It's So Easy to Write Books – And So Hard to Sell Them!
Why writing for Medium and Substack are more profitable for me
Writing a book used to mean you needed an agent and a contract with a publishing house. It wasn’t easy. But once you were in, you enjoyed all the professional services of your publisher. You didn’t have to design a cover or arrange editing or publicity.
You can get around the gatekeepers now and be published anytime you want – but you will have to do all those things and more on your own, and you’ll be competing against the big publishing houses that already know how to do all the things you have to figure out mostly for yourself.
The No. 1 thing you have to figure out for yourself is this: Is your book worth it?
Writing a book is just about the most fun you can have
It’s deeply satisfying, but also a bit indulgent: You are asking other people to pay you money so they can then devote many hours to reading your thoughts. Are you making it worth both their money and their time?
It’s one thing if a major publishing house is devoting resources to convincing people your book is worthwhile. But if you have to devote your own resources to this, you better be convinced your book is worth it.
Lots of excellent books are written every year, and most of them will never be read by very many people. You have to know going in that your book will probably be one of them. I did.
I recently published The Trailer Park Rules. I worked hard on it, and I spent my pandemic stimulus money paying a professional book editor. I spent money on a professional cover, too. I’ve devoted a lot of effort to promotion and the result is … modest sales.
And I’m thrilled!
Achieving modest sales on a self-published book is a huge achievement, particularly if this is the first book you’ve published under a particular name.
However, The Trailer Park Rules is not my first book. In 2018, I started writing genre novels under pen names. I wrote two series, and it’s a fact that series novels are much easier to sell than a more serious novel.
Each ebook pays $2.10 and each paperback pays $5.15.
I have sold 282 ebooks and 152 paperbacks as of today. So I get $1,375.
This doesn't include a smattering of books sold via local bookstores/at book signings, but I don't have those figures because they'll settle up with me later. It's a couple of hundred bucks so far. I don't think this is exact as I get different amounts from foreign sales, but those don't amount to very much.
I sold 18,540 genre novels. I sell a negligible number of paperbacks - those are overwhelmingly ebooks so I'm not going to bother with them. The genre novels are priced at $3.99 and I get to keep $1.40 each for them. So doing the math, I have made something like $25,956 from them since 2018.
The Trailer Park Rules is about some people living in a trailer park
Here’s the blurb:
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer parkFor residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.
Writing light genre novels is fun and I may do a few more…
…but Trailer Park is more like the kind of book I read for pleasure. So I took what I learned about writing and publishing genre novels and applied it to writing this new book.
I write my books (and my Medium and Substack pieces, and my freelance work and everything else) on Google docs. I format the novels using the free Kindle Create software.
You can design your own covers if you’re good at it, but I’ve always paid a designer because while I technically know how to do it, my attempts are not good enough and I cannot overemphasize how important your cover is. The best book in the world will not sell if the cover isn’t right. It doesn’t just have to look good, either – it has to signal the genre.
There are whole books out there about how to choose Amazon keywords and how to write blurbs and all the rest of it, and if you decide to write books, you have to learn all of it.
Writing a book or two under a pen name as a learning experience is not the worst idea.
That’s not what I was trying to do, though. When I was the editor of a daily newspaper, the woman who ran cops for me each day was Brenda Rothert, and if you look her up, you’ll see she’s now a very successful romance novelist. I ran into her then-husband at a meeting one day (he was the city manager of our town at the time) and he told me about her work. I went straight home and started writing. My romance novels didn’t do as well as hers, however, probably because I wasn’t writing the kind of books I love to read.
I have a lot of advantages going for me
I have a decent understanding of the self-publishing biz now, I have a mailing list thanks to Medium and Substack, and I have written a genuinely good, high-quality book. I’m working on my next one, but I will not be able to crank out this kind of book as quickly as I could the genre novels, and I’m OK with that.
This is more of a passion project. I’m well aware that I’m unlikely to sell millions of copies. But sometimes, writing one good thing is reward enough.
I’m making more on Medium
The most astonishing thing happened last month. I wrote a story on Medium that has earned $15K! Yes, a piece that took me two or three hours to write out-earned the book that I devoted at least a year to!
The piece is We Could Learn a Lot About Sex From the Dutch. What made this story take off? Well, it has the word “sex” in the headline, which is one good way to get attention, but it’s not a sexy story. It’s mostly about the differences between American and Dutch sex education.
I’m married to a Dutch guy, and people tend to like the pieces I write about our cultural differences. In fact, for a long time my most successful story on Medium was another American/European/Dutch cultural story: How You Drink Your Coffee Shows Who You Are: Americans really know how to ruin a good cup of coffee. (That story has earned a little more than a thousand bucks. We used the money to buy a nice espresso maker!)
The sex education story has some of my personal experiences – there’s a hopefully humorous bit about me forcing my then-teenaged son to listen to a lecture about contraception as we did yard work – and I include some stats that show the Dutch have dramatically lower rates of teen pregnancy, suggesting their approach works better than the American one.
Furthermore, I think I hit the SEO pretty well:
The Netherlands has comprehensive sex education, a progressive culture and lower teen pregnancy rates. Americans could learn a lot from the Dutch.
So here are the things I think made this story so successful:
“Sex” in the title
Good SEO
A blend of personal experience and statistics from a reputable source
A comparison of American and European cultures
Lots and lots of luck!
It’s worth studying your most successful work, but it’s also a good idea to understand there’s some magic involved. I joked to my husband that I need to write something that combines information on Dutch sex and Dutch coffee! I haven’t yet figured out how to combine those two topics, but when I do, I expect the big bucks will roll right in.
🥰Michelle Teheux is a writer in central Illinois. You can subscribe to her here or on Medium. To buy The Trailer Park Rules, click here. 🥰
⭐⭐Calling all future Medium superstars⭐⭐
Do you feel inspired by Michelle's WOW-worthy Medium story?
Get access to the NEW Medium School that will change your writing game.
If you upgrade you not only can watch the replay but also get access to my NEW Medium School course with 111 lessons (!) and about 25 hours of tutorials, interviews, replays, and bonuses, the writing community with 220+ members, LIVE sessions, and many surprises.
The Medium School is my hands-on, tangible and confidence-building course on how to kickstart your writing on the publishing platform Medium.
It gets updated all the time (because Medium’s only constant is change 😉) and based on the questions I receive from my community.
Good news: It’s a perk for members (subscribers) of my paid community.
And the best part?
It’s only $9 per month or $90 for 365 days support and community.
No, I’m not kidding.
It’s inspired by my successful Medium Kickstarter Bootcamps in which my students have more progress on Medium in just a handful of days than they had in years going at it alone.
🥰 The incredible Michelle Teheux is a dear friend of mine and a community member. Please subscribe to her here or on Medium. To buy The Trailer Park Rules, click here. You can also watch our interview (6:31) here. Your support makes a HUGE difference for Michelle 🥰
Thanks, Michelle for this refreshing summer guest post. Keep rocking Medium, my friend!
 | A guest post by
|
Congrats for your success on Medium. However, there were probably millions of stories written for the one that is performing like yours. Hats down on that. However, I doubt that this is a reliable strategy. For instance, I already had 6 boosted stories (which is a proof that they are probably good), and didn't earn more than $200 on any of them.
So true