 Trying to make it as an author is hard. Bloody hard! But what do I mean by making it as an author? In my head, it means earning more from selling your books than marketing them. Sure, there’s loads of costs involved in getting your books out there in the first place, but these are fixed costs. Once you’ve published your book, what you’ve spent on editing and cover design never changes. I make no secret of the fact that I’ve spent thousands of pounds getting by books publishing ready. The biggest chunk of that cost has gone to editors: circa £1500-£2000 a book, plus what I spent on editors who did a sub-standard job—whose work had to be re-done. I also spent a lot on a cover designer who produced a load of covers that I have since replaced—they just weren’t good enough. My latest designer is far cheaper and far better. I’ve spent lots of money and wasted a big chunk of it. And now I have 6 books ready to release this year. If you want to know how I ended up with 6 books written before I published any of them, I wrote a blog post about it here. Two of them are now out, and I’ve already spent more on marketing them than they’ve earned back in profits from sales and pages read on Kindle Unlimited. Curious about my stats? I’m happy to share. First, here’s my sales figures:  £112.41 earned so far. Path to Power was out on 20th February, Masters of Magic was out on 3rd April. Clash of Crowns is not out until 15th May – so the £1.67 is a pre-order figure. Where have these sales come from? The spike on 20th Feb was mostly down to pre-orders. I’d collected 9 of them by release date. A few others around that date will be from people who might have pre-ordered, except that they wanted a paperback, and pre-orders only work for ebooks. But who were these people? I don’t know for sure, but I’d suggest they’re a mix of people who I’ve engaged with on Twitter, newsletter subscribers, with a few friends in the mix too. But as you can see, sales faded to almost zero until 25th March. A few of my Twitter posts had a lot of hits around that date—there could be a correlation. But I’m actually unsure exactly where they came from, TBH. I know I got 6-9 sales in late March because I attended a Royal Engineers Army Reserves conference, went to a function in the evening, had a few drinks, and managed to persuade quite a few people to buy my book on the spot—they got their phones out an ordered then and there! When you’re at a Sapper conference and you say, “I wrote a book where I send a Sapper to a magical planet!” It seems to get a bit of traction. (Sapper is a term used to describe someone in the Royal Engineers, if you’re wondering). What about ads? As for ads – I kicked off my Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) on 6th April and have sold 6 copies of Path to Power and one copy of Masters of Magic since. I’d suggest the sequel sale is probably from someone who bought Path to Power earlier. So if we attribute all the Path to Power sales to my ads, that gives £10.05 in royalties, plus another £1.75 in pages read in Kindle Unlimited. A total of £11.80. How much have I spent on ads since then? At the time of writing, £88.85. And here is where my money is going.  Over 20,000 people have seen one of my two ads. 487 people have clicked on the “Shop now” button. And of those people who have perused my book on Amazon, a maximum of 5 of them bought it. How cheery do those figures make you? It’s possible that some people will have downloaded it to Kindle Unlimited. I won’t see any evidence of that until they start reading. It’s possible that some people have saved the post for later or logged the name of the book to come back to. It’s possible. But I doubt that will get me another £80 worth of sales to cover the cost of the ads. Do I have money to burn? Um, no. I’m lucky in that I’m in a stable financial position. Years of slaving away bashing houses to bits, renovating them, selling them and climbing the property ladder means I pay little on my mortgage and I have a bit of rental income besides. I earn a bit from the Army Reserves and from some occasional building surveying. I also have a husband with a decent wage. But can I afford to just throw money away on ads forever? No. So why the hell am I still running them? Er, insanity? Blind faith? A strange desire to impoverish myself? Probably all of these, to an extent. But the real reason is that I’m hanging onto that promise that both Meta and lots of established authors have repeated: that the ads don’t work right away. They take time to find their audience, and people need to see the same ad a few times before they buy. There’s also the potential of read-through. If 50% of buyers of book one go on to buy book two, and of those, 75% buy book three, then for every copy of book one I sell, I get almost the same value again from read-through sales (I did the maths, it’s an extra 87.5% of a sale, to be precise). So that nearly doubles my profits. Then there’s the second trilogy. Then there’s the people my readers might recommend my book to. And so it ripples on—at least, that’s the theory. Chances are I’ll lose money. But chances are, I’ll never make a profit from my books either. Not for a while, at least. I was recently sent an article by Written Word Media. It did a survey of 2000 authors—most of them indie authors—and the answers to one of the questions it asked is below.  This graph kind of made me feel better. I’ll have 6 books out soon. The median earnings for authors with 1-5 books out is £0-$250. For those with 6-10 out, it's just $250-$500. If you say you need to earn at least $2500 a month to earn a living, then the median writer would need to have over 26 books out just to survive of writing alone!
