Become a Successful Indie Author

by Craig Martelle

  But I’m inefficient with my time because I can be. Those who work full-time jobs and have young families at home don’t have the luxury of wasting one minute. You have to do everything for your small business as an indie, which means you need to be efficient if you want to maximize your earnings potential.

  What are your priorities to maximize your time?

  #1 Writing. You are the talent, and you should always treat the talent right.

  #2 Presentation. Preparing your book for market—cover, blurb, keywords, categories, reader engagement.

  #3 Marketing. Books generally don’t sell themselves. This includes your newsletter.

  #4 Other Stuff. This is the admin, taxes, running your knuckles over a cheese grater, you know, the usual author stuff.

  I’m not telling you anything you haven’t heard before. You have to write the book and make sure that the cover and blurb help to sell it. If you don’t do those first two things, you’ll waste a great deal of time and money on marketing.

  When you have the writing and presentation squared away to the best of your ability, then marketing becomes number one. I say that nothing sells the last book like the next book, but without some marketing, people won’t know that last book exists, let alone the next one.

  If you only have five hours a week in which to do it all and you’re able to get a book a year published, I salute you! Making the most of your time is important. What brought this to the fore for me was having to edit a 60k word book (not mine) on a new story line that was my responsibility. I thought it would take three days and throw me way behind. It took thirteen hours, a little more than one work day, because I gave it my 100% focus. No Facebook, no writing, no marketing, no ka-ching from BookReport. (That’s nice, but it’s a distraction that you don’t need unless you are doing hour-to-hour marketing, same thing with checking your author rank—if it doesn’t change what you’re doing at the moment, then you don’t need to check it.)

  Learn what you need to know at that particular time in your journey. If you haven’t written your first book yet, there’s no need to get overwhelmed by the marketing. Work on your craft until you need to know how to do a blurb. Research covers in your genre to make sure your cover attracts the right readers. When your book is done and getting ready to publish, study up on marketing. There’s enough information available in various Facebook author groups (I would always recommend 20Booksto50k first) that you’ll get a healthy start and be able to ask smarter questions, dial in the knowledge that will help you best at this particular time.

  If you focus and prioritize, going after your number one with fanatical devotion, you’ll find that you’re able to get more from your time.

  There are a couple rules of consulting. You can never have more than one priority one and when your number one issue is resolved, number two becomes number one—as in, you will always have something at the top of your list.

  Give your top priority the attention it deserves, and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.

  Chapter 7

  Marketing

  Return on Investment

  Margin

  Amazon Ads

  Facebook Ads

  BookBub Ads

  Overview

  Very few people can be successful in this business without advertising. Most of those have built their followers over time and get a set number of sales with each new release. Some can make $100k/month based on the quality of their newsletter subscribers alone. I know one author who spends a relative pittance (a couple hundreds of dollars a month) in advertising and makes six figures month in, month out. She sells her readers two high-quality books a month and they buy the books when they are released. This is the epitome of the game.

  I saw an ad on Amazon for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. JK Rowling thinks she needs to advertise (at least her marketing team believes that there are more buyers out there), so why wouldn’t the average Joe?

  That’s me. The blue collar author. I am your average Joe driven to succeed, a workaholic who believes that if I just work a little harder… It’s better to work smarter, and it’s far more lucrative.

  I need to write the books because my readership is waiting impatiently, but these are good books with appeal to a far broader audience. Can I keep my readership happy while increasing my sales? How can I get my books into new hands? Marketing.

  It is easier to sell ten books to one person than one book to ten, but I’m trying to do both because that is a whole new plateau up the mountain of success.

  You’re making the same face that I’m making. Advertising and marketing isn’t hard, it only takes a little effort and thanks to the work of a few of my friends, it isn’t even that much effort.

  They have written entire books on some very specific details as well as provided most of the information at no cost on their Facebook pages or their blogs.

  I’m not going to try to shortcut their work, because I’d end up quoting huge sections. I can’t do that to them. I will tell you to buy their books as the current seminal works on the subject. Their books are what I use, and for this section, I’ll go into how I use the advertising on those platforms.

  Let’s get some basic terms down first.

  Money – at the end of the day, this is what we’re talking about. We want more money at the end of every day than when we started.

  Revenue – this is your gross earnings, how much money your book brings in. A $2.99 book in KDP Select will earn you roughly $2 in revenue.

  Expense – a valid cost, even if it isn’t tax-deductible, although we want all expenses to be tax-deductible.

  Profit – what’s left after you subtract the expenses from revenue. This is your “you” money.

  Cash Flow – the money flowing in each month balanced against the outflow. The money you make today on Amazon will be paid in two to three months. The money you spent on ads is paid at the end of the month, or in $500 chunk increments during the month. Pay me now, but you get paid later.

  Overhead – these are your base costs that you have regardless of whether you publish a book or not.

  Margin – this is how much you get between your cost and price.

