How I made $100,000 dollars from my first novel in just TWO MONTHS (six years after it was published)
Some stories to inspire you to champion your backlist!
Hello my amazing paid community, I hope you’re all travelling and writing well! This month I wanted to tell you a personal story that changed the way I think about publishing success, as well as do some more breakdown on how to get the most value out of our backlists.
I believe we need a bit of a renaissance in the industry in the way we think about backlists: I love looking for ways to value all my books and keep them alive as part of my creative catalogue. What’s more, I always like to take my rights back from publishers if they lose interest in my old books, and this has resulted in a number of exciting wins over the years:
MY BIGGEST WIN WITH MY BACKLIST
Below are my sales reports from Kindle Direct Publishing for the months of June and July 2016.
Yep, you’re reading those figures right. In June I earned $37,100.27 USD and in July I earned $36,481.96 USD, totalling $73,582,23 (around $100,000 AUD in the exchange rate of the time) over just TWO MONTHS. I was also in the Top 500 Amazon bestsellers across all categories during those months - which earned me extra bonus payments. And all this for a book that I had published myself in the US, and which was first published in 2010.
So how did this happen? Well, there were a few reasons: