My Journey to Becoming a Best-Selling, World-Famous Author.

Hey now, Neal Stephenson and Richard K. Morgan still make money But it makes sense that the erotic fiction genre has a much more level playing field without a few big names to compete with (apart from Chuck Tingle )

I wouldn't even call it an erotic genre, as there are a lot of haremlit books that do fade to black secks scenes. It's basically just fantasy, often isekai fantasy, with the same plots and struggles as other fantasy (and scifi for that matter) books, these just include a harem.

Audiobook for Mask of the Gods went live today. 1 review so far, 5 stars. I won't be able to see data from that directly, but the publisher should be updating me monthly. I'm really curious to see how that pans out. From what I understand, audio takes a while to build up good numbers, but has more staying power than ebooks. So good for longevity.

I'll reveal a little secret: I never even listened to my own audiobook. I just listened to the free sample on Audible, and the narrator, Andrew Pond, did an excellent job. Never been much of an audiobook person, myself. And I feel like it would be really awkward listening to someone narrate the secks scenes, although my one review says they were great. Some people go nuts for audio, though.

Having a lot of trouble focusing on writing today. Case in point, I'm posting here when I should be finishing up work early so I can write another thousand words. Tee hee.

On the burnout side of things, a guy I know got burnt out on writing books... So now he's writing a screen play instead. I thought that was an interesting pivot.

In reply to infinitenexus :

That's awesome that you've found something that you're enjoying doing, and that you've been strategic enough to point yourself at a real opportunity.

In reply to infinitenexus :

so, when do you get paid and how close are the estimates to the actuals?  $12k for spare-time "work" is nothing to sneeze at.  congrats!

I get paid at the end of the month. Looks like there's a 3-month delay. So far the estimates look to be very accurate, darn near spot-on. 

Since I'm pretty much laying my personal finances bare here, I figured I'd also mention that I paid off the last of my debt, which was my wife's car. So now we have 10 grand in the bank and zero debt. It's a nice feeling for someone that's spent a lot of his life poor.

infinitenexus said:

we have 10 grand in the bank and zero debt. It's a nice feeling for someone that's spent a lot of his life poor.

berkeley yeah dude, that's fantastic.

Alrighty folks, it's a new month, which means it's time for me to post my performance last month:

In short, it was awesome. More than twice what I make at my day job, and I enjoy writing a lot more, too.

I'm not sure how the next few months are going to be. I'm releasing more books so I know the snowball effect will continue, but my next trilogy will not be as popular. I'm starting to have some second thoughts about it. It's pretty darn dark, which can be great when telling a regular story—and it is a great story—but this is essentially reader insertion fantasy, so super dark isn't always a good idea. I expect my next trilogy to sell, but only about half as much as my previous one. Preorders are at 34, so just over half of what my previous trilogy started at. We'll see what happens. I started writing a new book, something fun that will sell, and the creative juices are flowing so I've been writing quickly. I'm hoping I can bang out a quick trilogy that I'll can have ready to release quickly in case this cyberpunk thing doesn't do well.

What I find interesting is that at this point, a book that doesn't do well will still earn a few thousand dollars. So even if the book flops, all is not lost. I think I'm just being pessimistic, though.

Data for audiobooks comes in very slowly but my publisher let me know on Friday that I had sold 102 audiobooks so that's good. 

I'm also trudging through the mud dealing with the VA, trying to make a bunch of appointments to get all my injuries checked out. They've all gotten notably worse since I left the army, so I'm trying to get my disability percentage increase. It's at 70% right now. If I can get it to 100%, I'll go ahead and retire from my day job and just write. With the safety net of my disability payments, it'll basically be impossible to fail. 

The Wife and I are saving up a ton of money for an awesome future. We have some big plans in mind and we're working hard toward them. I won't let anything slip now, but maybe toward the end of the year I'll start talking about it. I'll just say we're saving up to move somewhere safe and warm.

In reply to infinitenexus :

I will add a point from working with musicians, sometimes you don't know when or why something you create will hit. If something you write is a direction you want to try or an opportunity to branch off to something a bit different, give it  a shot. We're all just trading our time for money out here, the way I see it is there are two ways to make it more worth it, doing something you like a bit more, or making enough more money to be worth the extra struggle. In practice I find there's some combination of alternating between the two that makes for better days.

In reply to dclafleur :

There's a sort of list of unwritten rules for being successful with haremlit. I generally follow them, but I decided to take my cyberpunk books and rewrite them as harem simply because it got me an extra month ahead. It gave me three extra stories to put out. So right now I'm almost done writing a book that will be released mid-July, and I've already started on the book that'll come after that.

My next book is by the book (heh). It's a fun adventure where the main character steadily grows in power and knowledge, kills the bad guy(s), and shags the ladies. It should sell great.