That’s a hell of a lot of writing, a hell of a lot of editing, and a hell of a lot of expense—assuming all authors pay for editing and covers. This all sounds terribly gloomy. It does, doesn’t it? But it’s still early days. I’m going to hold my nerve on the ads a little longer and see if they start paying off. I’m going to attend some more in-person events—I went to PASCIFY last Saturday. Another very expensive marketing failure. See this post on Twitter. But the next ones I have planned will be cheaper to attend, and maybe I’ll sell more books? You don’t know unless you try. I’m going to try some promos with websites like Bargain Booksy and Book Barbarian. I’ll give Amazon Ads a go. I’ll write more books and keep trying. I’ve invested too much of my life in my books so far to give up now!
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 It was September 2021, and I was on holiday. I was with my husband in Santorini, Greece, on the kind of holiday where you spend most of your time lying on a sun lounger not doing very much—the kind where you go away just to have a break from doing stuff. On these kinds of holidays I get a chance to read; and read I did! My life is often so filled with stuff that I don’t find the time, or the headspace, to read, so holidays provide space where I can fill my time with time-fillers—like reading. So there I was, reading books in the sunshine, when I had an epiphany. I could write a novel at work! This sounds like a bit of a dubious connection, but bear with me. Reading fantasy novels reminded me that I loved fantasy novels; it also reminded me that a novel of my own had been rattling around my head for over a decade and still hadn’t been written. In 2010, I was in a graduate-level job and was somewhat under-employed. I had to sit at my desk all day, but I didn’t have enough work to fill my time. No one really cared what I was doing. I was kind of surplus to the team—slotted into various departments to learn about the business, without a real role as such. I was bored, so I decided to start writing a novel. I could merrily tap away at my computer, looking busy, but doing something completely non-work-related. The novel I wrote in 2010 was called To Save a Pegasus. It was about a teenage girl from Earth who stumbled through a portal to another world and ended up embroiled in a mission to save a Pegasus from an evil queen. I wrote it, tried to get it published, failed, and gave up writing for eleven years. But while I was busy not writing much, I did come up with an idea for another story. I wanted to explore the idea of sending more characters from Earth to fantastical places, but this time, it would be a woman who was a long-lost heir to a throne, and her husband, who was an officer in the Royal Engineers. And in this story, they’d not travel through a portal; instead, they would travel across the galaxy to a faraway planet where a magic field replaced the magnetic field, and Earth natives could become uber-sorcerers. The basic concept remained unchanged, but the execution certainly evolved a lot over the eleven years I spent mulling the story over. I actually started writing it twice and gave up after a few chapters on both occasions after not really getting into it. But I still thought about the story every now and then, and it evolved into a trilogy—but it only existed in my head; until September 2021, that is. At that time, I was employed on a full-time contract working for the Army. But I found myself somewhat under-employed. I’d tried to come up with projects to fill my time, but I kept getting told to get back in my box—the problems I was trying to solve didn’t sit within the remit of our department, apparently. So I was left to stare at a screen, bored, in case anyone Skype-called me. So that epiphany I mentioned happened because I was reading again, which reignited my love of fantasy, which made me think of that novel I’d been mulling over for over a decade, which reminded me of that time I wrote a different novel while bored at work. So, I decided that when I got back to my desk, I would start writing book 1 of my trilogy. By Christmas 2021, the first draft of book 1 was written. In the new year, I started on book 2. By Easter 2022, I’d quit my job due to not being stretched enough and was busy working my notice before I’d start a new job working for Amazon. I’d also finished the first drafts of books 2 and 3. Then I started on the sequel trilogy. By the time my contract ended at the end of July 2022, I’d finished the first drafts of books 1 and 2 of my second trilogy and started on the third. Meanwhile, I’d had friends and family read book 1, made a few tweaks, and tried to get it published. I talk all about this novel’s journey in a blog post I wrote in August 2024. You can find it here if you’re interested. The amusing thing is that at the time I wrote that post, I thought that novel’s journey was almost finished! It wasn’t. It had a long way to go. I won’t bore you with the details, but to summarise, I published it in May 2025, then unpublished it soon after. Why? Several reasons—the main one being that it got review-bombed thanks to a little Twitter storm I got embroiled in. But looking back, I’m starting to think that was perhaps a blessing in disguise. If I hadn’t been review-bombed for something that had nothing to do with my novel, I wouldn’t have unpublished it. But the thing is, it went out with flaws. It hadn’t been edited as thoroughly as it should have been because I’d been let down with editors and was determined to hit my publishing date. Its plot was perhaps not as tight as it should have been, either. So I did some more work on it, got it beta read, digested the feedback, tweaked it some more, got it edited—again, and now it’s ready. Proofed and polished to within an inch of its life, the bloody thing is as it is now and isn’t getting changed again! So that’s Path to Power. But I mentioned I wrote another five books besides. What was going on with all these during this period? I didn’t just abandon them in draft form; they got