Lessons from My Indie Author Crash Course

I didn’t expect to spend 2024 learning the ins and outs of self-publishing. But life comes at you fast.

Ten weeks into this new full-time second job, I’m sharing my biggest takeaways so far—including some cold, hard numbers from my free promo week and other advertising forays. I also want to talk a bit about how I define success in this brave new world.

I decided to write this post because a couple people privately contacted me to ask questions about indie publishing. In answering them I realized that the last few months have taught me so much, and that a lot of what I had to learn wasn’t intuitive or expected.

Disclaimer/caveat: there are a lot of people out there offering publishing advice and self-publishing advice—some of them know less than they claim and many of them know way more than me. I’m just sharing my experience and in no way claim to be an expert.

And let me start by saying: it hasn’t been all ups and no downs.

Going indie is a lot.

Self-publishing isn’t easy. It’s not something you just do on a whim. It’s hard work, a full-time job, probably more than one. (Book writing and book marketing are two totally different skill sets.) It can and will take up as much time as you allow it to.

All the same, I have no regrets about my choice to self-publish. Most of my emotional investment in my books, including my motivation to write more, drained away while City Owl Press held and exploited the publishing rights. Having full visibility on the backend of production and full control over my budget makes a tremendous difference in that context. It brought me back to thinking of myself as an author, not just someone who published some books one time.

With that said, I’m not here to say indie is better than trad publishing—or worse, for that matter. Indie is good for me and my books right now. But I still have my agent and I still plan to go back on submission with my next sci fi book. Ultimately, I’d like to follow a hybrid path, depending on what I like writing ever lines up with the markets. (TBD.)

The best path is the one that brings your book to its core readers. And that brings me to my biggest lesson…

Readers are EVERYTHING.

If I’ve learned anything from the whole publisher-from-hell bad breakup situation, it’s that readers are out here for AUTHORS. It doesn’t seem like many readers even think about who publishes their favorite books, much less feel a sense of loyalty to that publisher.

This makes sense. Before I started down the road toward trad publishing my own work, I didn’t think about publishers much. I knew some of the big names, like Tor, but I didn’t pick books based on those names.

But since splitting with City Owl Press, readers have shown incredible support for me and the other authors who were cut loose. And that means the world to me.

There is something magical about the indie experience in that there is no gatekeeper between the author and readers—and I have much more visibility than before on what works and what doesn’t in connecting with them.

Don’t get TOO wrapped up in the metrics.

I will be sharing numbers here because one of my enduring challenges has been understanding what normal looks like. The real answer is that “normal” numbers are going to vary WIDELY between authors, books, genres, etc. But also, authors entering the indie space may get easily disappointed by how tough it is to get your books discovered, bought, read, reviewed…

It’s normal to only sell a few books a day or week or month, is my takeaway here. There are ways to bump that up, and you can build with long-term strategies. But also, don’t give up and don’t compare yourself to people with a large backlist who have spent years building their audiences. Learn from them, of course, but remember that what may look like instant success is usually the product of sustained investments of time and money.

Self-publishing costs less than I feared (mostly).

Getting a book from finished manuscript to published product is an investment. Some of the costs were unexpected. For instance, I never had reason to know that it would make sense to buy 10 ISBNS for $295 even though I only needed 6. There is only one company that sells ISBNs in the US and they are making a killing with their government sponsored monopoly. (Yes, you can get free ones from Amazon but you can’t use those on other platforms like Ingram.)

On the other hand, I thought cover art would be a tremendous expense. In fact, because my covers were pre-made with slight changes, I spent less than $200 on each. And you can find beautiful pre-made covers available for under $100. Of course, a custom runs higher—upwards of $300, potentially worth it if you aren’t in a big rush like I was. But I’m very happy with the covers I have now, and I have gotten a ton of compliments for them.

I made a couple of one-time software purchases that were definitely worth it. Because I use a PC (Vellum is Mac-only), I bought Atticus for formatting for $147. I also spent $99 on Publisher Rocket, which enables category and keyword searches for Amazon (a must-have for demystifying the algorithm.

