The Millionaire Authors You've Never Heard Of
Some self-published authors make millions of dollars per year, and you've never even heard of them.
I met a few of these author-millionaires last week in Vegas for Author Nation Conference (thanks David Kadavy for the rec), and it turns out that you can get rich from self-publishing genre fiction.
My takeaways:
- traditional-publishing is how you get famous, but self-publishing is how you get rich (for a deep dive on the book publishing sphere, see this podcast episode.)
- wealthy self-pub authors write roughly one million words a year, and many write a book every single month. I met a few authors with over 100 books.
- As with every industry, it seems like an excellent product is ~30% of success, and 70% of success is marketing.
- If you’re a new author, your best marketing is to write more books (I heard this many times.) Amazon will advertise your books if you're publishing consistently, and your readers won't forget you as quickly if they have more to read from you.
One huge drawback to the 'get rich self-pub model':
Making reliable money = fitting into your genre. I got the sense that, with this model, people buy your books not because YOU wrote them, but because they want to read any book in that genre and you marketed yours the cleanest.
The 'market your book' sessions at the conference said some version of the same thing:
ASSIMILATE
ASSIMILATE
ASSIMILATE
And within me there's a little voice yelling in a battle cry, "Never!"
I write for that voice.
So, that business model not only doesn't work for me, but it stands against me.
Soooo, wish me luck with this whole authorship journey, lol.
Favorite Quote from the conference:
"Write for yourself.
Edit for the masses.
Market for the money.
Do it unapologetically." -Willow Winters
Till next time!
-Madi
PS: Thanks for your feedback about naming this newsletter! The general consensus was to continue to keep this thing untitled. You like that it's an email from me to you, and I like that too, so we'll keep it that way for now.