Behind the Book: Make a Living as a Self-Published Author

This was one of the first books I wrote. The first edition came out in 2017 and this one has been rebuilt around it instead of touched up.

I’m fond of this book, and a little stubborn about it. It argues something I still believe with some heat: work builds a writing income, and anybody selling it as luck or a trick is taking money from people who can’t spare it. Rebuilding it for 2026 was my chance to find out whether that argument had held up.

Each time somebody declares the golden age of self-publishing over, they bring a new reason, and they’re as wrong now as they were in 2013.

The current reason is AI. Books and ghostwriting are relics, the argument goes, because why would anybody buy a book when a machine will produce one on request. Before that it was market saturation. Before that it was the collapse of the ebook bubble.

Meanwhile the tools got better, the platforms matured, and the distribution options widened. The noise got louder too. That’s real. More books published daily, more courses promising to shortcut the work, more machine-generated content in the stores.

What the doomsayers miss is that noise helps anybody producing quality work consistently. When the average book gets worse, a good one gets easier to find. I get tired of hearing people predict the death of an industry that keeps paying the writers who show up and do the work.

What changed between the 2017 and 2026 editions?

Three things, in practical terms.

AI became a legitimate research and editing assistant, if you use it properly and don’t let it write the book. That distinction is the whole chapter and it isn’t a small one. Audiobooks became a serious revenue stream. In 2017 an audiobook was a thing you did afterward if the book worked. It’s now a channel with its own economics.

And subscription platforms like Substack and Patreon created direct-to-reader income that didn’t meaningfully exist when the first edition was written.

What hasn’t changed about self-publishing since 2017?

Every fundamental in the book. Research your market before you write. Publish consistently. Build a catalog. Treat it like a business, not a hobby that occasionally produces money. The authors failing in 2026 are failing for the same reasons they were failing in 2017. Wrong topics, inconsistent output, no platform, no patience. Not one of those has anything to do with AI, market saturation, or any of the other explanations currently on offer.

That’s the finding that made the revision worth doing. A decade of platform change and the failure modes didn’t move.

Why is self-publishing worth doing at all?

Because the barrier that used to define publishing is gone.

Getting a book to readers once meant interesting an agent so that an agent would interest a publisher, or spending your own money to print thousands of copies and store them in a garage while hoping to sell a few at local bookstores.

A friend of mine ordered a thousand copies from a printing company in China a decade ago. The book was gorgeous and he gave them away at speaking engagements. Outside of specific circumstances, print on demand has removed the need for any of that.

Beyond a few restrictions on extreme material, anybody can now publish any original work they create and reach a global audience. That’s a larger change than most people writing about it have absorbed.

What decides whether a self-published author’s catalog works?

Research before writing, and almost nobody does it.

Check Amazon. Walk into bookstores. Talk to readers. None of that is foolproof and even basic market research saves months of work on a book nobody wants. It matters more the more you publish, because speed without targeting is only faster failure. The authors who build sustainable catalogs are the ones who write the most books in topics people are looking for. My book on selling on eBay sold about 5,000 copies, and I’d credit the subject more than anything clever I did with it. People wanted that answer before the book existed. Writers who skip the research and then blame the market are blaming the wrong party, and it costs them years they’ll never get back.

Should you write series or standalones?

A decision to make before a word exists, and it’s commercial instead of artistic.

One author and writing coach I interviewed chose series deliberately, and her reasoning is hard to argue with. If book one goes well, selling book two to the same audience is far easier than selling a new concept to a new audience. The readers who liked the first one already trust you. Her five-year plan is three considerable series running at once. That’s a catalog strategy built into the planning stage instead of discovered afterward. Most authors decide this by accident. That means they decide it badly.

What does Make a Living as a Self-Published Author say about pen names?

That they’re legitimate and that the paperwork isn’t optional.

You can use a pen name on the cover, the title page and the copyright page where allowed, and promote under it. You don’t have to build a second real-life persona from nothing. Contracts and some rights assignments require your legal name, and that’s where authors get caught out, even though a copyright registration can be filed under the pen name alone. A pen name hides you from readers. It won’t hide you from a contract. Avoid anything that infringes a trademark or impersonates a real person, because the author carries that risk alone.

Some authors hire ghostwriters for books released under a pen name. Those arrangements are legal when properly contracted and documented, and the qualification is doing all the work in that sentence.

How do you make time to write as a self-published author?

By treating writing as the thing you protect when everything else gets squeezed.

The chapters run through a quadrant approach to what deserves the day. Strategic planning for future books and platform elements that pay off over time sit in the quadrant that never feels urgent and produces most of the eventual income.

Then the tasks that feel pressing and move nothing. Some social media responses, certain administrative work, non-essential email. If they can’t be delegated they get handled fast and aren’t permitted anywhere near prime writing hours. That’s a working writer’s schedule. Productivity systems sold to writers are a poor deal, because a system is one more thing to maintain instead of writing, and the people selling them are rarely the ones finishing books.

Who wrote the foreword to Make a Living as a Self-Published Author?

Bonnie K.T. Dillabough, and she puts the distinction better than I do. (See also my review of her novel Ripples of Infinity)

She opens with the fantasy version. Being young, being enamored with writing, imagining herself and a friend as famous writers in a little flat somewhere with a typewriter and stacks of blank paper, drinking herb tea and collecting hordes of raving fans. Then she says this is a guide through the reality of a writing career, and it isn’t for hobbyists or dreamers. Anybody can become a published author. Not everybody becomes a paid published author making a real living from the work. Her sharpest line is the one about what kind of book this is. There are a great many books about how to write. This is a book about how to get paid to write, and she’s right that those are different subjects with very little overlap. She also wrote that she wished somebody had handed her the book when she was younger. That’s the sentence I’d want on the cover if I were allowed one.

What can no self-publishing guide do for you?

Make you money quickly.

A very large number of voices claim, frequently at a scream, that they know exactly how you can make thousands of dollars a day or six figures or become a millionaire. I hate them. They make their money selling the dream to writers, and the writers who believe them lose months to confusion in a picture that’s already complicated.

This book is a practical map for building an income that can support you and a family, and it makes no promises, because the outcome depends on your skills, your effort, and how long you’re prepared to keep going.

What I’ve written will disappoint anybody looking for a quick way to make a buck, and I meant it to.

What does it take to make a living as a self-published author?

The whole operation, in eighteen chapters.

What to write and how to decide. Writing itself. Using AI honestly. Brand, platform, the author blog, the email list. Legal concerns. Covers, metadata, the parts of a book, the copyright page. Publishing, networking, keeping the money flowing, and that it’s a business.

Metadata gets more space than most books in this category give it, because metadata is where a great many otherwise good books disappear. I’m proud of this book because it refuses to lie to anybody about how long this takes. A self-published writer who treats it as a business, researches the market and keeps publishing can make a living, and I think anyone telling them otherwise, whether they’re predicting doom or shouting about easy money, is doing them real harm.

From the author

Make a Living as a Self-Published Author
Authors have never had it better, and most still make nothing. Make a Living as a Self-Published Author treats writing as a business and shows how to build one behind the books.

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