Write. Publish. Repeat. (The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success)

by Sean Platt

Used to be, if you enrolled your book in Amazon’s KDP Select program (trading Amazon 90 days of exclusivity for a five-day window to make your book free), all you had to do was flip the five-day switch and you’d sell a lot of books. Promote that free book in any way possible, then turn the book back to paid status so you could rake in the money flooding in from your new, higher sales rank. But in 2013, Amazon changed how free “sales” counted toward your post-free sales rank, and that particular tactic totally stopped working. Authors who didn’t know how to pivot were screwed. When Sean and Dave started writing serialized e-books, they wrote their faces off to maintain a weekly publishing schedule, and thereby form a habit with their readers. They released a project’s six “episodes” over the course of six weeks, with each episode priced at 99 cents.