Cracking the Cashflow Code: Writerpreneurs
A mystery of starvation because of slow decline of profits. An introduction of a 9-part investigation into a book marketing whodunit.
Investigating the Mystery of Low Income Authors
It's easier than ever to write and publish your books to the world.
It's also harder than ever to make a living at it.
This text is here to help you connect the dots and maneuver successfully through the minefield of “conventional wisdom” and “advice” that keeps authors struggling to make ends meet.
(Spoiler Alert: by the end of this study, the villain is defeated, the mystery solved, and the writer-hero has a new approach that's been proved to work...)
While writers no longer starve in garrets, slaving away at the Next Great American Novel – it's because they have a day job or other support methods that keep up their house payments and put food on their tables, clothes on their backs. And retirement plans plus government support keeps them eking out a living after that.
Authors do get better at their craft as they keep writing and publishing, but they've have been sold a bill of goods on how to turn that writing into a livable income, much less a luxury lifestyle from book sales alone.
Writers get a certain amount of joy from writing. It's in their blood and keeps them going. They should be rewarded when their output matches what their audience wants most.
This short text, with its set of videos and course, show the result of a lifetime of researching - throwing away 97% of what we've been told works after testing to find out what actually does.
And it's probably not what you think. Because the veneer and polish on top of this gorgeous furniture called “Make Your Living as a Writer” is glossy, thick, and tough – and while the wood below is worm-riddled and rickety.
A Simple Review Turned Mystery Investigation
Nothing obvious made any sense.
It all started out simply updating a series of books I'd written years earlier – about writing, publishing, and marketing. I thought it would be fairly simple. It was simply a review of my last nearly two decades of working as a writer, how I'd somehow squeezed out a living from what I could publish. In those 18 years of book production, I'd written, edited, and released 22 books on publishing. All from researching widely, evaluating thoroughly, and testing painfully – so I could blaze a trail for others to find what actually works.
While some of these books sold evenly, most didn't. I've had a few flash bestsellers in my time. All while a handful of these works keep selling like clockwork every month. Enough to pay my personal bills. But all that time I've also kept a part-time job maintaining a working farm and making it sustainable in the process.
This is, as I found, a fairly normal scene for a writer and author. In short – I've been there, done that. And lived to tell the tale.
I never expected it to take a year to complete what seemed to be a simple revision project. Those 22 textbooks needed to be brought up to date. The details of publishing had changed and evolved. Yet I wasn't looking to just tell more about algorithms and search keywords. I was looking to see what core ideas I'd missed in my studies – which is harder than just cleaning up what I'd already found and reported about.
Originally, I thought these non-fiction books only needed weeding, like a garden. When I got into them, I found some had only a few timeworn principles or basic patterns. Some had no real basis other than recording what was being passed around as “best practices” in those years.
As the same time, I'd just finished three years of a test of fiction writing and publishing. And I was starting what turned out to be six months of intensive social media marketing.
At the end of those months, I'd hit a wall. And a choice. I'd found that almost nothing about social media was profitable – at all. Unless you owned the platform.
A Wooden Door Closes, and an Iron Door Opens
What I did find was a platform called Substack, which enabled readers to reward people for quality writing. And that was a welcome breath of relief.
This was a new way for a writer to earn income. It promised great things. But what about all those books I'd written? Why were so many people having a hard time trying to make a living writing.
Next I found, on Substack, where one author was interviewing another, and the similarities between them and I were too striking. We had each bought into the churn-and-burn mentality of how to “make a success on Amazon”. We were each also, burned out from massive amount of writing and marketing. So the publishing scene took a pause for us. AI had come out and now people were planning to upload as many “generated” books that they could to Amazon. Stories of people at conferences stating that they planned to upload a hundred books this next year. (Amazon had to limit uploads to “only” three a day.)
All for pennies a book in royalties.
The One Question Unanswered
What kept coming back to me was the question:
How does this enable me to market books that sold better?
Those answers came slow. Three years of writing fiction showed that there was no such thing as organic discovery – at least not on Amazon or the major book distributors. There were only ads and algorithms that got a book “discovered”. Publishing on Amazon meant keeping up with the code and policy decisions. It meant nothing about writing a really good book that readers enthusiastically shared with their friends and even strangers.
Social media was now shut down. The bulk of the people attending there did not post. And those users did not share when they could. Meanwhile, several of these platforms simply declared that they wouldn't forward any post that contained an exterior link. They sent no traffic anywhere.
All the data and books about publishing “best practices” were worthless. That left me literally starting over.
What made a great book, a great story – that never changed. So the search went away from writing into publishing. But publishing really was simplified once the aggregators came in several years ago. Almost any type or form of text file could be turned into an ebook, and that ebook turned into a Print On Demand paperback.
All that was left was Marketing. So the question became:
How does this [data I'm studying] help me market my books?
Then the arbitraries started really raring their heads. Social media turned out to be less than worthless for marketing. Amazon had extra fees and taxes in the form of advertising on your own book sales page. And meanwhile Amazon was posting all sorts of ads for anything but books there as well.
Marketing no longer worked. Advertising was polluted.
We'll cover later how writers are disconnected from the readers – not even allowed to talk with them on forums. Yet they are supposed to “build audience” by some sort of mystic telepathy that is found in Amazon ads – or through the non-interested lurkers on social media.
As I said – hit a wall.
...And Then the Murders Began
So this research became some sort of investigative murder-mystery to solve. Deciding on that model was when things began to sort out.
I had villains – monopolist Big Tech companies, I had victims – starving writers. Laws had been broken in fact – or rewritten to absolve the crime. Yet there were no police around to restore order. Those monopolies in fact controlled the near-entirety of booksales. They set the prices and favored certain classes of sellers. Writers were at the bottom end of the scale. Readers were close by – but unable to be talked to. Bestsellers became more and more impossible for the bulk of writers to achieve, and even established authors were having a harder time.
That's where this book began in earnest. Over a year after I started sleuthing out answers.
There's an old phrase that comes to mind: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
For all this innovation and sales over the last decade and a half, the percentages of authors who have made a stellar success of writing and publishing hasn't really improved. It's seemingly become harder than ever to break into the ranks of the published authors who make a consistent livable income from their writings.
However, writers and business always finds a better way to match demand with supply. Because of their creative imagination.
And so begins the rise of the Writerpreneur…
Continue reading here: