Non-fiction writers used to fair better because plenty of people were willing to buy PDF ebooks that could be downloaded from the internet. But fiction readers always wanted physical books. Sadly for most authors, THAT option was too expensive.
But now publishing fiction is easy because not only can you published all your own novels for free (and do it quickly), but also fiction readers are now happy to download and read novels on their smart phones and other reading devices.
This has freed up fiction authors to earn a living writing their books.
But how can you earn even more money from fiction writing?
One of the first millionaire self published fiction authors was John Locke. He wrote a series of novels but struggled to publish them.
Then he discovered Kindle publishing and not only did he publish all his novels as digital books, but he made so much money that he also wrote and published his best selling non-fiction ebook, How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! And he sold over 1 million of that ebook even faster.
So what was his secret?
His novels weren’t better than anyone else's, in fact they are just OK to read IMHO.
But what he did differently than most fiction writers is that he published a whole series of novels.
So when one of his readers finished the first book they were eager to read the next, and so on, and so on.
And that’s the real secret to success through fiction publishing. You need to write and publish a whole series of novels instead of just publishing one and sitting back and expecting to make a fortune.
But having said that, the first caveat here is to make sure that each of your novels, not only leads the readers through an on-going story, but each novel must also stand alone. There can be no open endings.
It’s just like the Harry Potter novels. Each book is a complete story so even if you only read one of them, you can follow what’s happening and understand who all the characters are. But every subsequent book builds on what happened in the previous books.
Another caveat, is to make sure that the readers, when buying one of your books, knows that it is part of a series.
I know of one author who published a series of novels but didn’t make it clear on the cover. So when readers found out that there were more books to read they felt cheated because they thought each book was a separate story.
The author changed her book covers to make it clear that it was a series, but the damage was already done because of the unfavourable reviews being posted online.
And if you want to write non-fiction you can also write and publish a series of ebooks by expanding your subject and breaking it down into separate ebooks instead of separate chapters.
So if you want to sell more novels, think about writing a series to keep your readers hooked and wanting more.
-------------------
Self Publish Worldwide
