How Impatient Writerpreneurs Earn Income Faster Despite Expert Advice
A late entry into an upcoming book. Passionate defense of common-sense writing and publishing. FWIW.
I.
There’s a lot of untested and simply bad advice on book marketing floating around out there. Some are false on its face. Other approaches will take you years to test and disprove - mainly because there is a bubble of believers who have been taken in, who are repeating that data everywhere, and attack any critics because they cannot admit they are wrong. Meanwhile, the years roll by without viable or sustaining income.
I set out to prove or disprove the tiny few elements of book marketing that I knew were true. Because they weren’t giving me an approach that could leverage my time and money into vastly improved sales.
And right out the outset - I’ve been supporting myself for over a decade based on a handful of very successful non-fiction books, chiefly the paperback formats, despite never taking any ad out to promote them. Unconventional success. Sustainable income arrived within the first four years of my first published book. But, yes, I made my first dollar within weeks of self-publishing my first series of books. And yet, I wanted to expand my income to new heights. So I dug into this research with a critical eye for application.
The attitude behind this research was also that I could be wrong - that I was simply holding myself back because of fixed ideas or bad advice I’d swallowed long ago. The old phrase, “I’m from Missouri, so you’re going to have to show me,” came to mind.
A Study of Outliers
This line of research was built out from exceptional cases such as those. And we’ve seen those few who are reportedly earning an outrageously large income seemingly overnight. Yet a thorough study of top selling fiction authors and their back history showed it was only after their fifth “damn good book” in a series was where they actually started earning the “big bucks”. Before that, they spent years learning their actual writing craft. But these, again, weren't marketing from the outset.
Then again, some marketers caught the writing bug and began producing a line of works (often non-fiction, where the craft of engaging a reader isn’t so required). Those books “suddenly” became top selling books, and their series continued to be successful for years. In their case, they spent years perfecting their craft of marketing before they were able to then write and market a book into a top-selling spot.
In both cases, it was the study of one or the other craft, and building a series of books in a particular category or genre where their income became dependably livable.
And yet, it was after a certain point that their income spiked and stayed high. How and why these few outstanding writers and marketers succeeded so quickly became the driving question. Everyone likes more income faster.
I picked up to study the material I had laying around which took up “Content Marketing”. In this case the studies said that where content producers effectively marketed their work, it was about 18 months to generate enough income for a single person to live on. The premise was that you could build a business from just producing content. The approach was a simple one.
These Content Marketing books laid out a model that seemed much faster than the typical entrepreneur or author marketing how-to books. Still, I was wondering what in their advice made earning income from their content take so long. Their “time to first dollar” was several months. As an author, I’d earned my first royalties in weeks. I was impatient only because I’d already been there, done that and faster. Just not to the volume I still wanted.
Again, these books and their authors had substantial followings. Floods of testimonials offered as proof. Was there anything I’d missed?
In Search of What Works
I’m always in search of what works. Using a very pragmatic approach. What works should always work, for every application - if the facts are straight and applied correctly. My research habit is to boil down and discover what made things actually work – the principles, patterns, systems which underlie all this. And too frequently, I found flaws that made the best advice fail.
When I started out writing and publishing, there were no texts in this writer-entrepreneur area that were specifically designed for Internet ebook authors. And when I’d first found this book years ago (which shall remain unnamed) I thought it very sensible. Because it said things like – write what you’re interested in, and knowledgeable about, and narrow down to an area you could develop an audience in with very little competition. Then monetize that audience and later diversify into additional product lines. All these were the very settled steps every entrepreneur takes. Here, this was being accomplished with sheer content. Was this an improvement on the steps an author takes?
There was a simple observation I’d made years ago, that the two types of large successes in the book publishing arena were:
1) Marketers who learned how to write, or
2) Writers who learned how to market.
Obviously, “marketing” is shorthand for “entrepreneuring”. When entrepreneurs who already know marketing then add the craft of writing and publishing to their skillset, they add an additional income stream. Conversely, as a successful author, was it the craft of the entrepreneur I should study to raise my income to the heights I wanted?
Was there something in this Content Marketing material that would help me as an author master marketing/entrepreneuring?
II.
Testing Social Media for Audience Building
In the later works, the Content Marketing model now recommended extensive use of social media to keep in touch with my buying audience. And that you would actually build a large audience from social media by following patterns that go something like this:
get onto social media and churn out a bunch of short epigrams of 280 characters or so,
get audience response, then that will tell you how your concept tests out according to readers.
You next test your concept by producing a longer piece (meaning a “thread” of about 500 words) which can then cross-check your idea for what your “audience” was interacting with.