I will note here that because my books were previously published, I didn’t have to invest in editing—which would have been by far the most expensive part of this process. A dev edit can cost around $2,500 – $3,500 for a 90k word book at standard rates. My publisher spent a ludicrously small amount on editing as well. While any future books I self-publish books will have a bigger up-front investment, I look forward to paying my editors more fairly.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

It hasn’t been the big ticket items that have tripped me up as much as learning just how many small details went into book production. I had never had reason to know what “trim size” and “bleed” meant for printing or why it mattered how many pages my book came out to. These data points, it turns out, are essential to finalizing a print cover: page numbers determine the width of the spine, while trim size determines the height and width of the pages.

After the fact, I’ve concluded there is a best practice order of operations to this that I absolutely did not (possibly could not) follow. For one thing, the formatting should ideally be done before the covers are finalized so you can give your trim size and page numbers to your artist early, instead of at the last minute.

If I weren’t republishing, I could have uploaded everything to distribution and scheduled a release date while I got the covers ready. Instead, I was scrambling to get my books reformatted, which meant that my print books lagged after my eBook releases. The cover artist was very gracious about my late-breaking print dimensions. I’m so grateful to Artscandare for their hard work and patience with my many emails.

Bad news for people who hate the ‘Zon.

I also learned the hard way that there is no predicting Kindle Direct Publishing’s time from submission to live (first book: around 120 hours; third book: 3 hours); that you cannot make changes to a book on KDP while it is under review no matter how grievous the error (I don’t want to talk about it); and that giving your book a subtitle will prevent it from merging with prior non-subtitled editions on your author page, but removing it will forever be memorialized on your KDP dashboard. Fun times.

Finally, I learned that as much as we all love to hate Amazon, its rates for authors are the best in the business. Ingram’s royalty rates leave me with pennies. I learned this week that they don’t even pass on their full wholesale discount to indie bookstores.

This is why only my first two books are up on Ingram right now: it hardly seems worth it. I’m also slowly working on getting the print editions up on B&N, but currently more focused on Amazon because those numbers hurt my soul less.

Not all promos are created equal.

If you’re a ‘Zon hater looking for good news, I have had almost no luck with Amazon ads despite trying to follow the advice of experts. I also ran ads during my free promo and the ACOS (advertising cost of sales, or, how your spend stacks up to your earnings) became so painful I just stopped and never went back.

I only ever ran a few Facebook ads during past releases, but this time I went all out. It becomes a lot more interesting to spend time on when you can actually see the impact on the back end. I never had access to my KDP data in the past, so now I can say with some certainty that social media posts do matter for sales.

On the other hand, calling out my ex-publisher for illegal DMCA takedowns had a better ROI than anything else I did. That was free and I had fun doing it. (Maybe my true brand is legal snark. I guess that fits.)

ANYWHO. Let’s look at these ad experiments by the numbers.

Amazon ads: underwhelming ROI, arcane targeting.

Amazon’s recommended targeting keyword for my books is “books.” That should give you an idea of how user-friendly this platform is. However, having read some intense breakdowns of how to do this right, I gamely gave it a try.

I did two rounds of Sponsored Product ads and spent a total of $98. Not that much of a spend, I know, but the first round was a total bust. The second ran during my KDP select free promo, leaving my results deeply skewed. Basically, I paid Amazon to give my book away for free. I would not do this again and it did not translate to better results later. Most of my units moved during the promo were not direct results of my Amazon ads.

I have heard that these ads still increase visibility in hard-to-quantify ways, but until I understand how to use these better, I think I will stick to less mysterious methods.

KDP Select free promo days: exciting, exhausting, unexpected.

This was my big promo push, which I scheduled for the re-release week of my third book. I bought a $300 promotion stack from Written Word Media for book 1, which I had scheduled for a KDP Select free promo for five days starting February 19. The stack included five days of Reader Reach Facebook ads with Freebooksy and eReaderNewsToday placements.

At the end of the week, I was drained, exhausted, and floored by the showing of my book in its little categories. I was not expecting that.

