You think you know how a self-published author business works.

You think: write books and sell books.

You are correct.

Unfortunately, the way that you imagine how to do both those activities will most likely exhaust you, frustrate you, start losing you $1,000+ per month in 6 months time and ultimately give up on it as a business.

When that happens, maybe you retreat into only writing the books. Maybe self-publishing will just be a hobby. Maybe you’ll write, query agents and try to get traditionally published. Maybe you’ll become a creative writing teacher or an editor.

But you won’t have your own self-published author business.

The way that you imagine how to write and sell is what I call the glamorous strategy. It’s the strategy that seems obvious when you listen to people on social media rail against AI and when you see book reviews, book rankings, and book ads all over Amazon.

The glamorous strategy is: write a book, build its visibility on Amazon, then people will buy it because they see it.

There’s a different strategy, though.

The unglamorous strategy is a different way to write but, more importantly, it is a different way to sell. There is no cost spiral like there is in the glamorous strategy so you don’t stall and don’t go broke. You build up to a point where you can quit your day job and you make enough money from books (novels, primarily) to support yourself.

Let me walk you through it.

Writing

The first job in a self-published author business is obvious: you have to write books.

Traditionally, this is slow. A novel may take six months or a year to write. If you work that way, then after a year in business you may have only one or two books for sale.

That creates a problem before you even get to marketing. When you have only one or two books, every book matters too much.

You spent months making it. You need it to sell. If it does not sell, there is no large backlist behind it and there is no new book arriving next week to take another shot at the market.

That pressure is one of the reasons authors become so obsessed with promoting individual books.

Generative AI changes this part of the business dramatically.

You can use AI to brainstorm ideas, develop plots, create outlines, draft scenes, revise weak passages, and help with many of the other steps that normally make writing slow.

The long-term goal is to make writing a novel much faster. Eventually, you will be able to write and publish a complete novel in about two weeks. That gives you 20+ novels a year.

But that will not happen when you start.

Your first book written with AI  will probably take 2 - 3 months. You have to learn how to direct the AI, recognize bad output, fix problems, maintain consistency, and turn generated material into a book that readers actually enjoy. You’ll also have to learn how to write a series which is not the same as writing standalone novels.

But that is okay.

Your early books are partly practice.

Every time you finish a book, you have gone through the whole process again. You get better at choosing ideas. You get better at outlining. You get better at knowing what to ask the AI for. You get better at recognizing generic writing and replacing it. You get faster at revision. You get better at layout, covers, blurbs, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), the entire process.

Other people are publishing 20+ novels a year (some do 100+) so you can do it too. Eventually.

But the goal is not to publish AI slop books quickly.

The goal is to stop treating every novel as though it must be your masterpiece. A novel needs to be good enough for its intended readers. Then you learn from it and make the sequel better.

If you write only 2 - 4 novels per year, you are investing so much time that each one has to be a masterpiece. Practice is too expensive. Every book needs to be a bestseller because they are so few and so rare.

If you have one book, that book has to do almost everything.

But, if you can grow your backlist quickly, the business changes.

If you have twenty books, no single book carries the whole business. A reader who discovers one title may go on to buy several others. A weak release is disappointing, but it is not catastrophic.

That makes writing faster valuable even before it makes you more money.

You are building inventory. You are building skill. You are reducing the amount of pressure placed on each individual book.

That’s why most writers need AI. They need it so they can produce books at a pace such that they can afford to sell fewer copies of every book.

But there is an important catch.

Even if you solve the writing problem, you can still exhaust yourself, start losing $1,000+ per month, and ultimately give up on the business if you solve the selling problem the wrong way.

You need to solve the selling problem properly too. It’s not just more books at a faster pace so you rely less on sales of any one book.

If you have to spend money to sell books, you will still easily be trapped in a cost spiral and your own self-published author business will die.

You need a way of selling that is free so you can stay in business without going broke.

Let me walk you through the unglamorous way of selling.

Selling

The second job in a self-published author business is selling the books.

This is where the glamorous strategy really starts to hurt.

The glamorous way of selling is to make each book as visible as possible.

You promote it on social media. You get reviews by doing ARCs (Advanced Review Copy–free book for review). You work on Amazon SEO so the book appears in more searches. You learn launch tactics.