work too. To roll back a little, after I finished my first trilogy, tried to get it published and got nowhere, I had a pro manuscript review done, and when I read it, I realised book 1 stank. It needed so much work that I couldn’t face it right then, so I decided to publish my sequel trilogy instead and come back to my first trilogy later. My second trilogy was written after I’d practiced writing on another three books, so it was, of course, better. It didn’t need as much work to get it into a decent state, I thought, so I could polish these books, publish, then after, polish the first trilogy and publish the first trilogy second. It worked for Star Wars, why shouldn’t it work for me? So my second trilogy, The Offspring Trilogy, was pro-edited, polished, and published in 2023. All three books got good reviews. I sold a few hundred copies. But I just couldn’t seem to build the momentum I hoped for. Sales began to dwindle, and my read-through from book 1 to 2 wasn’t great. I was starting to think book 1, The General’s Son, had flaws. Not massive flaws, granted. It wouldn’t have got good reviews if it were a bad story. I just suspected it took a bit too long to get going and maybe lost readers early on. I wanted a professional opinion on this story before I did anything else, so I paid for a manuscript review. The review confirmed my suspicion about the start, but it suggested that a few other things weren’t working as well as they could, either. So, around a year after The General’s Son was released, I unpublished it—with 39 reviews averaging 4.5 stars.  Condor moment time. I took a deep breath and decided to start over. I’d re-write my first trilogy. I’d tweak The General’s Son, I’d then get all six books ready and shiny and polished and launch the whole lot of ‘em, starting with The Queen of Vorn (since renamed to Path to Power) in May 2025.
As mentioned earlier, The Queen of Vorn was published, then unpublished soon after, pending a re-brand and some more work. So, after another round of editing, all six books will be out this year. Book 1 is now out. Books 2 to 6 will be out at six-week intervals until they have all been released into the world. For good, this time. I’m not un-publishing again!  Build a “platform,” they tell you. It’s vital for a successful author to have a “platform”… When I first started writing and did bits of research into how to be a successful author, one of the themes that came up time and time again was the notion of having an author platform. At first, I didn’t quite understand what a platform was. So if you’re in the same boat as I was in those early days, here’s my understanding. An author platform is basically an online presence. It usually involves having a website and a decent following on various social media platforms. The different platforms A few years back, I tried to build this presence on a range of platforms, including Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The only one I had any success on was Twitter. As for the other ones:
Twitter/X Now, Twitter…I’ve had some success there. I started posting regularly in autumn 2021, around the same time that I started writing The Queen of Vorn. And on this platform, I had some success. Writing a short post is quick and easy. I could do it in the morning while I drank my first coffee of the day. I soon found posting questions was a great way to invite interaction and hence followers, and I realised that if you followed people, lots of them would follow you back. For the last four years, I’ve been posting almost daily, and commenting on other posts besides. In the early days, I kept tabs on how my following was increasing. I just looked at that data and realised I last updated it in March 2023. I’ve just added in my latest follower count, which stands at 43,036. I made the graph below so you can see the trend.  You can see at first, the count rose quickly. I think this was in part due to luck. I jumped on the platform at a good time when the algorithm gods favoured me. In the early days, I could write posts that would regularly get tens of thousands of hits. That died away with time, but I had a good base and so the numbers continued to climb. I have tons of followers, so what? There have been plenty of people who have posted on my comments flagging this in a way that sounds a tad envious. You have loads of followers; stop whining about… that kind of thing. But: What is the benefit of having loads of followers? Err??? Six days ago, I wrote the following post:  What was behind my sudden negativity? Primarily, it was the result of one particular follower who I had allowed to live rent free in my head. But how did he get there in the first place? I’m trying to move on from the horrific experience I had soon after I published The Queen of Vorn this summer. I’ve removed the blog post I wrote about it and some of the tweets relating to it too, as I don’t want it to sit as a stain on my author platform. But as a brief summary, I wrote a post about a mediocre review, got loads of attention, and as a result someone set out to destroy me; and I ended up review-bombed. Six books that I’d been crafting for four years were bombed with one-star reviews, including three that were unpublished 18 months prior and two that were not even out yet. As well as the one in question. Needless to say, that little debacle somewhat knocked me sideways. I’ve been trying to recover ever since. Goodreads took down some of the more hateful reviews and some of the one-star ratings, but they refuse to take down the bulk of them. Hence, a scar remains on my author platform that I can’t remove. All I can do is try to move on from that. So after picking myself up from the heap on the floor I’d ended up in after this horrible experience, I set about trying to rescue my books. The book that got the mediocre review that I commented on did go out with flaws. I talk about how this happened in a blog post I wrote in September. Here’s a handy link if you’re interested.  But despite its flaws, it didn’t deserve to be destroyed the way it was.
