How I Did It

About two years ago I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that changed my life.

Here was the paragraph that got me:

"Mr. Locke (John Locke) earns 35 cents for every title he sells at 99 cents. Altogether, he says his publishing revenue amounted to $126,000 from Amazon in March alone. It costs him about $1,000 to have his book published digitally, complete with an original dust jacket image. He also hires an editor to work with him at additional expense."

At that point "The Fourth Awakening" (TFA) had been out for just under 2 years and was selling well enough to convince me to work on the follow up book "The Gathering Darkness" (TGD) in my spare time. TGD was nearly finished but it was so radically different from TFA I was afraid it might turn off the core audience so I wasn't pushing it.

After reading about Locke, I dust off an old idea. In the late 1980s I sold and had published 5 mass-market pulp men's action & adventure novels. They were incredibly hot at the time and they sold huge numbers of books. So many, that two decades later I still see them on the shelves of nearly every used bookstore I walk into. My "Devon's Way" series had ended abruptly when my NYC publishing house filed for bankruptcy. I had a plot for the 4th book in the series in the works where Devon had a grown daughter he hadn't known existed pop into his life. I updated it and three months later I had "Family Reunion (The First Charon Family Adventure). It was a very tongue in cheek spoof of modern spy/suspense books.

Like John Locke, I was able to get it online for under $1,000. I recouped my expenses in about 60 days. That was when I realized I had built a near rabid following for TFA -- the people who get it, REALLY get it. The rest write sad Amazon reviews showing how badly they didn't get it. I had fans that liked my writing style but only had one book to buy.

I decided to change all of that.

In June of 2011, I set a target date of Christmas 2012. I wanted to see how many titles I could get up on Amazon. My thinking was, if they buy one and like it, the reader would come back and buy all of the rest if they were priced reasonably. Having also worked as a Work-for-Hire ghostwriter for a division of Harlequin books for a while, I knew what it took to write a full length novel on a four month deadline and had proven I could do. I was off!

The Gathering Darkness came out a few month later, followed in rapid order by 3 more Charon Family Adventures. All were priced at 99 cents FOR THE EXPRESSED PURPOSE OF BUILDING A FOLLOWING!

In 2012, I sold well over 100,000 Kindle downloads of my books. That doesn't make me James Patterson or JK Rowling, but it certainly means I don't need to be pursuing a potential lucrative career in the fast-food industry either.

As the fall of 2012 approached, I decided to try something different. Instead of a full length novel, I wrote two short novellas. Like episodic TV, these are part of a bigger story using the characters from TFA. I planned to write six Episodes at 99 cents each then combine them into a single book. The jury is still out on that one. Some of my core audience is PISSED at me.

Despite this bump in the road, all of the elements of my plan were in place and just before Christmas, I pulled the trigger and raised my prices. TFA and the first Charon book are still 99 cents. These are my gateway books to try and get the bargain hunters hooked enough to come back and buy the next books in the series. The rest went to $2.99 and one $4.99.

Sales and rankings immediately fell BUT January and February 2013 revenue was higher than a really good month of December 2012. I was selling a third less books but making more money. It also has the added plus of getting me out of the "99 Cent" marketplace and into a nicer, more upscale neighborhood.

When I release Charon #5 in a few months I'm going to drop Charon #2 to 99 cents and lower the "Family Bundle" (I combined the first three Charons into an anthology and had CreateSpace publish it for me) will go to $3.99.

I would highly recommend you create your own plan then work it. There is a huge opportunity here which may not come along again in your lifetime. The jerks and hacks are already marketing things like "You can get rich on Kindle using our program which will do all the writing for you! Only $19.95. And if you buy now you also get...." When the vultures and jackals start circling, it is a sure sign this market is about to peak.

Hopefully Amazon will crack down of the conmen and crooks and not let them kill the goose that is laying all of the golden eggs.

In the meantime, catch the wave before it is too late.