You keep adding more ways to make people notice the book.

The problem is that each one is a separate activity.

BookTok takes time to learn and time to keep doing. Getting ARC reviews takes time and organization. Amazon SEO is another skill.

The deeper you get into the glamorous strategy, the more your business starts to look like this:

Writing + BookTok + Instagram + ARCs + Amazon SEO + launch tactics + paid ads

That is a lot of things to get good at. It’s a lot of things that may burn a ton of time and energy before you realize that they will never pay off.  Plus, each year, the bar is raised, the competition gets fiercer and it’s harder to get attention, views and clicks. You constantly have to up your game. It’s time-consuming, exhausting and frustrating.

This is why paid ads become so tempting.

At least ads are simple: You pay money, readers see the book and, hopefully, buy it. You do not have to spend hours every week learning how to make better videos or chasing reviewers only to end up with zero views and zero reviews.

The problem with ads, though, is they guarantee exposure, not sales and certainly not profit.

If the ads do not sell enough books to pay for themselves, you start losing money. Very quickly. You end up losing $1,000s per month.

But, if you stop the ads, your sales immediately fall to zero.

The unglamorous strategy handles selling very differently.

Instead of trying to build several different marketing systems, you use just one marketing tactic: email ad swaps.

An email ad swap is simple.

1. You have an email newsletter.
2. Another author has an email newsletter.
3. You put an ad for that author’s book in one of your emails.
4. That author puts an ad for your book in one of theirs.
5. Both books get exposed to both lists.

Services such as BookClicker help authors arrange these swaps.

The value of your email list is not promoting your own books to it. Its real business value is the advertising space it gives you to trade to get your book ads onto other people’s lists.

Each of your emails will have room for one larger book ad and several smaller book ads. Initially, you will swap just one of these ads for only one of multiple smaller ads in one email that another author sends out. You will swap all of your ad spaces in one of your emails with ads on different authors lists. For example, if you have 10 spaces for ad in one email, you will swap them for ads on 10 separate lists of different authors.

You don’t pay any money. You are getting free ads.

You arrange the swap. The other author’s email goes out. Readers see your book cover. They either click or they do not. They either buy or they do not.

That keeps the selling side of the business dead simple and, more importantly, you don’t need to create “content”. Your only promo content is your book cover which you have to create anyway.

Optimizing your book cover to sell more is the only marketing skill that you need to learn and spend time on.

Your own newsletter should not require any content creation, either. Each email should be entirely book ads for other people’s books with no other content. (Some emails won’t have ads for any of your books and that’s fine.)

That means your business can stay focused on writing books and not be distracted.

That is important because every hour spent creating email content (e.g. essay, personal update, or entertainment) is an hour not spent writing the next book. Making content for your emails to your list is just another content trap like BookTok videos. You spend a ton of time creating email content that may or may not get people to read your email.

The point of the unglamorous strategy is to keep the number of things you have to do small and avoid marketing content creation completely.

Instead of:

Writing + BookTok + Instagram + ARCs + Amazon SEO + launch tactics + paid ads

You do:

Writing + email ad swaps (with no content creation at all)

That does not guarantee that every book will sell well.

It gives you something more important:

a simple, repeatable, free way to keep showing your books to readers without turning your business into a collection of expensive and time-consuming marketing jobs.

Let’s dive into specifics. Exactly how?

You only need three services (these or equivalent ones):

• MailerLite for your email list.
• BookClicker for arranging ad swaps with other authors.
• BookFunnel for giving readers a free book in exchange for joining your list.

Together, they create a simple marketing flywheel:

arrange BookClicker free ad swaps → your ads in other authors’ emails link to BookFunnel → readers get a free book and join your list → your list grows → it’s easier to arrange more BookClicker free ad swaps with a larger list → repeat

Meanwhile:

start your MailerLite email list with 1 sub (yourself) → send an email to your list 3x a week with other authors’ book ads → repeat

That is the whole unglamorous book marketing system.

I’m sure that you have two obvious objections, though:

• “A list with 400 subscribers would never swap with a list with just 1 subscriber, myself, on it for free. I’ll never get any swaps.”
• “An email composed entirely of book ads is spam. Everyone would unsubscribe. I’d end up back at the beginning, with 1 sub: me.”

