This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings and hello and welcome back. This is Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. And today I wanna talk about writing books and making money, which are two subjects that don't always go together. Now right from the beginning, I'll tell you there are a couple of big myths about writing books.
And the first one is that writing a book is a good way to get rich. And the second one is that no one who writes books makes any money. So neither of these things are really true. If your goal is to make a lot of money in a short period of time, then writing a book is probably not the best idea for you. But at the same time, it is possible with the right effort, strategy, and plan to actually make money writing books, even make a good amount of money.
So personally, I love writing books. I don't do it as a marketing tactic. It's not an extension of anything else. For me, writing and publishing books is something I really enjoy. And though it's certainly taken some effort, I've actually been able to make a good living doing so.
Now I work with traditional publishers to publish my books. But today's story is all about a finance employee who sells 200,000 self-published romance novels and pulls her family out of debt. And at the end of the story, I'll give you a few tips if you want to write a book. All of that's coming up in just a moment. [Music]
And now our story.
Carrie Heywood has always been an avid reader. One night, after finishing a book, she found herself struggling to select the next book she was gonna read. She does most of her reading on an e-reader, where she also searches for and purchases new books. For some reason, none of the books available that evening were capturing her attention. And it was in that moment she wondered if she could write the book that she wanted to read.
When her writing journey began, Carrie was mainly reading Young Adult Paranormal Fantasy, which is a very popular genre. For her, she enjoyed the setting and the stories, but the element these books were missing was a more descriptive romance. She felt it was a bit superficial, at least in some of the books she read. And while she loved books about young love, she wanted a book where the characters were a bit older and the romance was more detailed. Of course, you don't just sit down to write a book for the first time, or if you do, it doesn't usually end up being one you can do much with.
When Carrie began that task of writing her first book, like most new authors, she made a lot of mistakes. In novel writing, there are two types of writers, plotters and pantsers. Now, a plotter is someone who carefully plans, knows exactly how the plot's going to develop from beginning, middle to end, whereas a pantser is someone who kind of flies by the seat of their pants, makes it up as they go along. Well, at first, Carrie was a pantser, and her stories went wherever her imagination was going at the time. That kind of free writing can be fun for a while, it can be freeing, but it's not necessarily great for readers, nor does it tend to make for good finished books.
So halfway through the first draft, she realized she had no conflict in her story. The hero and heroine met and fell in love without any issues blocking their way. Anyone who likes to read fiction probably knows why this is a big problem. What's the point of reading a story with no conflict? Stories are all about conflict.
It took her six months to write that first draft, and then another five months working on edits and rewrites before she was able to publish it. As hard as it was to learn all the new skills associated with writing a full length novel, going back and adding that necessary conflict, the publishing process was actually a lot easier. I mentioned at the top of the show that my books are traditionally published, meaning that I partner with the publisher for all aspects of production and distribution. Carrie's books are self published, which means she's in charge of all aspects of her publication. So in the traditional system, the publisher handles the editing, the cover design, the formatting, the printing, the foreign rights, the publicity, and many other things.
With a self published book, if you're unqualified to perform those tasks, or if you just don't want to do them, you need to hire freelancers. So that's what Carrie did. She hired freelancers for those other tasks so that she could keep writing. To distribute the book, she began with a service called Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, sometimes known as Amazon KDP, that would immediately allow Amazon.com's users to purchase and download the book. She also signed up with Smashwords, another service that fed her books to additional ebook retailers like Barnes and Noble and iBooks.
Once she had figured out how to create conflict and plot her stories a bit more in advance, Carrie realized that she really liked writing books. In fact, after finishing that first one, before it was even published, she'd already started on her next one. And over the next four years, she kept writing and publishing on a very regular cycle. She began in 2013 and she's now published 15 books, 11 of which are part of three different series. And with the series, she's been able to use a creative strategy of growing her audience.
