There are so many posts these days about the market being flooded and how hard it is for newbies, I wanted to tell the story of my first year and to hopefully give some encouragement and easy to follow steps of what I think you need to do in order to kick start a new pen name these days.
So first a little background...
I wrote 7 terrible books and released them all under pen names. I did this because I knew I needed to learn...
1. How to write a book
2. How self-publishing works
3. I needed feedback from readers
I got all this in spades and decided that I was ready to write and release under my own name and make a proper go of it. I released three books between January and June (I wrote ahead and saved some up). I had a VERY good year, particularly for a new author with no following.
There are a few things that I think contributed to my good start, and a few things I screwed up that stalled things for a while, but I think I have a good handle on what someone needs to do to get off to a good start in 2019.
Now obviously there are many factors involved here and I’m not saying I’m some guru of how to write and sell books. I simply want to offer up some advice of what I think works in the hope it helps others. I learnt a huge amount from the other place and feel like I want to pay it back somewhat. This is a condensed and simplified version, but I’m happy to answer questions if people have them. Please be aware this advice is only based on Amazon exclusively.
So here we go!
First, the basics...
1. Pick a genre you know well and love.
2. Write a series of three books under a pen name and release them.
3. Learn from the writing, learn from the publishing, learn from the reviews.
Once you’ve done that, you’re probably ready to start doing this for real.
So here’s what I think works...
1. Write a book that meets genre expectations
2. Find 4-5 authors who write incredibly similar books to yours and are selling really well. Ideally these won’t be big established stars but mid-listers or people on the rise. They need to have quite a few books or be releasing quickly as well.
3. Run some low daily cost AMS ads using these authors names and any auto-suggestions around them from Amazon.
4. Pick a release schedule you can maintain and stick to it. 4 a year ideally.
5. Stick rigidly to your genre until you’re killing it.
What this does is ties your books early on to those 4-5 authors. Amazon’s engine spots that people buying those books are buying yours and shows your book to more people like that. If they then buy it, Amazon will show your book to note people like that and so on.
Because of the automated selling machine Amazon have created, the main thing you need to do is teach it what type of product you have and who they should be selling it to. Once you’ve done that, they’ll start selling it for you.
I spent quite a while identifying the perfect authors to target at the beginning and have ridden that wave since. You can do it too.