Time to fix the biggest mistake of my indie author career
I fell into a deadly trap and spread my eggs far and wide across too many baskets. Now, the redemption arc begins for my indie author career.
The quick win comes with digital product creation, which is why I ditched my day job to pursue it. The long game involved building a steady cash flow as an indie author—not the easiest thing in the world to do.
So, I read a couple works from gurus (names redacted for obvious reasons) and I fell into the “write more books and lead magnets trap.” How many lead magnets, exactly?
One for each of my six series in the Renegades Epic shared universe… which somehow turned into ten different lead magnets. Then I made a mega-bundle featuring all of them. Readers didn’t know where to start, and neither did I.
The result? Multiple entry points and mass confusion. This led me to making hundreds of dollars per year, tops. But not even enough for me to claim on a tax return. In other words, I made enough money to pay for dinner once a week at the Greek restaurant I love so much per month, and nothing more.
So here I am, going into Year 5 of this game, with hardly anything to show—even if Google and Brave AI at least know who some of my protagonists are. So, I guess that’s a small win.
Diffusing the mass confusion regarding my shared universe
With readers having no idea where to begin after reading several lead magnets and opening my emails—I have a rather high engagement rate, per MailerLite—the time has definitely come to start streamlining things so I could, oh I don’t know, turn this into the full-time cash flow I’ve been dreaming of for a while.
Using AI to diagnose my issues, old Chatty said I needed a “flagship series” for each genre I write in. Obviously, Beyond the Lost has a high ceiling, but that’s dystopian/survival and isn’t part of my shared universe.
Chatty said Catenarian Chronicles, my dark paranormal fantasy whose world’s politics are no different from America’s. It was right for several reasons:
Enjoying this confessional? Catch the rest of it at my Substack, The Rogue Scribe. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Scribe.