So, the past 5 days or so, sales have dropped off rather sharply. Instead of $240-250/day, it dropped to about 180, and yesterday was only $144.36. I was wondering what was wrong and asked in my author discord group and was told that's normal. I just released the last book in a series, and when that happens the dropoff is almost always quite sharp. The only thing I can do to fight that is to release more books! 

I'm speaking with a guy and I think I'm going to hire him as a ghostwriter for a series. I just need to find the time to plot out the trilogy that's in my head. I would be paying him about $1200/book, which is a pretty good deal as it would ultimately give me one more trilogy to put out there. His writing is okay; I would need to edit it pretty heavily but the basics are there. To get a ghostwriter that's as good as me or better, I'd have to spend around 4-5 grand per book. This is all part of growing this as a business instead of just me writing books. If I can get someone to reliably crank out 5-6 books per year, that greatly helps add to my revenue stream. Keep in mind my first trilogy here made 12 grand. So me paying $3600 or so and spending a few days doing some editing to release a new trilogy (possibly under a new pen name as well) should be a smart decision. 

Finding myself in a situation where my day job is straight up in the way of writing. It's majorly affecting my output; I haven't written hardly anything the past few days. Also, I don't really enjoy my day job probably 80% of the time so my mood is sour and it's hard to write when I feel like that. So my productivity has ground to a halt. I have 23K words written in a new story and I think I can stretch it to 4-5 books, but I just can't write. 

I'm working on getting my military disability rating increased from 70% to 100%. Once I get that done, I'm quitting this job and writing full time. It's extremely frustrating when I can't write; I'm doing this for my family's future, so I feel like I'm taking away from that each day I don't get words on paper.

Okay, so release day! This is an interesting one; releasing a cyberpunk book that I knew wouldn't do as well. Well, it hasn't done as well, but "well" is subjective. 

First, I made a biiiiig booboo. I forgot to check that little box that puts the book into Kindle Unlimited, where you can read it for free (or $11.99/month but whatever) and I get paid for page reads. I caught it when I woke up and it was fixed by 7AM, but that's a lot of people that didn't get an email first thing this morning about a new KindleU book from me. So that's gonna hurt me, but I'll recover.

As of now, 6:12PM, I'm sitting at 58 book sales for the day. 49 are for the cyberpunk book. Page reads are just now starting to trickle in. My book ranking is a mixed bag; me missing the early KindleU definitely screwed me, but I'm still at 14K position in the full kindle store (in which there are about 8.5 million ebooks). I'm hoping I can get this one to below 6 or 5K. So in short, it's doing incredibly well for a cyberpunk book, probably extremely well compared to most fantasy books, and pretty ho-hum for a harem book. In the end I can't complain, as I've made $300 today. But I know it could be better. The good news is I already have 17 preorders for book 2.

The snowball effect is apparent. Of the $300 I've made so far today, half is from my previous trilogy. This is why releasing a book a month can build up quickly to big bucks, it's just hard to keep it going!

Is the new book under your usual cyberpunk pen name? Not seeing anything new on Amazon.

No, I deleted everything under that pen name. I don't plan on using it any longer and nothing under that name sold anyway, so I'm just cleaning house. It's under my harem pen name, Micky Carre. 

So, the book has sold about average for an average author, which means a total flop for a harem author. It sold $200 on release day and it's been making about $10-30/day since then. I'll be releasing book 2 in that trilogy since I already announced the preorder, but I won't be publishing book 3. I dunno. I already wrote it, but I'm not going to pay for it to be edited. I might go through it later and release it just to finish the trilogy, but I know it won't sell much. Right now I'm just focusing on writing the next book. I've bounced around a little bit, trying to deal with a total lack of free time and imposter syndrome.

But then I try to remind myself that if you go through a lot of the top selling LitRPG books, honestly most of them suck or are mediocre at best. And many of these books sell sell sell. I try to remind myself that I don't need to write a masterpiece. I don't even need to write a great book. I just need to write something good enough. And I know I can do it. 

I started a slice of life/cozy fantasy book but stopped after 20K words. I made a few mistakes and got frustrated with it. So I started a harem litrpg book instead, and I'm 27K words into it now. I'm going to try my best to write something long, like 100-150K words long. More pages=more money, it's as simple as that. 

In reply to infinitenexus :

I still think your cyberpunk book had a chance as a straight up sci-fi. I know a lot of people who read that genre and it's pretty repetitive out there right now. A fresh idea and author could make a killing. 

