According to Roy, if you want to make money self-publishing you need to start “writing to market”. Well, unless you’re already a super successful author…then you do you.
But for the rest of us regular folks who don’t have people lining up to buy our next release, we want to start making money now.
“If you’re struggling and you haven’t been making money,” Lewis says, “you have to learn to write to market, okay? And you have to understand which tropes and which niche you need to go after. So I’m gonna give you the advice right here. This is million dollar advice.
If I get on a coaching call with someone and I look at their book and it’s a historical Christian romance, okay, and I go look in that main category and I see that the top book in that category is ranked one thousand?”
“Well, a book that’s ranked one thousand that’s selling for $3.99? The most that book’s gonna make is, let’s say a hundred bucks a day. That’s an average, all right? But I would say that’s a good average. It might be as low as thirty to forty dollars a day.
Hard to know for sure, there’s a lot of circumstances. Whether they got audiobooks, paperback, all that. But the bottom line is that that book’s not making a lot of money. So let me put this in terms that everybody can understand.”
“If you wanna be making ten thousand dollars a month profit,” He continues, “and you’re launching books where the best you could do is rank one thousandth? On Amazon? And maybe make a hundred bucks a day, best case scenario?
You’re not gonna be able to quit your job. Right? But if we go and we look at the Clean & Wholesome category, for example, which is the overall Christian category, and I see the top five books in that category are Christian romances, then you need to focus on writing the tropes, themes, and circumstances that those books are writing.”
So let’s say we’re looking at a list of books. If you can breach the top 500, your royalties will go way up. That’s the key when publishing an eBook.
Depending on your ranking, you could be looking at $200-$500 per day. Don’t forget, though, that you’ll probably need to spend money on ads to get to that point. Another thing to remember is that the riches are in the stitches. Find your corner of the market and get good at it.
When choosing your niche, Roy suggests picking your genre and then add the factors that are selling well to it. He says to avoid getting too specific, however, because then your market might become too limited.
Amazon owns 83% of the eBook market, so the answers to what’s working are right out in the open. Take a look at Amazon, see what’s selling, and go from there. And hey, once you become a bestseller, then go ahead and write whatever you want!
