Some time ago, I made a video on a concept called “Books Sell Books.” I thought it was time for another update because I recently received some surprising information. It shouldn’t have been surprising, considering everything I talk about, but it was surprising to me. I thought it might be helpful to share it with all of you.
For anyone new to this channel, my name is Seth. I’m a full-time fantasy author. I write books. I sell books. I love making videos about both of those things—about writing and about selling books. This video is more about selling books.
So, if you are an author, or if you’re someone who would like to be an author, or if you’re someone who’s either just starting out in your career or you’ve been at it for a while, I want to talk about this phrase, “Books Sell Books,” and my experience with it. This is one of the things you hear bandied about if you hang out in author forums or around authors. However, I’ve been hearing it less and less, which is really fascinating to me. Instead, I’ve been hearing more and more about marketing and social media and how to get yourself out there and how to sell your book. But I think that’s a trap. Bear with me as I work through this.
The phrase “Books Sell Books” is pretty self-explanatory. The best way to sell your book is to have someone read a different book of yours and like it enough to come and buy another of your books. This is really just talking about the compounding effect of having multiple books out.
This is also a fairly new concept. The traditional model encourages people to write one or two books a year because that’s all the system can handle. People who write more than one or two books a year are in a particular category in the traditional world, and they only get into that category when they have proven themselves by selling a lot of books.
However, in the indie world, there is an understanding that the more content you have—as long as your content is good or as long as the reader enjoys your content—the more content you have, the more things you can sell. This is an especially important principle because most people don’t buy books again. That is to say, if they buy one book, they’re not going to buy that same book a second time.
This means that if I’m an author and I have one book available for someone to buy, if I want to sell more than one copy, I have to acquire a second customer. Customer acquisition—getting someone to buy my book—is more expensive than someone being able to buy multiple products from me. So every time I come out with a book and someone enjoys it, and then they go and buy a second book of mine, I didn’t have to pay anything for that second sale.
Hopefully, that’s not too confusing. If it is, let me know in the comments, and I’ll try to break that down better. But this principle that “Books Sell Books” is a really vital one if you want to be an indie author or a hybrid author. Really, even if you want to be a traditional author.
Because publishing companies are not spending money to advertise books anymore. They’re really not. They’re not marketing books. They spend money for advances, and then they don’t spend that money on marketing books. And that is a real bummer because it means that the author themselves has to do it.
There’s also another thing that’s happening. In the indie world, we went through a bit of a gold rush period. Around 2009 to 2015 was considered this gold rush period, where anyone who was publishing with any level of quality made money hand over fist. This gold rush really rewarded people who put out the most books possible. But it also created a false perception. It created this idea that still lingers today, that you can make money online being an author, and that the way you do it is you write a good book, and you put it out there, and then lots of people buy your book, and you become famous overnight.
And that is not how it works. It’s not how it ever worked. There are the occasional unicorns who will put out a book, and it will blow up on social media. It’ll do really well. And when that happens, they suddenly become famous. But internet fame doesn’t usually last. And it often doesn’t even translate into sales.
So I think it’s really important that if you are coming into the book world, especially in the modern era, you understand this concept. If you want to sell books, you have to write books. And I don’t mean like write two books or three books. You have to write a lot of books. That’s not necessarily what people want to hear, but it is really important.
To illustrate how important it is, I’m going to share a little bit of information about my own journey. My first book was released in December of 2018. In the first month, I made a few thousand dollars in sales. For a new author, self-publishing, that was a significant achievement. I made a couple of thousand dollars in the following months, although the amount decreased slightly each time.
However, when my second book was released, it boosted the series. I noticed an interesting pattern on my dashboard. There was always a spike in sales in the first month after a book’s release, which then tapered off quite quickly. But because I was releasing a new book every three or four months, I would see another spike in sales just as the previous one was starting to taper off. This is a fairly typical pattern for a dashboard.
As I continued to release books, I fell into this rhythm. I noticed that if I didn’t release another book, my sales would drop significantly. This held true for the first three or four books. But around the fifth book, I noticed a change. My sales, even when they tapered off, were higher. I was selling more books during my down periods.
Every time I released a book, I earned more income in the first month. Even after the initial drop-off, which is common in the industry, I was selling more books. This makes sense when you think about it. If a reader enjoys the first book in a series, they’re likely to read the second, and so on. This means that instead of getting a single sale, I was getting consistent sales over time.
This pattern became even more pronounced when I released my second series. Readers who enjoyed my first series would then check out my other works. They would see the Titan series, for example, and read all the way through it. This happened with each new series I released.
As a result, I developed a roadmap for how I recommend people approach this. Books sell books. You can invest a lot in advertising your first novel, but nothing is more efficient than simply writing a second book.
When I start a new series, I don’t bother advertising the first book. I focus on writing the second and third books. Around the third book, I start to put more effort into promoting the series. I continue this pattern for each subsequent book.
If you’re writing a trilogy, you would stop at three and then start a new series. For me, most of my series are six books or more. I’ve found that three books is the point at which you should start promoting a series.
If you’re not writing long series, then stacking series is the way to go. Write your first three books for the first series, then start another. The goal is to give readers something to engage with and continue reading.
But there’s another reason why the principle of “books sell books” is a good one to follow. The more books you write, the better you become as a writer. As you improve, it becomes easier to sell your books. Focusing on writing rather than marketing or growing an audience, especially when you’re starting, is the way to go.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/12AHT2c9S7M
Thanks for reading and watching.
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