This morning, I happened to stumble upon a post in a Facebook group for authors. A chap with a single novel to his name, asking the assembled wisdom of the internet how to sell more books. He’d spent the previous twelve months ploughing money into ads. His total spend? More than the royalties his novel had earned in the same period.
The replies came thick and fast. BookBub. Facebook ads. Amazon ads. Newsletter swaps. One bloke even tried to sell him a course on TikTok marketing for authors, which felt a bit like offering swimming advice to someone without arms.
Nobody mentioned the only answer that actually works.
Write More Books
That’s the answer, in full. If you want to sell more books, write more books.
I’m not being glib. There’s genuine maths behind it. A single novel sitting on Amazon is a lottery ticket. A catalogue of twenty novels is a fishing trawler. Every new title creates a fresh chance for a reader to stumble across your work, and once they’ve read one, they’ll often work through the rest. I make most of my income from readers who discover one of my books and then go on to read other books in my catalogue. That doesn’t happen if there’s only one book to read.
Ads on a single book rarely work either. The average margin on an ebook is a few quid, so when you’re paying 40-50p just for a click on Facebook or Amazon, you’d need a conversion rate of 1-in-4 to make profit. That kind of conversion is unheard of in any sector, never mind one as competitive as books.
On Amazon, you’re also competing with authors who have multiple books to sell. They’re not trying to sell a single book; they’re trying to attract readers. They know that if someone picks up one of their books, that reader could be worth £10, £20, £30+ to them if they read everything the author has ever penned.
To give you an example, if one person buys the first book in my Clement series, that reader is actually worth £6.88 when I factor in the read-through to the other three books in the series. I can therefore afford to bid three times as much for a keyword in Amazon Ads as someone selling a single book. And I’m just one author.
Think of it like this. Imagine sitting on the bank of a river with your fishing rod set up, a single line in the water. Then, you see a guy fifty yards upstream with twenty rods and twenty lines in the water. How many fish will you catch in an hour compared to that guy? I hate fishing, so this is where the analogy ends, but I’d guess very few.
I appreciate that this might not be the advice you want to hear, BUT it’s the most freeing piece of advice you’ll receive all year. Stop pouring petrol on damp wood. Go and write the next book.
Three Other Things That Matter (Whether You Have One Book or Twenty)
The “write more books” rule is necessary but not sufficient. A prolific author who fails on any of the following will still struggle. Nail all three and the catalogue effect kicks in properly.
1. Write Something Worth Reading. Then Edit It Properly.
Sounds obvious. Isn’t.
I’ve lost count of the first novels I’ve opened that read like an enthusiastic message from a stranger on LinkedIn. The author has clearly poured their soul onto every page. Bless them. But nobody told them the dialogue creaks, the pacing sags around chapter four, and the opening line contains the phrase “little did she know.” A decent editor isn’t optional. A decent editor is the difference between a book and a manuscript.
2. The Cover Earns Its Keep in Three Seconds
Spending twelve months on a novel and then ninety minutes on the cover in Canva isn’t thrift. It’s self-sabotage. The cover is the only piece of marketing the book will ever do entirely by itself, and a reader thumb-scrolling Amazon at half eleven at night makes a yes-or-no decision in roughly the time it takes to blink.
If the budget is tight, buy a pre-made cover. If the budget is non-existent, save up. Treating the cover as an afterthought is like turning up to a job interview in sweatpants and a stained t-shirt. I’ll spare you the cliché about first impressions.
3. The Blurb Is Harder Than the Book
This is the one nobody believes until they’ve tried it.
You’ve just spent a year writing eighty thousand words. The blurb needs around a hundred and fifty. How hard can it be?
Extremely.
The blurb isn’t a summary of the plot. The blurb is a piece of sales copy. Different muscle entirely. The novelist’s job is to tell a story. The blurb writer’s job is to make a stranger click ‘Buy Now’.
Sell the question, not the answer. Sell what’s at stake. And whatever you do, don’t tell the reader what happens at chapter twenty-six.
If your blurb opens with “When Sarah moves to a sleepy Cornish village”, you have already lost. Sarah is one of roughly forty thousand novels currently opening in a sleepy Cornish village this Tuesday. Pick a different verb, a different setting, or a different Sarah.
Most authors knock the blurb out in an afternoon. I spend longer on a blurb than I do on a chapter, and I rewrite it a month after release, once I can see what readers actually responded to. The blurb is the difference between a click and a scroll. It deserves the time.
If you’re into snappy phrases that encapsulate a ton of words, remember this: in the blurb you’re selling, not telling.
The Bottom Line
If you have one book out and you’re spending money trying to sell it, stop. That money is better invested in writing the next one, fixing the cover of the first one, and rewriting the blurb that isn’t doing its job.
Marketing a single novel is like trying to start a fire with one matchstick in a force eight gale. You’re not wrong to want it to catch. The wind simply isn’t on your side. Add more matchsticks. Build a proper pile. Then strike.
I have twenty novels. I have a website, a newsletter, and a modest Facebook presence. I run almost no ads. I make a living from this. The catalogue does the work for me, and it keeps doing it whether I’m at my desk, on holiday, or doing something far more interesting than worrying about Amazon ad spend.
If you want to see what twenty novels looks like in practice, the catalogue is here. Borrow one on Kindle Unlimited if you fancy testing the theory that I usually earn more that way. Or buy one outright. Either is welcome. Both fund the next one.