The good:

• Cambion’s Law saw 4k downloads over the week.
• The free promo drove KU page reads as well on roughly the same curve as orders (2k for CL, almost 3k total).
• On 2/22, Cambion’s Law set a new personal record for page reads in a day—breaking 1k.
• Estimated royalties also echoed this curve (total: $47 for the week)
• I set a personal record for est. royalties in a day ($16!) on 2/21 (previously $12)
• I got some quick ratings/reviews, finally crossing the 100 rating mark on Amazon after being stuck at 97 for a long time (years?)
• Getting my first orange banners was a huge psychological/emotional lift.

The bad:

• I saw diminishing returns after day 3 (Written FB ads continued til Friday but the rest of the stack finished 2/21).
• The KU readthrough on books 2-3 didn’t appear too robust.
• Obviously, I did not make back the amount spent.
• I saw an immediate drop in sales/KU activity when promo ended.
• Before the promo started I was at 180k paid rank, and the day after the promo ended, I dropped to 228k

Takeaways:

• The biggest download day (2k+) was 2/21 (Freebooksy promo), the most bang for my buck.
• Orders for books 2 & 3 followed a similar curve on a much smaller scale so readthrough is modest but observable.
• The Written Word promo stacks are worthwhile (at least for free promo).
• If I were to do it again, I would only do a 3 day promo, not 5.
• Making your book temporarily free does drop your paid ranking – however, I did see it bounce back
• I still earned money when my book was free, and more than I expected.
• It did drive modest activity to the series as a whole, with my ranking staying under 90k through the end of February.

Questions still outstanding:

• Does this promo type have sustained impact on rankings/sales/page reads?
• How many free downloads actually convert to readers & series read-through?
• Will few smaller ad packages booked at later dates capitalize on any benefits from ranking in free? (So far, no.)
• Are Written Word stacks effective for 0.99? I may test this at a later date when my first KDP select period ends.
• How does Bargainbooksy stack up against Freebooksy? I ran a Bargainbooksy promo soon after this period and it didn’t yield much, which may be just because I ran it too soon.

Promotions a la carte

Outside the Amazon promos, I also tried a few individual placements, with disappointing results. GenrePulse is one of the cheaper placements, so I tried it several times. The first one was scheduled as an $0.99 sale in the Paranormal Romance genre, at $20 for a one day placement on February 12. (Orders 2/12-2/13: 5, with estimated royalties

During the week after my Amazon free promo, I scheduled a number of small-dollar placements to try to see if sustaining a decent ranking was, well, sustainable.

I used BargainBooksy at $45 for placement February 24, GenrePulse (Fantasy), at $20 for one day placement on February 27, eBookSoda at $29 on February 27, BookBarbarian at $40 on February 29, and a Book Butterfly promo for $90 from February 24 – March 1. That week, I sold around 31 books and sustained a decent ranking—not bad, but not spectacular.

I tried GenrePulse one more time this month ($0.99 sale price, Fantasy/Urban Fantasy), and paid $32 for a double placement with 25% coupon (March 5). Orders 3/5-3/6: 2. This will likely be the last time I invest in GenrePulse, because although they are among the cheapest email blast ads, they don’t appear to do much for sales.

KDP Countdown Deal (book 2)

To sum up, my free promo was far more successful than expected. However, for ROI purposes, if I were to make the choice over again between the KDP select free promo vs. countdown, I might pick the countdown instead. I tested the countdown with book 2, but I didn’t support it with other promo/ad buys, making it an unscientific comparison.

I ran the countdown deal on book 2 from March 1 through March 6 with one price change from $0.99 to $2.99. Price changes over the countdown week did not seem worth it to me. Most of the activity occurred when the book was $0.99. The nice thing about the countdown deal is that it allows you to make your normal 70% royalty rate, which is what you would normally make when the book is full price. If you are manually changing the price to set it below $2.99, you will only be able to receive the 35% royalty rate.

Results: I sold 12 copies of Cambion’s Blood that week, but Cambion’s Law saw some sales as well. It was a decent week by my standards, though of course not anywhere near the wild numbers of the free promo.