Regardless, it was tarnished beyond redemption in my opinion, so I pulled it from the shelves and resolved to do some work on it to fix the flaws. I would also give it a new title so it could get a fresh start. Keen to get as much feedback as I could to make improvements, I sought the opinions of beta readers. Twitter helped me find some. Yay! The platform has some positives: a bunch of people read my novel and gave feedback. Now, if you ever do this yourself, I have one piece of advice: If you disagree with feedback, only ignore it if it’s an outlier. What I mean by this is that when you get feedback, lots of people will say lots of different things. Some you may read and think, “yeah, I thought as much”, other comments you may disagree with. I suggest you ignore these unless they are a common theme from different beta readers, or you will start changing your novel into something completely different and maybe even make it worse. Now, getting back to the point of the article—I got lots of feedback and, as a result, decided what changes I would make to my story. One particular reader, however, was particularly critical. He made a lot of comments that I disagreed with that hadn’t been raised by others. That’s fine—everyone likes different stuff and has different opinions. I thanked him for his feedback, which was rather detailed, and asked if he would be interested in reading my revised version. I revised it, and he read it, and he came back with a load more rather critical feedback. Now, here’s the thing. When someone takes the time to read my work and provide details as to what they think of it, I’m very grateful. They give up their time for free to do this, so whether or not the feedback is good, I still hold them in high regard for doing this. When I got the second batch of critical feedback, I thought this reader deserved some of my time to explain how although the comments were useful, and that there were a few points I would take on board, I also wanted to explain why I wouldn’t be completely re-writing my novel to turn it into a different story, as he’d basically suggested. Reply written, let’s move on. Except this particular person didn’t want to move on. He seemed to be somewhat offended that I didn’t take all his points onboard. He kept dripping comments into my Twitter feed. Every time I referenced the Twitter storm of the summer, I was a whining victim. Every time I referred to my book, he liked to have a dig about how I couldn’t take feedback. This went on and on. I would have blocked him a while ago, except that I only usually block people who are hateful, and he wasn’t hateful. He always phrased his comments in a reasonable, respectful way, despite their negative connotations. The Queen of Vorn was revised further and rebranded, and I asked for advance readers on Twitter. The lovely human being I referred to decided to create a pseudonym and sneak his way onto my ARC list. He got his free copy and then proceeded to slate it on Goodreads. His review is easy to spot; it’s the one that goes on about The Queen of Vorn in a review about Path to Power. He also decided to write a blog about it on his website, going into great detail about how awful my book is. I don’t know why this person became so obsessed with me. But I’m angry with myself for feeding his obsession. Every time I replied to his comments, I was feeding the beast without seeing him for what he is. When I looked at his latest stating of my book on his website, it finally clicked. He’s a bully. And the worst thing you can do when dealing with a bully is react. So I realised he needed blocking, ignoring, and left to stew in his hatred of me and my books until he eventually got bored and went away. He is just one bad apple, I guess. Besides him, surely there are positives to having loads of followers. Why would people seek fame if they didn’t want to be noticed? Being noticed is good, right? It helps people make money, doesn’t it? Um, I’ll come to that shortly. I’ve been talking a lot about the negatives of having loads of followers, so I think it’s important to address the subtitle of this section a bit more concisely: What is the benefit of having loads of followers?
But as for selling books? Err… Whenever I try to plug my books on Twitter, the response is usually tumbleweeds. Sure, I may have found a handful of readers for my stuff on this platform. But in terms of the ratio of time spent tweeting stuff to profits for book sales, I’d be far better off using that time working for minimum wage and using that money to pay for ads. The Platform Curse If you have lots of followers, a lot of people can see you. I’m very much of the opinion that most people in this world are decent and good. But there’s a minority who are nasty and spiteful. The more people who can see you, the more likely it is that one of these nasty people spots you. And if you do something they don’t like, they will gleefully set about trying to destroy you. The sad reality of life is that hate spreads far quicker than love. I managed to collect hundreds of book reviews, ratings, and comments in a short space of time that were nasty and vindictive. But to try to get hundreds of good book reviews and ratings takes a lot of time, effort and patience. We are all human, and we all make mistakes. You can get things right 99% of the time. But we sometimes make mistakes. And the more people that notice, the more likely it is that someone will be ready to sink the knife. |
