. Despite my successes and my tremendous skills and diverse employment background, I am currently un-employable. I should make $30K a year at the very least for what I am able to do, but because I've been out of the "job market" for the last five years, I can't get an interview to save my soul. And when I do, it all comes back to the fact that I don't have a recent work history (even though I work 12-hour days on the regular, running my own business.) I have skills coming out of my arse (type 75wpm, data entry 11K-kpm, test in the 90% on Microsoft Office, experience with web/graphic design, marketing, accounting, management, etc., working in insurance, real estate, public relations, retail AND restaurants,) but I can't even get a job answering a damned telephone. Having done so well as an indie, in that I could make my ends meet for years on end WITHOUT an outside job, takes me completely out of the running.
So when I say there's no way around it, I'm telling you the cold hard truth. You want to make a living with your writing? You're going to have to hustle. No one is going to give it to you. You have to earn it many times over before you ever see the work pay off. I wrote for twenty years before I ever made a dime. Fortunately, because of self-publishing, many of you won't face the same challenges. It still won't come easy. This is a war, my lovelies. And you have to be willing to spring up out of bed every day willing to fight it.
Some days I'm more successful at this than others.
Which brings us to...
Step Three: Learn How to Adapt.
It is safe to say that self-publishing has changed the game of publishing, but that doesn't really go far enough. The more accurate way to say it is that it is changING the game. What worked for indies in 2012 won't work in 2016. It's as hard as it ever was, and gets even harder the more people jump on board to take a little piece of the pie. That's why the "only 40 writers" article even exists, to caution new writers against using self-publishing as some sort of get-rich-quick scheme, which makes it so much harder for the rest of us who actually want to make this a substantial career.
I'm not real worried about that though. The slush pile is a little different than it used to be, in that those books are often published now and flooding the market, but fighting the slush has been a part of this profession since I started sending out queries in the 1990s. I have to stand on my head to convince anyone to read a book, then or now. I just do it a little differently these days. Truthfully, I'm doing it differently than I was when I started self-publishing in 2011.
You have to be adaptable in life, not just this business. If you can't adapt, you die. That's evolution 101. You constantly have to reinvent yourself and modify your expectations accordingly. This job in particular is very fluid, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, in that you CAN find new ways to do things, so experimentation is welcomed and encouraged. Let's face it. This industry has been changing moment to moment for years, so nobody really knows anything anymore. The best thing about being an indie is that you CAN stop on a dime and try something new without worrying about the traditional publishing paradigm. But if those experiments fail, and they often do, it can be very bad. Just like water, it doesn't take much to pose a dangerous threat of drowning. That's why adapting is key, no matter what you want to achieve. Anyone who has ever achieved anything great had to master this.
As this industry changes, you have to be willing to adapt to it. A lot of people are scared of indies, just because they don't know what to expect. They will downplay your successes, like this original article attempted to do. They want to discourage you with scary statistics which don't JUST apply to indie writers by the way. Traditional writers are just as likely to have low or "mid-tier" careers rather than become bestsellers, thanks to the publishing stranglehold against them. You, as an indie, only make that much harder for publishing giants, who have a lot more moolah on the line than you do when they invest in a book. They want to get you off the hunt. But here's the reality: self-publishing is no longer the redheaded stepchild in the basement. Though major publishers have taken a hit in sales in recent years, self-publishing is currently on an upswing, despite all the safeguards in place to keep us at the bottom of the pack. If you're an indie, you are part of a movement, swelling like a tide, ready to knock the old traditionalists right off their high horses. Several bestselling writers have even ditched their traditional publishing contracts so that they have better control over their content. Many have learned that the work is the same even with a traditional imprint, and have decided that it isn't worth taking the cut in royalties in order to publish traditionally.
If I'm expected to do all the marketing and publicity for my book, I'm going to take the full 70%, not the 35% offered by most traditional publishers.
Plus concerns have been raised recently regarding less than reputable publishing houses, which, despite their successes, have left many of their vulnerable writers out to dry - where many are living in fear they'll lose their rights to their content entirely. Far too many writers are handing over money to people unwilling to earn it. They want you in their "stable," but all the work ultimately falls on you and they get to walk away with your money thanks to legal contracts that bind you to them, for better or worse.
This is why self-publishing has proved so successful. Instead of waiting for quarterly reports to see how things sell, an indie can log on daily and keep an eye on things. Because of this, it is easier to adapt and experiment with things to boost our income. Some things work. Some things don't. But you have more control over it. If you're just checking your sales once a month, you're missing major opportunities to properly market/sell your book.
Each and every one of those 40 who have managed to sell one million books have worked their ass off to get there. It wasn't some accident or fluke. Serendipity plays a minor part, but I guarantee the people who made it happen didn't sit around on their laurels expecting a huge payday simply because they hit "publish" on a book. They watched the market, they learned what their readers wanted, they figured out how to boost their visibility (which is the absolute key to success in this industry,) and adapted accordingly.
In other words... they treated it like a job. If you want a successful career as an indie writer, that is what you must do.
People will discourage you from tackling this kind of career because honestly it is a poor man's game. Your odds for a quick payday are long. If you want to sell a million books, they're even longer. Only 40 indies have done it, after all.
But 40 people HAVE done it. And lots and lots and lots more have managed to eke out a pretty decent living following their example. Best-sellers get the most press, but they stand on the shoulders of hundreds, even thousands, of no-name, mid-tier writers who proudly call themselves successful professionals.
Set your metric for success.
Do the work to achieve it.
Be willing to adapt along the way, particularly in terms of your own expectations.
There is no shortcut.
Good luck. And godspeed.
Now let's get back out there...
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