Thanks man. I think it was a good book, but breaking through in regular scifi is very hard. A friend of mine that is a 7-figure author from litrpg and haremlit novels tried his hand at straight scifi and was able to do okay. For that matter, mine is doing okay. It's sold $350 in the last 8 days, so that's good. It's just not doing well from a haremlit standpoint. Right now I'm basically eating filet mignon every day and complaining about a ribeye. When book 2 comes out it'll get a little boost and over the next month the two books will probably earn a grand or a little more. So not bad sales, just not enough to live on. For that, I'm going back to isekai harem fantasy.

Alright, end of the month! Even with a book that was a flop, I made $4,761.48 last month in book sales/page reads. Much of that was my first trilogy still powering along. Sales are slowly tapering off but it's still a good revenue driver. 

I've still been struggling to write lately. Work has been super busy since we fired a lazy guy and his work load fell onto my lap. We have two new people but they need to be trained. Then when I get home it's time to be a father and husband so free time to write has been very, very limited. By the time I get a few minutes after The Wife and my son go to sleep, I'm usually not in the mood. So it's a struggle, but fortunately I worked my rear end off and got myself three months ahead of schedule. I have a book coming out in 2 weeks that I wrote two months ago. So I'm slowly chipping away at my next writing project, but progress is slow. 

These book sales have really been helpful. We're putting our son in preschool/day care, fixed a few problems on our cars, and we're saving for a house. We wouldn't have been able to do any of that with just my day job's wages. I have $13 grand in my saving's account now, the most I've ever had. Next month I should be at $20K as long as I'm a good boy and don't want to supercharge my car or something. 

infinitenexus said:

Next month I should be at $20K as long as I'm a good boy and don't want to supercharge my car or something. 

it's OK to want. 

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

I am treating myself to a couple things. Black leather seats in the summer are rather nightmarish so I'm removing the ones in my car and replacing them with some Momo seats. Considering how heavy the sport seats are for the E90, it'll save 100+ pounds and my back won't be a ball of sweat anymore. Also tinting my windows, which will help. But the rest is going into savings.

In reply to infinitenexus :

You will save the 100#s, but you will sweat more ... I know from experience. The solution is AC and tint. 

Cute dog!

I have A/C but even on full blast, it freezes the front of me while my back sweats against the leather. I need to fix something with my rear windows so they roll down (I think there's a small plastic clip that's broken) and then I'm getting them tinted, that'll help a lot as well. That being said, I don't think I will ever, under any circumstances, own a black car with a black interior again. Even up here it's just too hot.

So, I've found myself in a low point. We had a lazy guy here at work that finally got fired, so his workload fell on my lap. So now I'm swamped all day and can't write here in my spare time, and then when I get home I can't write because that's my time to be a husband and father. I can sometimes write a bit after The Wife and my kid go to sleep, but I only have a few minutes, then I need to get some rest. I struggle with sleep, so I can't sacrifice that. So I haven't written much at all, it's pretty much ground to a halt. I don't have a lot of options here, it's going to take a good long while to catch up at work, and I can't cut away my already limited time with my family. So sadly, no writing will be done for a bit. Maybe on weekends I can get some done.

It's put me in a mood that even when I find myself with 10 spare minutes, I struggle to write. It's tough. I'm 30K words into a book and it's just sitting there. Hopefully soon I'll be able to get some work done on it.

I'm quickly seeing that my only real hope of making this work and making a lot of money from it is getting my disability up to 100% and retiring so I can write full time. It's simply not possible to do it while working full time. If all goes well, all that should happen around 6 months from now. Fingers crossed.

In reply to infinitenexus :

The stuggle is real. I think every parent here can relate to that on at least some level, so you're in good company.

Another month, another release. My cyberpunk books have not done well. I get it, book 1 has a morally gray character, it's a dark book in a dark world, the ending is pretty dark, etc. I should be writing self-insertion power fantasies, not super dark cyberpunk, so these books have flopped. Book 2 just came out 3 days ago, and in total books 1 and 2 have made $815. So they've basically paid for the editor, and now they're trickle in $5-10/day for a bit. I'm giving myself some extra time to worry about book 3. It's not going to sell well, so I kinda don't care that much about it. I'm just going to self-edit, which will save me $400. 

Now, in case anyone is wondering why I'm considering $800 in 5 weeks a flop, book 1 from my previous trilogy has made just short of $9,000 so far. In fact, a couple days ago I hit an awesome milestone and I've now made more than $20K as an author! Woooo! Here, I took a screenshot. I'm proud of this.

I'm trying to focus on my next series, for which I'm going back to the proven formula: 1st person narrative, isekai fantasy with hot babes and a main character that defeats the villain. Simple, straightforward fantasy with some awesome boobs. Just what sells.

Oh, I bought some racing seats/mounts/sliders/a harness with my money. Worth every penny, I hate leather seats in the summer. So far I've been really happy with them.