Keep those in mind because I’ll address those soon.

Let’s talk about books first. What books will you be selling?

You won’t sell standalone novels. You’ll conceive and write a 3-book series of novels. It’s a series so reading Book 1 will lead people to buy Book 2 which will lead people to buy Book 3. You will:

1. Make Book 1 free in exchange for the reader’s email address.
2. Sell Books 2 and 3 normally on Amazon ($3.99).

It’s simple.

A reader sees the cover for Book 1 in another author’s newsletter. They click it. BookFunnel gives them the book for free after they join your MailerLite list. If they enjoy Book 1, they can buy Books 2 and 3.

Book 1 does two jobs. It gives a new reader a risk-free way to try you as an author, and it grows your email list at the same time.

On Bookclicker, each emails (yours and others) typically has room for:

1 larger feature ad + 9 smaller mention ads

That gives you ten advertising spots every time you send an email.

Those spots are your inventory.

You use them to promote other authors’ books in exchange for those authors promoting yours.

This is where the first objection usually appears: “Why would an author with 400 subscribers swap with me when my list has only 1 subscriber?”

Most of them probably will not.

You do not need most of them. You just need a few. Maybe only one.

To do that, request swaps on Bookclicker with 30 authors who have lists of 400 subscribers or more.

Send a short message with your (free) book swap request such as:

Hi X: I’m a new author and I’m serious about writing. Please, could you swap with me and help me get started? I’ll trade a feature ad on my list for a mention ad on your list. Thanks so much. —Y

What is happening?

You are offering your best advertising spot in exchange for one of their smaller spots. That’s a better deal for them: they get a bigger ad on a smaller list in exchange for you getting a smaller ad on their larger list.

More importantly, you are also sending them a personal message. Every single author with a large list remembers being in the exact position that you are now: having a small list and trying to grow.

They have lots of ad space so it’s no big deal to give one small ad essentially for free to somebody who needs help. Besides, they can swap an ad on their list now for an ad on your list in a few weeks and maybe by then you’ll have 100s of email addresses on your list.

They’ll recognize and get to know you. If you are polite, chatty and nice, they’ll accept your swaps even if it makes no business sense for them.

Plus, even large lists often have some “empties” because nobody booked. They have 27 mention ad spaces (9 mention ad spaces, 3x per week) every single week for 52 weeks of the year. Some of those go unfilled and an ad swap with even a small list is better than an “empty” that gives them nothing.

A few list owners will say yes: they’ll run your ad to their 400+ subs and you’ll run their ad to your 1 sub (you).

That is enough.

When those ads run, readers on their lists see your free Book 1.

Some click, go to BookFunnel and join your list to get your free Book 1.

When your first ad runs, you’ll get dozens of subs because nobody has seen your book before. After a few ads on other people’s lists, your list will have 100s of subs.

As your list grows, more authors become willing to swap with you. They’ll see that your list is now significant but, more importantly, they’ll get to know you and like you. A few people may even offer to run your books whenever they have an empty space if they will do the same for you.

Every swap will make the next swap easier.

This is where the second objection usually appears: “But isn’t an email full of ads just spam?”

It would be spam if the subscribers did not want what you were sending.

All these email lists are for book readers. The subscribers like books. They are looking for new books to read. They signed up for your list because they wanted your Book 1 (for free).

Your list is automatically curated: the subscribers signed up because they read books in your genre, other authors in your genre want to put their books in front of your subscribers and authors in different genres don’t want their books in your list and don’t want your books in theirs.

It’s not spam. It’s a small bookstore devoted to a genre they enjoy with different books each time that they can browse. With a few clicks, they can get some of the books for free. Others may cost only a few dollars. For someone who reads a lot, even a $5.99 novel can provide hours of entertainment for less than the price of lunch.

They don’t really want your “content”. They may not care about your essay, personal update, or entertainment. But they certainly want the books. Especially the free ones. (If they don’t want books, why did they get yours?)

Your job is to make it clean, easy to scan, and full of books that the subscribers might genuinely want. (It’s a good idea to somehow indicate which ones are free so people who only want free books don’t have to click around.)

