The secret to making a living as a self-published author

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This article is not meant to bum you out. However, there is no doubt that when you first read this article it’s going to feel overwhelming and daunting.

That is not my intention. It is simply a byproduct of telling you the truth…and the truth is that it’s a lot of work to become a success. Even “overnight successes” worked incredibly hard to get to the top, and work even harder to stay at the top.

No, bumming you out is not my goal.

My goal for this article is to give you a blueprint, just like an architect hands a foreman the blueprint for a house. The foreman already has all the tool to build the house, but they don’t have the blueprint to know how to make to specification. I believe you have the tools and the knowledge. I’m just giving you the blueprint. Anybody, and I mean anybody, that works hard enough can make it as a self-published author. I truly believe that. However, the keys to the castle have been guarded for a long time.

Too long.

It has led self-published authors to give up or abandon their dreams because they didn’t think they were good enough. But the truth is that one point in every successful self-published author’s career somebody shared a tip with them that changed everything and set them on the path to success. That is my goal with this article. To give you the keys to the castle so you can unlock every piece of potential you already have. That being said. This will be harder than you ever thought possible, and you will have to suffer greatly to get there. However, you will come out the other side a warrior, forged in fire, and made of steel.

Plan to write 15-20 books

The most important thing that self-published authors have is a backlist of 15-20 books. This is because most self-published authors make the bulk of their money on their backlist.

The backlist are the books which are not being released right now (those are frontlist books), but that they have released in the past. I’m going to give you the secret to writing faster toward the end of this article, but first I want to talk about why the backlist is so important.

It all comes down to the cost of a book.

The average cost of a book is between $.99 and $4.99 on Kindle. I’m going to take the average book cost as $2.99, because historically this has been the price point that most self-published authors use when it comes to books and the one that offered the best revenue potential. If you only have one book out, the most you can ever make on a potential reader is $2.99, right? However, if you have a series of books, let’s say 5 books, then the most you can make on a person is $14.95, which is five times more than $2.99. This is not hard math, but it is math.

Now, your distributor (Amazon, Apple, Nook, Kobo, Google Play, etc) will take 30% of those funds, leaving you with only 70% left. Meaning that if you have that 5 books set, you will only see $10.46 of that money, and on a $2.99 book you will only ever see $2.09. For the sake of cleanness, I’m going to use round numbers, so we’ll say that a 5-book set will return you $10, and a single book will return you $2.

I’m sure you can already see where I am going with this, but by having a five-book series will mean that your potential revenue is five times greater than for having a single book. And if you have 20 books, then your potential revenue is 20 times more than having a single book, meaning that you can make a potential $40 on one customer, where you could only make $2 before. It is hugely important to understand this concept because it is why self-published authors can create $.99 or free specials for their books. They are relying on something called sell-through to make money.

Why is sell-through important to a self-published author?

Sell through is the percentage of people who will finish one book and then continue to buy other books in the series. Numbers vary, but a standard sell-through percentage looks like this:

50% of people who buy book one will buy book 2.

75% of people who buy book 2 will buy book 3.

90% of people who buy book 3 will buy book 4.

95% of people who buy book 4 will continue with the series to its conclusion.

A little simpler a five book sell through would look like this:

100%>50%>75%>90%>95%

That means if 100% of your buyers bought book one, then 50% of those people will buy book 2, and so on. The number of total buyers drops off after each book, which means that you need to have a lot of people buying book one so that enough people read through the rest of your collection to make a decent profit. Let’s take a real-life example and say that 1,000 people buy your first book. Using the metrics above, your sell-through readership would look like this.

1000>500>375>337>320

That means that if you have 1000 people buy your first book, you should see 320 people buy your fifth book. How much money would that net you? Well, let’s say those books are all $2.99 and you make $2 after fees. What do those revenue numbers look like?

$2000>$1000>$750>$674>$640=$5064

Using the projected sell-through above, you would make a total of $5064 if you had 1,000 people buy your first book. Looking at those numbers, it’s easy to see how sell-through can add a massive amount of money to your sales every month.

Now I know what you are thinking. That’s great, but I can’t get 10 people to buy my books, let alone 1000. Well, this is where marketing comes in, and why people often offer discount or free books to people through Facebook ads and other mailing list services like Bookbub.

Advertising doesn’t usually turn a profit when you only have one book, or even three because you don’t have the ability to utilize sell-through on your books to make promotions powerful…yet. However, once you have 3-5 books in a series, then you can start running ads to the first book in your series and stop losing money on your ads. This is because cutting the price of your first in series to $.99 still allows you to generate revenue from the rest of the books in the series. Even if you cut that $2000 to $0 and offer the first book for free, you would still make over $3000 on books 2-5 alone. Sell through is the most important metric you have when determining your marketing budget. If you know this number it’s easy to scale up your marketing spend. Without it, you are shooting in the dark.

How to test your sell-through