As you refine your content more closely to what that audience says it wants, then you’ll attract more audience. (Sure, that’s shorthanded a bit. For my use I was testing the social media of Twitter-X and LinkedIn, since these were nominally text-based and would suit a writer.)
So I started an experiment to test this new advice. I’d shunned social media for years, as Tim Grahl long ago found out it didn’t sell books. And memes with cat pictures certainly didn’t help me write my books. However, I saw the possibility that by building a body of work with my short posts, I’d soon have a book-length set of material by writing daily. This aligned to the blog-to-book process, something that has always been successful for myself and others.
I’d already started reviewing what I’d earlier published about writing-publishing to extract the evergreen principles and update those books. This then gave me tons of content to post as threads. I next started putting these up as threads once I updated them. And also posted threads of research results as I went. Keeping track of everything, I intended to later collect and edit these threads into a book. That was the book I could then promote and sell with confidence. Because it had been “pre-viewed” by interested readers.
Yes, it’s convoluted. Very involved logistically. These content marketing texts did advocate repurposing older content. So I was encouraged to just keep going.
All I was doing was taking the long view that I could produce enough content to publish a 200-page salable paperback every few months. After all, Stephen King wrote 2,000 words a day, which is what I was setting out to do. While this was much less than my usual output, I was able to write these short works more precisely, editing them into that length and keeping them pithy and easily digestible.
Missing Audience Feedback
The trick was in getting that feedback. Social media algorithms favor only certain “correct think” conversations. And only really share the most popular ideas – such as making lots of money fast (Get Rich Quick). Meaning: only a few people would see your posts if they weren’t popular right out of the gate. Some call this being “shadow-banned.” And people can’t engage with what they never see. That then shoots the theory of popular “votes” in likes and retweets to validate content.
My content was all about improving your writing and subsequently building an additional income stream. Not some highly entertaining material - just pragmatic common sense. And despite my prolific posting, I got no real traction in six months.
This explained why my threads got little real feedback. My own comments on other’s work got more recognition. But those were short comments, not collatable essays.
So I started comparing how I’d built my earlier success in writing and publishing.
My earlier approach that worked was:
Find out who’s interested in what you are interested in writing.
Write what you’re interested in for those people in a format they like to buy.
Publish your writing so it winds up in front of their searches.
Direct deposit that income from what sells - and smile.
Then follow that content up with more of the same.
The feedback was in terms of sales. They brought income or they didn’t. They sold a lot or just a few.
After six months of this experiment, I’d gotten just 50 more followers and 0 (zero) subscribers. And no valuable feedback about my content.
I was discouraged. According to the model, I should have even made income by now. What about this wasn’t working as described?
An Early Test in Writing Prolific Fiction
So I cast the research net wider to look for earlier comparable studies. I’d just come off a several-year test not long before this - where I’d written and published a short story fiction ebook every week for three years, plus regular collections of these into longer works. Where they didn’t sell well, they sold – mostly. All without ads.
And I could trade ebook giveaways for subscribers and added some 4500 to my list during that time.
Technically, these books were a success. Meanwhile, my earlier non-fiction writing supported that fiction test. These books sold year after year with no ads or marketing attention.
It was those same non-fiction book sales which now supported this new experiment. The point of these tests and experiments was to earn even more income, to expand my business. It was obvious I needed to write more books of that quality. So was this social media approach a way to do that? It didn’t seem to be. Was I missing something?
Another Approach - Paid Newsletters
I was still researching in my spare moments as I carried on with this current social media experiment. And then one day during this, I did a side-test on Substack. The result was that I got both free and paid subscribers in a couple of weeks.
Yes, both subscribers and income within days of posting. This was what I was looking for all this time.
So I shut down the social media test and all the extra services I was paying to post my content there. I moved all my earlier content to Substack.
After I settled into this new platform somewhat, I got curious enough to go back and review that social media model I’d been following. That lack of results suggested the content marketing model evidently had a fatal flaw. And while it said to keep your day job meanwhile - that was going to be a long “meanwhile”.
Now we had the outliers of both Substack and my publishing records of what worked and didn’t. There was a right way of earning income quickly from content while you build your business. It didn’t have to take years to earn income.
Why did these models work where content marketing didn’t?
III.
How Authors Have a Faster Route to Income
Authors have it much easier than some content marketers - and find it faster to increase both income and subscribers. They read what they love and teach themselves to write those types of books. There are already other authors out there producing and selling books in those genres. The audience is already there in the book distributor’s site, already selected by interests. And they buy.
