It’s not so much a rule as a repeated observation. While the plural of anecdote isn’t data, there comes a point where something happens often enough that one has to believe there’s something other than divine intervention at work.
The observation is that many authors don’t begin to get traction until they’ve published five novels. More specifically, they’ve published five novels in the same recognizable niche—ideally, in a series.
There are two reasons why this observation is important.
First, the goal is to gain an audience for your work. Having an audience means people like to read the stories you like to tell. Everything else comes from that basic premise. Fame, fortune, or just seeing your name on the cover of the book a stranger is reading, you can’t get very far in publishing without an audience.
To gain that audience, you need to be putting books in the places they look. For the average indie author, that means in a sub-sub-cat on Amazon. This creates a problem if your five novels are all in different categories. Sure, go wide if you want. Kobo and Nook and iBook, oh my, but the same observation holds across vendors and even formats. (Can you say “audiobooks?” Of course you can.)
For an example:
In the old days, science fiction was on the Science Fiction shelf. Today it might be on the Space Opera shelf or the First Contact shelf or the Colonization Shelf or the Military SF shelf. If I want to gain an audience, I need to know who that audience is with a much greater degree of specificity than I might have had to in the past—and what kinds of stories each of those shelves hold. I write science fiction, but if I want traction, I need to pick one of those shelves to focus on because that’s where the most likely readers will look.
Which is not to say I need to run up the demographics on those people who have bought my books. I already know their most salient characteristic: they read space opera. Sure, they might read other niches as well, but in order to get their attention I need to have a big enough footprint in one niche to show up on their radar.
Second, amortization of your promotional investment becomes easier when you have more properties. As I wrote last September, backlist is your lever. The five-novel rule provides a rule of thumb for how long that backlist might need to be to effectively amortize your promotional investment in time, money, and focus across your catalog. When you can realistically expect buy-through on your catalog—because the books are in a series or at least all in the same niche—then justifying giving one book away for free becomes a lot more palatable.
This second bit is why I generally don’t recommend that new authors spend time, money, and attention on paid promotion. A Bookbub is great when you’ve got five books, but not so great when you spend $500 to give away a few hundred copies of your only title.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t work on gaining some early fans, but more like maybe focus on what matters most—having your five novels in play—and work on building relationships with the other authors in your chosen niche.
The career path for indie authors involves a different kind of dues. We don’t have to ride the query-go-round, but we have to look past the sales levels of our earliest works and grit through to at least five novels in order to find traction. While it’s true that some people capture lightning in a bottle on their first time in the rain, the odds of winning the lottery are still pretty small.
Somebody cue up Lou Bega. Suddenly, I want to mambo.
As an aside, what would you like me to write about as 2018 unwinds? Leave a comment or email me at nathan.lowell on the gmail.com and I’ll see what I can do.
I wrote the rough draft of five novels all at once. Now I am circling back to revise and self-publish in fairly rapid fashion. (I’m up to book #3). The upside is that my novels are unified and I’ve gotten to correct major flaws that I didn’t notice the first time through. The downside is that the “fun” of creation is now put on hold while I slog through the editing and formatting/uploading phase. Time to write a few short stories to keep the muse amused!
That’s a great approach!
But the grind can be – well – grindy.
Nathan, if you haven’t done so already, what would be your recommendation on an author’s debut novel for marketing focus?–understanding that backlist giveaways won’t be on the short list. Has that changed over the past several years? Thanks for your expertise!
My primary recommendation for the first book is write the second. Any focus you put into marketing is focus you’re taking from book two. Since that’s a really hard sell for new authors*, try finding an ally.
Looking for readers early is really hard because everybody starts at zero and you only build the audience one-at-a-time. It’s where I started and it just took a lot of time to get an audience that can sustain me. If you can borrow an audience from an ally, you can jump start that first kernel of audience.
The advantage is that you can do this while you’re in production for that first book. Look in your niche. Find an indie author whose work you admire and make friends. Once you’re friends, ask if they’d give you a beta read or maybe a cover blurb for the release. After it’s out, you can ask “what am I doing wrong? This first book isn’t selling.” (See also: CC Chapman’s excellent advice Don’t Lead With the Ask)
It all comes back to knowing your niche – who’s active in it, what they’re writing, and how they’re doing. A couple of early-career authors working together to promote works they enjoy can make a huge difference at the end of the first year.
JMO. YMMV.
* It can pay off big. I wrote my first four novels in my debut year (2007) but book five made the splash for me – and gave me the leverage of a back list for my growing fan base to latch on to.
Nathan, thank you so much for sharing your experience and insight to help keep priorities in check.
I think you make a lot of good points. I have a lot more than five books out, but since they’ve been out awhile so I feel like I am sort of starting over again. My latest is a medieval romance and I’m going to try to use my previously published medievals to promote it. But looking back I think I should have written all three books in my new medieval series and then put them out over a year. Right now I’m torn between promoting the first book and finishing the second and going nuts. I think your idea of being strategic is really spot-on and good advice for the many authors who write in several genres and keep putting them out there and hoping something will catch on. It’s a shotgun approach that I don’t think works anymore.