Hey! Jon here. I’ve worked in self-publishing for a solid eight years now. I recently released this three-hour guide to the whole self-publishing process (useful whether you’re at $0 or $10,000 per month) on my youtube channel. Check it out here—I guarantee you’ll find it helpful 🙂
Now, here’s a quick rundown of my top tips, strategies, & best practices for self-published authors:
The money is in high-content books. Low-content books are not worth the time and effort unless produced at massive scale. Having a high-content book that ranks in its niche is the path with a much higher earnings ceiling. High-content books can also be released in many more formats than low-content, resulting in wider distribution and greater earnings. You can either write yourself or outsource to ghostwriters, but regardless, high content is the way to go if you’re serious about self-publishing.
2. All titles should be distributed across KDP, ACX, and Ingram Spark in eBook, Paperback, Audiobook, and Hardcover Formats. Only approximately 30% of our profit comes from KDP itself: ACX and Ingram Spark (not to mention Findaway, Kobo, Apple, etc.) are underutilized distributors that require only slight formatting changes to list on and make books available to entirely new audiences.
3. Ads + review generation. We’re nearly always unprofitable in terms of pure ACOS (ROAS, if you will) on a book-wide basis. For this reason ads are most useful in speedrunning rankings and exposure when books are launched. So, ROAS should include longer-term stats, not just ACOS. If you can nail ACOS, scaling is as easy as it gets assuming breadth in relevant campaigns. On this note, make sure to stay within Amazon’s review guidelines, but even within them there are processes to accelerate review generation, mostly involving book groups, book giveaways, and accumulated email lists/fanbases (essentially, building out a brand versus publishing independent books with no means of capturing reader info).
4. Niche matters. Fiction is an extraordinarily difficult niche to break into. We near-exclusively publish and acquire non-fiction titles and this is the superior commercial route to take for the vast majority of self-publishers (if you just enjoy writing fiction, do your thing, just recognize how it impacts your business!). Additionally, books in relatively unsaturated and opportune niches far outperform books (no matter how great) in crowded niches. Do your research and choose carefully.
5. Go international and translate. Limiting your content to English and solely focusing on the United States is kin to shooting yourself in the foot. Our sales are now majority international (though the U.S., of course, is still the largest individual market by far) and whether working with international publishers or translating content and re-self-publishing in-house, going global is a must.
6. Find good people and stick with them. The pros who churn out ridiculous numbers do it through people that are really good at what they do across highly valuable skills like content creation, advertising, review generation, graphic design, and so on. They often build and then sell accounts at 50x+ multiples and rinse and repeat. Develop your own skills, but also find the people who are great at what they do and stick with them.