  There are people who borrow money to run ads. Until you are sure what kind of return on investment you’ll get, I would be wary of spending more than I make, unless you know you can afford to take the loss. I wouldn’t recommend spending much money at all on advertising until you have three books out. That’s simply my opinion.

  As I said before, it’s so much easier to sell ten books to one person. Hold that mantra and start making money at this thing we call self-publishing. Once you figure out how to sell your books to one person, take what you learned and sell to two, then five, then ten, and keep building that foundation from which you can keep climbing.

  Return on Investment (ROI)

  This is one of the single most important calculations you can make. How much did you spend and how much did you make? If you can correlate these two efforts, then you can take steps to put your ad money into efforts that see you get two to three times your money back or more.

  Primary ROI is when you put your book up for sale, see how much you spent on ads, and how much you made above your baseline. Did you make more than you spent?

  An example. Your $2.99 book goes to 99 cents as part of a Kindle Countdown Deal. (One shortcoming is that this is US and UK only if you’ve set it up in both stores, but that’s it.) Your royalty from each sale is 70 cents. If you bought a BargainBooksy ad, an Ereader News Today ad, a Robin Reads ad, and then boosted a few FB posts, you might be out $250.

  $250 divided by $0.70 is 357.14. You need to sell 358 copies of your book before you are in the black and have a positive ROI. If you only have one book out, your entire profitability is based on how many copies you can sell of that one book above your costs.

  But if you have more books in the series, then you will get your secondary ROI, which requires a series of calculations. In Michael
Cooper’s book, he has a spreadsheet and everything you need to make the calculations, but they go something like this.

  If you have a 90% read-through (also called buy-through or pass-through rate) to book two, and 90% to book three, and so on to book ten, you can calculate how much money you will make from putting book one into someone’s hands. If you make one dollar on each of your books from two through nine, then your revenue guesstimate will look something like this based on your 99 cent book one. All values are profits.

  Ten copies of book one - $7.00

  Nine copies of book two - $9.00 (because we have a 90% read-through, which means for every ten sales of book one, we’ll have nine of book two)

  Ninety percent to book three - $8.10

  Ninety percent to book four - $7.29

  Ninety percent to book five - $6.56

  Ninety percent to book six - $5.90

  Ninety percent to book seven - $5.31

  Ninety percent to book eight - $4.78

  Ninety percent to book nine - $4.30

  Ninety percent to book ten - $3.87

  Even with 90% read-through, you lose readers with each new book for whatever reason. Once you get up toward 100%, then you have the readership hooked solid.

  If we have 90% read-through from book one and for the rest of the series, for every copy of book one that we sell, we don’t make 70 cents, we make $6.21. Keep in mind the above calculations are for ten book one copies sold. It made the math look cleaner.

  How much can you spend on book one and still make a profit? That’s right—about six dollars. What if you break even on that first book in a series with your promotion? Then it’s all gravy after that. That is the power of a backlist and a long series. If you don’t write in a series, but you have a distinctive style within the same genre, then you can still get those readers to buy your other books. Use your back matter to highlight enough of a similarity—readers of my Free Trader will love Hades 7 or The Outcast!

  Put on your production foreman, IT specialist, legal officer, and marketing guru hats for all the stuff in your book that isn’t the actual story. Give people the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter or buy your next book. The power of eBooks is that once you have your next book, you can update the last book with link. Nothing like selling the next book as soon as the reader finishes the current one.

  One word of caution for people who are wide. None of the booksellers like seeing links within your book to other booksellers’ websites. Apple will reject a book with an Amazon link and Amazon will turn a book away with a Nook link and so on. You can use a universal link that is user-directed, where a Barnes & Noble fan will always get the link to B&N.

  Sometimes booksellers don’t like the random link. They can’t tell if it’s malware or not. Just be advised that you may not be able to have active links in your book, so having something that’s easy to remember and easy to type for a reader is important. My landing page is craigmartelle.com. That’s as easy as I could make it and maintain my brand.

  Back to selling your books. Calculate your ROI correctly. With my backlist, if I can bring a single person on board who loves all my books, that is worth a minimum of $50 in profit. Money in the bank.

  Sometimes things get tricky when you drill deeper into the numbers.

  Many times, you will stack your ads along with newsletter swaps. You’ll get a great payback but won’t be able to put your finger on the payback for each individual promotion. That is known as throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s okay. It’s how most people do it, including me. I stack all my promotions, but I have an idea of what works better than others because I usually spread promotions across five days. Why five? Because Amazon lets me make a book free for five days each quarter.

  I do that and will start promotions on the second day. Just in case there’s a glitch on the first day, I can get the book to free before it starts. I’ll send my NL on the first day once free is confirmed. I’ll know what kind of response I get out of the gate because that will be the only promotion I run on the first day. Some of my Kindle Unlimited readers will pick up a book for free just to have it. They’ve already read it in KU, so in essence, I’ve already been paid for it by those good people. If not, then I hope they’ll dive into the rest of the series after reading number one.