Interestingly, I also didn’t make as much in royalties during this countdown deal. This is likely skewed by the release effect of Cambion’s Rise, which sold enough copies during its first week to pad those numbers. On the other hand, a lot of KU reads added to my earnings during my free promo.

Conclusion: more data needed. None of this testing is scientific whatsoever, so your mileage may vary, yada yada yada.

Meta ads: a low-cost, user-friendly(ish) heavy hitter.

I have felt my best ROI on sustained ad runs come from Facebook and Instagram ads. I have “boosted” or promoted posts from my Facebook/Instagram feed as well as created images and copy specifically for ads. I generally run these at around a $3.00 budget, because that doesn’t feel like a huge loss to me. I usually make at least that back in royalties.

For my latest run of Facebook/Instagram ads I followed Kindlepreneur’s guide on everything except the budget. I included a couple different types of ad copy (book quotes that I thought would draw readers in, as well as some punchy pitches) and several different ad designs I whipped up in Canva.

I have fiddled with the budget on these when an ad set is doing well but haven’t really seen a benefit in spending more.

Future experiments: Instagram page magnets & BookBub.

One tactic that I played with a little bit last month and plan to try again in the near future is promotions for my Instagram and/or Facebook pages. It isn’t a straightforward ROI conversion, but increasing reach can be extremely helpful.

If you’ve noticed, Instagram has become increasingly bad at reaching followers lately, so I’m not convinced boosting my reach there is the best use of my money. It did, however, help me boost my follower count on Insta when I tried it the first time (right before I decided to purge non-engaging/bot accounts and lost 20%, alas).

BookBub is the other arena I want to learn to use. They offer not only the coveted featured ads which grant so many authors their orange banners, but also sponsored ads with auction-style spending budgets. Since I feel my book doesn’t have a great chance at a featured deal (KU books are supposedly disfavored), I may eventually try out some of those, especially if Meta’s ads take a nosedive.

Indie expenses by the numbers.

All told, I spent a little over $1000 ($1076) in production costs to republish my three book series. It’s a little less than $1k if I subtract the ISBNs I bought but didn’t use ($180, an investment in later books) and the 1-time investments in Atticus and Publisher’s Rocket totaling $246. Let’s call it around $300/book, give or take—not bad, but again, I didn’t have to pay for editing this time.

I’ve also spent about $900 in ads and marketing the series since the indie edition of Cambion’s Law went live on January 21. Not all of that was well-spent necessarily, but I’ve approached it as an experiment, so it’s all learning costs at this point. Overall, if I were to do it again, I might stick to an ad budget of around $500 for this 60 day period (one-time promo stack plus ongoing Meta ads).

Now, for the question you are probably asking…

Is it worth it?

Well, strictly by the numbers, I’m still pretty far in the red. I haven’t earned back production costs, let alone advertising.

Note it says I have 4 books when I actually have three. I mentioned above that I experimented with adding a subtitle to my first book. My KDP stats will ever bear the mark of that lesson, as it reflects two separate versions of Cambion’s Law.

At this point, indie publishing seems like an expensive hobby. On the other hand, while published with City Owl, I earned a lifetime total of around $690, which doesn’t take into account the marketing investments I made during that time.

I’ve also already earned more in royalties in 60 days this year than I received during the entirety of 2023. So…the jury is still out on this one. If I continue to see similar earnings as the year goes on, I might actually break even.

Success is for me to define, and redefine.

In short, this business isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a long haul, not a quick shortcut. It’s certainly no get rich quick scheme, and I’m still not quitting my day job, which makes all the investments I mentioned above possible.

But for me, success is doing better than I did before. It’s having agency in my creative work and making decisions with all the relevant information to hand.

More than anything, success for me makes writing for publication feel worth it again. And now, three months into my indie adventure, I’ve felt inspired enough to start drafting something new. It’s slow going. I’m rusty and struggling to find time in my busy schedule. But it feels good to get a little bit of my creative groove back.

I wrote words today. I sold a book today. I’ve made more in royalties this year so far than I did all of last year. And thousands of people put Cambion’s Law on their Kindle.

Today, that’s good enough for me.