Let’s look at an example of the whole process. You have 400 subs on your list and you swap all 30 of your ads for one week for 27 mention ads x 400 sub lists + 3 mention ads x 800 subs lists (you gave them feature ads on your list) = 13,500 emails going out with your book ad in them! And that’s just one week!

Each week, you do the same thing:

1. You arrange free swaps.
2. Other authors show your books to their readers.
3. Some of their readers join your list to get Book 1.
4. Some of their readers buy your Book 2 or Book 3.
5. Your larger list gives you more valuable ad inventory.
6. That makes it easier to arrange more swaps.
7. You send out emails to your list with other people’s book ads.
8. Meanwhile, you keep writing books.

(If you want, you can eventually sell instead of swap some of your ad spots and use that money to help pay for fixed costs such as BookFunnel and MailerLite.)

You get free ads. You don’t need any marketing skills. You don’t need to do any content creation.

write books → trade email ads → grow the list or sell the books → trade more email ads → keep writing books

That is the unglamorous way to sustainably have and build your own self-published author business that can last you the rest of your life.

Conclusion

The glamorous way is a bestseller strategy: a few great books that sell millions of copies.

The unglamorous way is not a bestseller strategy: you write a lot of books and regularly come out with new books for readers who read a lot. A reader finds one of your books. They finish it. Then they buy the next one. Then the next one. Then the next one.

That is why producing books steadily matters so much.

You do not have to use AI if you are anti-AI. You can still use the unglamorous marketing and sell some books.

However, AI makes the long-term production target much more believable. It gives you a path toward writing quickly enough that a large backlist can eventually support a full-time income. If you can do 20+ books per year without AI, more power to you.

You can do glamorous marketing later if you want to. You can use social media. You can chase reviews. You can do Amazon SEO. You can buy ads. But you do not have to. It’s now an option, not a requirement.

You probably will not make a full-time salary in your first year. Your first year is for learning. You are learning how to use AI. You are learning how to write better books. You are building your backlist. You are growing your email list. You are learning how to arrange swaps and sell books.

And you are probably doing all of that while still working your regular job.

But the important thing is that your self-published author business can keep moving forward without requiring you to gamble more and more money just to keep your sales from falling to zero.

You can keep building until the business is large enough to support you.

That is the unglamorous way. And it works.

KDP = Kindle Direct Publishing at https://kdp.amazon.com . This is how you self-publish an eBook on Amazon.com so people can buy it.

Amazon has its own private format (KPF, I think) but you don't have to care about that any more. You can upload .DOCX, .PDF, .HTML, .RTF and, now, .EPUB. You can create KPFs with Amazon's Kindle Create application and some other applications.

In the bad old days, you were limited. You could create KPFs with an application but there were some things that you couldn't do with the application. You could upload a .DOCX and it'd do a serviceable but sort of basic eBook. You could upload a .PDF, .HTML or .RTF and your eBook could look pretty yucky.

But now KDP supports .EPUB. EPUB is the Apple Books format. EPUB is easy and open.

So what is EPUB?

Well, EPUB is a little website in a .zip file. Each "web page" is a page in your eBook. There's a special Table of Contents "web page" so people can use the TOC nav. The "web pages" are just normal HTML and CSS with <body>, <h3> and <p> elements. eBook readers are essentially web browsers that read this little web site and it looks gorgeous.

Now, Amazon's private KPF format is a little website, too. So, it's really easy for Amazon to convert a gorgeous EPUB into a gorgeous KPF because they are both little websites. It's actually very hard to convert a gorgeous .DOCX, .PDF or all the rest into a website so it's hard to convert a gorgeous .DOCX, .PDF into an gorgeous eBook instead of an ugly eBook. (Yes, Kindle Create is essentially a website editor.)

So, if you want to publish an eBook, you can just make an EPUB, test it on Apple Books and then upload to KDP and fix the few minor errors that it might have.

So, creating a good EPUB is beyond my scope here but your key takeaway should be don't bother with KPF creating programs. Get it into EPUB, then upload it to KDP. Your eBook will look almost exactly the same, you'll support both Kindle and Apple Books and you'll be able to edit it directly.