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.
People have been announcing the end of the golden age of self-publishing since about 2013. They’ve been wrong every year since, and they’re wrong now, with a new reason each time.
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 benefits anybody producing quality work consistently. When the average book is worse, a good one is easier to find, not harder.
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 honestly 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, not an afterthought. 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.
The book on this: Make a Living as a Self-Published Author is the business of a writing career across eighteen chapters, revised for 2026 and built on what hasn’t changed since 2017.
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 aren’t the ones who write the most. They’re the ones who write the most books in topics people are looking for.
Research is the difference between a productive catalog and a pile.
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 substantial 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.
Do pen names help or hurt a self-published author?
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.
Copyright registration and some rights assignments often require disclosure of the legal author. That’s where authors get caught out. Avoid anything that infringes a trademark or impersonates a real person.
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 long does it take to make a living from self-publishing?
By treating writing as the thing that gets protected, not the thing that 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, not a productivity system, and the distinction matters because a productivity system is another thing to maintain instead of writing.
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.
She opens with the fantasy version. Being young, being enamoured 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 isn’t a book about that. It’s 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.
There’s a very large number of voices claiming, and frequently screaming, that they know exactly how you can make thousands of dollars a day or six figures or become a millionaire. Those offers add confusion to 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.
Anybody looking for a quick way to make a buck will be disappointed by what I’ve written, and I meant them to be.
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 the fact 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 quietly disappear.