5 Publishing Hacks for Indie Authors 2020

Here are my five best hacks for self-published authors.


1. Enroll in Kindle Unlimited
You'd think having your books available on every possible platform would be your best chance at making more money... But Amazon has changed the game with Kindle Unlimited. I started out publishing wide, with my book available on Nook, Google, Apple, and Kobo as well, but that was a HUGE mistake. Firstly, Amazon rewards books that are in the Kindle Unlimited program. Whenever someone checks your book out and reads on Kindle Unlimited, your title gets a boost on the charts. As if that advantage isn't cool enough, Amazon pays you for every page read by readers in the program. But Brittni, how is a fraction of a cent per page going to make a difference?


So below is a screenshot of my sales broken down by month. The black is paperback sales, the red is ebook sales, and those gorgeous blue bars are made from money earned with Kindle Unlimited page reads. You can see the month when I started and how it has scaled up each month. That's because the readers in this program can try out your books at no additional cost to them, which means they're more willing to take on a new author who doesn't have their name out there yet. Once it catches on, you end up generating a whole lot of momentum on Amazon and it stacks with every book.

If I was not in Kindle Unlimited, you could chop the blue off this chart. That's a lot of money lost, more than I made combined on other platforms. Even worse, the momentum from the pages read probably sold a lot of ebooks too. If you look at that first big red spike if I had been in the KU program during that time, I would have had gotten where I wanted much quicker.

I'm not even finished. If you're planning on making a living at this, you'll eventually need to invest in ads. Say for example you want to promote your book with a budget of $1 per day. If your books are wide, you'd need to advertise to 6 platforms, that's $6 per day. It's better for new authors to stick with one platform, you can always take your books wide down the line. (Personally, I'm staying forever.)

2. Buy Vellum
Hear me out. If you plan to publish more than a few books, Vellum is a must. There are other programs that work just fine, but Vellum is an easy to use drag and drop formatting software that is a publisher's best friend. Need to make a boxset? Drag and drop all of the books into one file and that's pretty much it.
If you pay someone else to format for you, you'll have to pay them again or bother them every time you need to update or change it and as an indie author, I do this a lot. Maybe I come out with a new series and want to add a promo image to the back, it's so much easier to make changes and have them when I want them.
It's a hefty investment to start, with a one time $250ish fee, but I've saved so much by switching.
If you plan to publish wide (Not a great idea if you're new) D2d is a good free alternative.

3. Invest in a Newsletter
So one way that indie authors promote is by newsletter. Basically, this is a currency in the indie community. Once you raise your newsletter numbers you can feature other authors and they'll do the same. It's free advertising. I'm not going to go into how to do this here, but I wish I started this before I published anything. Now when I have a new release I can send a message to 5,000 people at once and get a nice boost in sales.

4. Commission Art for Ads
Hiring an artist to digitally paint an interesting image isn't all that expensive. It also gets a better click-through on Facebook ads. Badly cropped covers or anything with text on the image won't do as well. Trust me, it's something to look into.

 5. Join 20booksto50k
There's a Facebook group called 20booksto50k where a lot of the indie writers trade secrets. There are self-made millionaires in there telling you their formula. If you're not in the group... you might want to join. Just don't try and promote your book there or you'll be bounced.


I hope you found some of these hacks useful. Leave a comment below with your best publishing hacks. You can also check out my best series here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Z9LZ1RY/