This is because you’re posting to an existing marketplace. Marketplaces, by definition, exchange money for products. The only drawback is getting subscribers to your own list. Book distributors don’t share their buyer’s email addresses. To get around that takes promotion, at least through newsletter swaps and book giveaways. But while such marketing costs you little, it does take work.
These texts on the content marketing model were a fail. You saw a model that was derived from how others made their big sales and earned their outrageous income. But in my limited test, it turned out to be more hype than actionable strategy. Neither the first nor the new edition had any real how-to set of steps beyond a diagram. They were always about describing a model, not a recipe.
(As a sidebar, the content marketing model as outlined did work on one platform – YouTube. But that model shares ad revenue, true social media platforms don’t. To that degree YouTube is a marketplace – for videos. Earned attention got rewards.)
The fastest way to earn income from content is to post it in an existing marketplace. That recent test simply points to the fact that the social media platforms aren’t marketplaces. Those content marketers must spend years in building a marketplace for themselves and pitching that marketplace to potential buyers they could find.
Promoting on social media just slowed down the process.
Social Media and Walled Gardens
Social media these days doesn’t send much traffic (if any) to external links. Some authors run ads there to get traffic. Running ads apparently bypasses their algorithms. One popular strategy has been running Facebook ads for free or low-cost books as loss-leaders. That effort grows and expands an audience despite the social media interaction, not because of it. Your book sales on the book distributors then pay for your building audience. So you’re running some ads for your books, and some ads to get subscribers. This actual use is backward from the accepted content marketing model.
This review you’re reading started as a spin-off from a long research paper into how to market books. As part of that, I found a study which surveyed over 1300 authors about how they promoted their books, sorted by income range. And that opened doors.
These authors found social media promotion was ineffective at all income levels. This then confirmed what Tim Grahl found out years ago - social media doesn’t sell books.
The common approach shared by social media and big tech is being walled gardens. They sell ad-views. So they don’t want their users’ eye-balls going anywhere else. Because of their corporate greed and jealousy. (Cory Doctorow has covered this.) Amazon, Google, and all the Big Tech social media share those perverse motivations. Those corporations are there solely to make more dividends for their shareholders, not help content marketers with their own income.
And, as above, social media doesn’t quickly build an audience - except what that social platform wants to build: the audience which gives them the most ad views.
Lessons Learned: Evolving a Workable Approach
What kept me going to unravel this is that pragmatic realization that I’d already successfully made a living from a handful of books that kept selling. For decades.
I was newly testing social media because of the hype of these content marketing books and their evangelists. The idea was to build a bigger audience. And so expand my income. It was a big fail.
And yet, this gives lessons.
Now we know: Immediately successful writer-entrepreneurs are posting to existing marketplaces. Long-suffering content marketers are trying to use popular sites for earning income which aren’t designed for that. These marketers are required to build their own marketplaces from scratch. And so the walled gardens were pushing back against them – and why that model said 18 months to a livable income. Content marketers were having to reinvent ecommerce wheels for themselves.
Here’s what I narrowed down, a simple outline based on my experience and hard-won successes. You can apply this starting right now.
1. Read and write a lot. Concentrate on short stories (as ebooks) to begin with, and collect these into larger works. Master your craft by dissecting top-selling authors in the genres you love to read. Focus on one thing: routinely writing damn good books as a professional.
2. Get your books published widely. Use one aggregator. That keeps your publishing simple and avoids the trap of publishing anywhere exclusively. Write in series with repeating main characters, and follow-ups to non-fiction books.
3. Get your newsletter into a recommendation engine such as Substack, and do newsletter swaps regularly with other authors. These will build your subscribers.
4. Start routinely promoting your series to groups of avid readers (promo sites, Bookbub, newsletter swaps, newsletter recommendations, guest posts/interviews) Boost your subscriptions to gain beta readers, reviewers, and pre-release buyers.
5. Amplify your income by publishing in all formats of books and also courses.
6. Later, diversify to other genres, again in series, and with promotion.
7. Eventually, expand your audience through online ads on Facebook and Amazon ads, Bookbub deals. Bring these new subscribers to your courses. Rinse/repeat.
The ideal of a writer-entrepreneur is to build income streams by establishing a backbench of books in all possible formats (including courses) and then later diversify into related genres and repeat this.
You write and publish for existing marketplaces, with their blessing.
You build an audience through quality writing, but also encourage them to subscribe to your own list meanwhile. That’s where you build relationships and trust.
You follow up this writing with smart marketing and promotion to attract more audience, sell and deliver to that audience, and so build a regular business that will continue to expand.
That’s how writers and marketers succeed fastest – when they learn both their writing craft and entrepreneur craft.
And so this upcoming WriterpreneurOS book - to help you do just that.