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

by Sean Platt

built a business publishing fiction each week, positioning ourselves as the AMC, HBO or Showtime of Kindle.

Systems make me happy, and if you’re a writer who wants to get well-paid for your words, you should love systems, too.

Keeping readers on the page is an art, and no one does that better than copywriters.

that’s what this book is really about: becoming a full-time author who derives enough income from publishing books to support him- or herself and hence doesn’t need to do anything else.

Belief comes first. Actions that justify that belief come second.

When you write, your creative mind is in charge, and your business mind needs to get out of the way. But when you’re done writing and editing, those two have to flip.

one trait that trumps all of those is a willingness to do things that seem best, no matter how uncomfortable they may be.

If you want to know the mechanics of digital self-publishing (the details of how to create and publish a file, including which buttons to push), a much better guide is Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran. And we love “how to write” books like Stephen King’s gem, On Writing.

smart writers, rather than panicking, asked themselves: “Will people still want to buy books?” That’s the only question that actually matters.

Your business is pleasing readers and selling books. As long as there are readers out there, it is your job to find them.

The theory of 1,000 true fans states that an artist (not just writers, but musicians, filmmakers, carpenters, whatever) need only acquire 1,000 true fans to make a living at their art.

activities are writing more and better books, building a moderate amount of reader engagement (efficiently, not via long e-mails), creating solid calls to action that lead people to your next books from the backs of those they’ve just finished, completing bundles and product funnels (see below), and so on.

the long tail is a way to describe how the Internet has changed an artist’s ability to effectively market themselves in even the smallest niches.

Strategies are things like “write the best books you can,” “create reader loyalty and connection,” “satisfy customer demand,” and “create logical next-step reading experiences and have them ready (and obviously available) for readers when they finish your books.”

For all series of books, our introductory product is the first book in the series. For serials, the intro is the first episode. For longer, single novels, we try to create what we call a “prelude,” which is a relatively self-contained story that starts the larger work but can be pulled out to more or less stand on its own, probably with a small cliffhanger at the end.

This intro product is always free, and we put it in as many places as we possibly can. (Visit RealmAndSands.com/free

Quick example: Unicorn Western 1 is free. At the end of that book, readers are presented with an option: They can buy Unicorn Western 2 for $2.99, or they can buy the Unicorn Western Full Saga — which contains all nine Unicorn Western books — for $9.99, and save 60 percent.

The best funnels are those where the bundled upsell comprises the series in its entirety.

Most CTAs end with links to somewhere the reader can take that action, either written out in the case of print or clickable for e-books.

Our first CTA is usually for another purchase: either the next book or a bundle of multiple books. After that we’ll have a call to join our e-mail list in order to get upcoming books free or at a discount. We often follow with a third CTA that contains either a list of our other books or (preferably) a link to a web page with that list (seeing as we can update the webpage easily but don’t want to update all of our books’ CTAs). Somewhere in there we usually try adding a request for the reader to leave a review for the book they’ve just read.

USP is what differentiates you from everyone else.

“In a sea of options that seem more or less the same, what compelling reason do I have to buy from you?”

Success comes from hard work and the accumulation of small numbers. Unlike yesterday, today’s prosperity can bloom from continuous intelligent production. For the first time in history, life as a full-time writer has become about simple math.

He put out a piece of work, set it aside, then got started on the next one. He watched his sales numbers, but wasn’t invested, emotionally, in seeing any single title make him famous or rich.

Your only real option is to write good stuff, get it to market, then do it again.

If you’re not succeeding, keep working. Keep producing.

When you release your first book, all you really need is to get a few people to love it. When you release your second book, you want to let the people who already loved your first book know it’s available, because they’ll want to buy it, and you want to get a few new people to like your work. Repeat, then repeat again after that.

the moral is not that Sean and Dave have figured out what works. It’s that Sean and Dave have figured out what works best for them, in their specific situation, right now. You can never think you’ve “figured out the way”

If you have both a Createspace print version and an Amazon Kindle version of your book, the price of your Kindle book will show as a discount from the print book’s price — a small sleight of hand that makes your e-book version seem comparatively inexpensive to buyers.

having an actual career (rather than a time-intensive hobby) requires actually pleasing readers.

The fulfillment of yesterday’s dream today might be a step down.

be a successful self-publisher, you must be a businessperson as much as — or maybe more than — an artist.

To reach the zenith, you have to do all the right business stuff. You must build your base of true fans, and market to them in all the right ways. You have to create product funnels and write smart calls to action and place them intelligently at the back of your books.

One of our core tenets (and we’ll detail this later) is that you should always cultivate your tribe and not worry at all about those who don’t jibe with your style.

To the gamblers: You’re not going to have that one-in-a-million hit, so stop hoping for it and keep writing. To the skeptics: You don’t need to have that one-in-a-million hit … because you can keep writing.

if you do everything you can to put your best face forward to potential readers, your books will become more or less indistinguishable from those with a Big Six pedigree. This is what we meant by readers not knowing you’re self-published.

once the creative part is behind us, we always put on our business hats. At that point, our art is our product, and that’s how we treat it.

part of your business as an indie author is reader acquisition.

We wanted to be known as storytellers, not authors of a particular genre.

The more authentic you are — and the more vehemently you hold to that authenticity — the more true fans you will eventually accumulate.

making a conscious decision about who you’re writing for is really important.

Be specific about your target market. Drill down as far as you possibly can.

There’s one person you’re writing for, and that person represents your perfect reader.

I just thought of my ideal reader. Would he be cool with it? If yes, then I did it. If not, I didn’t. I never considered what everyone would think … just that one imaginary guy.

Know your stuff, or learn it. Respect your audience and give them what they want, need, and expect. Decide what you stand for and don’t waver.

If you ever get stuck, ask yourself what happens next, then next, then next. Don’t get an idea for a situation; develop the arc for your story. Pretty much every story goes like this: Someone is complacent, they face a challenge, the challenge nearly beats them, they find a way to conquer the challenge, then emerge changed at the other end.

Our contention is that good storytelling is good because the characters — not the author — are in charge.

The richer our understanding, the better our story. The better our story, the happier our readers.

Which style of nonfiction you write will determine how you outline, but the structure is always the same: major points with examples and explanations underneath, nested as deeply as seems necessary to deliver the information you want to teach.

If you want a great book on writing, our favorite (not too surprising, if you’ve read this far) is Stephen King’s On Writing.