She markets the first book of the series using free book promotions and sales. And then once someone reads the first book, that naturally promotes all the ones that follow it. So the whole goal is to get somebody hooked on the series and then naturally they're gonna purchase the second one, the third one and maybe beyond. Carrie also does a fair amount of self promotion. She has a blog, she uses Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
She has a newsletter to keep in touch with readers and advise them of new releases. So it doesn't just happen by magic, she works hard for it. But for all this hard work, there's been a very real reward and response. Since that first book came out, she sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide. Her books are now translated in several other languages and are also available as audio books.
And Carrie gets paid monthly royalties from these sales. With Amazon, if her book is priced $2.99 or higher, that's $2.99 or higher, the royalty is about 70%. And for eBooks that price under $2.99, the royalty is closer to 30%. Now naturally, since she's in charge of everything, she can set her own prices. And she usually opts for a price of around $3.99, just under $4, meaning that she earns about $2.80 on every book that's sold.
So if you do the math, I'm sure there's some variants of different prices. There's probably some promotional pricing in there somewhere, but at more than 200,000 copies sold, it's fair to say that she's earned multiple six figures through writing and publishing these novels. And that income has allowed her to pay off debt that she struggled with before she began publishing. It has also given her the financial freedom to travel and save for the future. Writing 15 books has not been without challenge, especially in the beginning, Carrie struggled with trying to find the right balance between time with her family, the day job she still has, and her writing career.
She had a hard time saying no to book events. She ended up over scheduling herself and to meet her deadlines, which of course were all self-imposed, since she was in control of the entire process, she found herself ignoring her family and running herself ragged. She says there is this belief in the indie book community that you have to publish one book a quarter to remain relevant. And as fast as she could work, that schedule was too accelerated, and she even began to have panic attacks, which obviously took away from all the enjoyment that the writing had been bringing her. Fortunately, over time, she finally learned to seek more balance between all these competing responsibilities.
She's still publishing books, just not for them a year. And for her, that balance means traveling for the book signings less, while having more time for her family, but still writing, and still publishing, and still developing those series that get people hooked. So there are at least several different paths to success in writing books. We could spend a long time talking about each of them. What Carrie has done, the model she's followed, it truly is enabled by new technology and platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.
There's a whole subculture of people doing this, and some of them are able to have big successes like hers. Naturally, not everyone's successful. There's a lot of people trying, but not able to find enough readers for their books, just like in any industry. But it is certainly possible, and Carrie's story is not the only one. This whole notion of publishing four books in a year, obviously paranormal romance is not my genre, but personally, I can't imagine an accelerated schedule like that.
I actually write and publish fairly quickly in my genre. I usually publish a book every year and a half or two years maximum, and that's considered pretty fast for what I do. Now, obviously the process is a lot different. Carrie doesn't go to 50 cities whenever she has a book out. There's a lot more research involved in the kind of case study process that I use.
I don't have to worry about adding conflict to my characters, at least not most of the time, but still, it's a lot of work. Now, whether you're interested in Kindle Direct Publishing, some other kind of self-publishing, some form of traditional publishing, or some hybrid approach, which a lot of people, including myself, are doing in different ways, I do have some advice. I think it's okay to learn about the business of publishing. In fact, I think you should, you should educate yourself. But if you're kind of just now thinking, oh, I want to write a book, I think you should make sure you're also learning a lot about the structure and art of writing books.
And you can do that first just by paying attention to the books you read. You should read thoroughly within your genre. You should not just read current books, but you should go back a decade or two decades or a century or two centuries, depending on what you're writing. And you should also read outside your genre. Really good writers and interesting writers tend to pull an experience from different fields.
They're not just influenced by the genre that they're in. And this is similar to what we see with lots of different cytosol stories, with people pulling in different skills, different experiences to come together and create something that's totally new. So if you're interested in young adult romance, be sure to check out Carrie's books. Of course, we'll link them up. And if you're interested in the business model behind it, we'll link that up too.
And the show notes for today, which you can find at sidehustleschool.com/6565. I'll include links to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, to Smashwords, to a new service he's using that I didn't talk about, to a publishing guide that my literary agent wrote a few years ago, which is very helpful if you're especially considering traditional publishing, and probably some other things as well. So go and check that out when you get a chance. As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Cytosol School, and I'll see you tomorrow.
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