It’s easy to get fixated on the Amazon Top 100. You hear stories about authors selling 10,000, 20,000, or even 50,000 books a month and you wonder how that could ever happen to you.
You may have heard about people having a successful Bookbub promo that charted a book in the Top 100 for a day or two, only to slide back down in the ranks into the hundreds and thousands a week or two later.
There’s a huge focus in self pub about the outliers, the breakout stars, the huge success stories that it’s easy to lose track of a simple point–odds are, you won’t be a bestseller. That’s ok though, because odds are that I won’t either. Most people won’t–at least not consistently.
But there’s good news.
Why?
Because you can make $50,000 a year without ever hitting the Amazon top 100.
Now I don’t know about you, but $50,000 is a very livable amount of money for me. How do you make that kind of money exactly? You just need to get a book to hit a 1500 rank consistently.
That’s right. A 1500 rank is approximately 75 sales a day. If your book is $2.99 and sells 75 copies a day, you’ll make $150 in royalties that day.
If you can hold those sales steady over the course of the month, that book will make you $4500. Keep that up for the year and you’ll make $54,000.
Things get even better though. If you have two books in a series and one sells 38 copies a day while the other sells 37 copies, you’ll still hit your 75 sales a day and $54,000 a year.
If you have three books in a series, each book only has to sell 25 copies a day.
With a four book series, you are talking about 19 copies a day per book. Those are doable numbers all of a sudden.
So how do you do it? I’ll leave that to the expert: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,124433.0.html
But here’s the basic idea.
Write a series of books in a popular genre (romance, mystery/thriller, sci fi, fantasy). Put the first book permafree with a mailing list sign up link at the back. Build that list, then write book 2, 3, 4, 5, etc… and use that list to sell your books. Pepper in a bookbub, ent, poi promo as much as you can.
The point is, don’t get discouraged that you aren’t living in the Amazon top 100. There’s a good living to be made on 75 sales a day. Get writing.
Looking for another way to promote your ebook?
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[…] read a couple articles the last few days that give this advice: you can make a good living at being a writer, even if you’re not very good at it. The idea is that there’s nothing wrong with […]
[…] 3) How to make $50 000 per year without hitting the Amazon Top 100 list! Very simple article and I think in a way quite doable. I’ve also seen many authors offer their first novel in a series for free and this seems to be a strategic move. Very interesting. Very cool website too for self-publishers. http://selfpublishingroundtable.com/howtomake50k/ […]
[…] How You Can Make $50,000 A Year Without Ever Hitting Bestseller List […]