  And that’s where your secondary ROI comes from. It is all simply ROI, but I thought it would be easiest to explain by primary and secondary.

  Margin

  From a business perspective, margin is what you make on each book. A 99 cent book is worth about 35 cents. What if you could sell that same book for $4.99? It would be around $3.49 (assuming no delivery costs, but Amazon charges you for that if you use the 70% royalty option—the more megabytes your book is, the bigger slice Amazon takes). Can you move the same number of copies at $4.99? Isn’t that the million-dollar question.

  There’s the Walmart model where you sell a bazillion of something at a low margin or the Lamborghini model where you sell very few of something but at a high margin.

  We are going to be far closer to the Walmart model, but as you are able to command higher prices, then you’ll strike a balance with a better margin and high sales. That’s where you’ll find the seven-figure authors.

  They didn’t get there overnight or through any shortcuts.

  Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) Ads

  I use AMS ads and I can’t get them to spend all of the money I put out there, but don’t be dissuaded! There are plenty of horror stories where AMS, out of the blue, spent everything that a person had put in regards to a maximum. I keep my daily total bids fairly low across a vast number of ads. They won’t max out all of them at one time. In a couple years of advertising using AMS, they have not even come close. I’m currently spending only $15/day, but am willing to spend $100 as long as the commensurate sales happen.

  I have between one and two hundred AMS ads running at any point in time. I use a combination of automatic targeting and manual targeting. For quick and easy exposure and low-cost engagement, I run automatic ads on all my books. I set the CPC at $0.25 and the daily at $3 unless it starts getting impressions and then I might crank it up to $10 or $20. AMS has never spent all my money, but they could. Be aware.

  Mastering Amazon Ads by Brian Meeks:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072SNXYMY/ for the eBook

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942810156 for the paperback.

  Facebook (FB) Ads

  Facebook will happily take your poorly allocated money. All of it. You need to do better than that. Good news! My friend Michael Cooper lives by the power of FB ads. Buy his book to learn the best way to do the foundational things. Then when you are making good money, you can test other ways.

  Help! My Facebook Ads Suck by Michael Cooper:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078NBW3M3 for the eBook

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548046590/ for the paperback

  Despite what Michael says, I do boost posts, but I have a number of target groups established. As FB restricted who they show posts to, I boost my author posts showing new releases so that the thousand people who follow me on that page will get to see my stuff! I usually boost for a week, most times for $20, but sometimes for $50. I haven’t seen the difference by spending the extra $30. I think FB is smart enough that the ones I can get for $20 are the ones who click and buy. I also make it easy for them—I use the amazon link. One click and they are on Amazon’s page, a mere hover away from a one-click buy.

  BookBub Ads

  David Gaughran’s work on the subject: https://us2.campaign-archive.com/?u=7fa8f00bfd097735355723f4f&id=a2b1384ad3

  What David tells you is that you start off targeting authors like you and then BB will run your ad based on the readers who follow those authors. Anyone with less than a thousand followers may not be a good target.

  So I went to BookBub and looked at the top twenty military science fiction authors for a new campaign I was starting. What did I find? The Mil Sci
Fi author with the greatest following had 786. Next had less than 500. Those guys! I only have 50. I hadn’t been pushing that and was missing out, big time. I’m going to do two things. First, I’m going to keep promoting readers to follow me on BookBub so when I have a new release, BB will send it to those who follow me and it looks just like a Featured Deal! How can you beat that? Sounds like free money to me. I suck because I didn’t take it seriously. But I am now. And second, I’m going to target a few of the Mil SciFi authors through a few test ads with fairly low spend to see who resonates and then I’m going to scale up my spend in hopes of scaling up the sales.

  BookBub is another service that will happily spend all your money. Take great care with your advertising budget until you have things dialed in.

  BB also has a great tutorial and blog that you can find what you need. It starts with a good graphic, an image that is 300 x 250 pixels—this is how you get people to give your book a shot. Having a number of them for testing will be helpful. Facebook ads reward pictures that don’t look like ads (i.e. images without text on them). BB, not so much. You need to put a very short pitch. BB’s blog is where you’ll find good information.

  https://insights.bookbub.com/

  Chapter 8

  Random Stuff, Other Words and Definitions

  Author Rank

  Collaborating

  Bestseller Lists

  Conventions & Professional Organizations

  Random Rants

  Author Rank

  I used to watch my author rank like a hawk. It was great to see it climb, and a bummer to see it drop. It's a general barometer of author health. 10,000 overall is better than 100,000. To me, that means you have much greater exposure, more readers who can spread the word about your work. The difference between an author rank of 10,000 and 50,000 could be two book sales and five KU borrows. If the borrowers never read it, you made money on two sales. That's it.