We have poured our heart and soul into writing a novel. That first one may have taken us from two to twenty years. We climb the mountains of effort to get it published and then launch it and it disappears with barely a ripple into the huge sea of books. It is hard to even know how many new titles are being published every year but it is growing exponentially due to the ease of self-publishing. This article estimates 1.4 million new self-published titles last year.
When my second non-fiction title was published by a good-sized traditional publisher (InterVarsity Press, Telling the Gospel Through Story) in 2012, they sent me an article to help me manage my expectations. 10 Awful Truths about Publishing was first written in 2010 when there were a mere 282,500 new titles published (Bowker issued the ISBNs). In 2021, new titles were approximately 3 million! It is hard to get average sales figures but the article above says that even most traditionally published books in big publishers don’t sell many above 1000 copies/year and many books don’t sell more than 1000 copies over their lifetime.
The importance of Book 4 in a series
For both my series, it has been Book 4 that has made a difference. It simply seems to take that long for a series to catch on and be noticed. With my first contemporary series it took four books until all the costs I’d put into self-publishing were recouped. From Book 5, there began to be some profit.
I have just published Book 4 in my second series. I was warned that switching genres was like starting again and it has been. In fact, Biblical-era fiction has a bit of a PR problem and so my second series has found it even harder to get online sales. There were a few months when I had three sales/book/month on Amazon and only an occasional sale elsewhere. It was mighty discouraging. Reviews have also been far slower to come and are becoming harder to get compared with five years ago. Again patience has been needed and I have pushed on to write the next in the series.
Patience in marketing
BookBub is the king in terms of marketing but the reality is that you only have one time when your book is new to having a featured deal (both at 99c and one free). The first time you have a BookBub deal will see the greatest downloads. Of course, I continue to promote my first in series there but with diminishing returns.
So I am exercising patience (and it is really hard) and waiting until I have at least five books in my series until I try putting the first book on at 99c. The more books you have in a series, the better that first promotion will be. So at the moment, I am only promoting my first series and waiting one more year until I have five books in the second series.
My first book didn’t show significant sales and reviews until I did my first BookBub featured deal. I didn’t have my first deal until I’d released five books. Although, checking my records I was struggling to be patient for I applied twice when I only had four books published. Thankfully I didn’t succeed in getting a deal at that point. Again I started slowly with a 99c sale in non-US markets, then later 99c in the US and international markets. It wasn’t until my fourth deal that I promoted the book at the 0.00 price point.
My six-book series was complete for over a year before I finally (and very reluctantly) put the first book in the series to free. In terms of ratings that has been a wonderful move because I have gone from about 200 ratings to 1400+ in two years. Another advantage is that I don’t have to keep changing my prices over multiple channels.
Writing the right kind of series
I have mentioned writing series several times. This is particularly important for the self-published author. I made a mistake with my first series in that you need to read the six books in order. This means that I can only market Book 1 in the series. This has an impact on my marketing.
By the time I completed that first series, I’d worked out that subsequent series needed to be linked by either setting or theme. I chose theme for Light of Nations. Each book looks at one people group who interacted with the Israelites during Old Testament times. So already we have Amorites, Egyptians, Hivites, and Midianites, and I’m writing the Moabites story.
Here is another article when considering writing in series.
And one with some other points of view.
Thank you for sharing your journey. It helps.
On a note you might find interesting, I read Grace in Strange Disguise first (found it at Koorong long before I got to know you). I couldn’t bring myself to read book 2 (maybe one day), so I went to book 5, then book 3, then book 6, and #4 is somewhat patiently waiting on my TBR pile. So I certainly haven’t read them in order! 😂
Book 2 is the reason that I wrote the series. It is my favourite of them all. Somehow we have to rewire our brain to think of things from how God sees them and not how we see them.
Hi Christine, I agree, patience is so hard in many aspects of our writing journey. In many ways I’m glad I was traditionally published before indie publishing became a viable option. I learned why traditional publishing can feel slow—there are business reasons for this—and I didn’t have to deal with the temptation to indie publish too soon.
In 2007 I was a finalist in a few unpublished writing contests but my debut book wasn’t contracted until September 2012 and it released in February 2014. My first 3 releases are out of print and I need to do more work on them (especially books #2 and #3) before I rerelease them.
I needed those 5 years (2007-2012) to learn more about writing craft and to understand how to write a marketable book to a specific target audience. God’s timing is always the best timing, and it usually requires patience to wait on His timing.
Yes, I’m glad I had the two traditionally published books first. I learned a lot through that process and it gives me a comparison point.