The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

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Okay, so I have to tell you about a training I just went through that completely shifted the way I think about my books.

It was called Series That Sell — presented by Dana Pittman, a USA Today bestselling author, certified developmental editor, and someone who has written over 100 novels. (Yes, 100. Let that sink in.) I walked away with one of those rare reframes that you can’t un-see once it’s hit you.

Here’s one of the nuggets she shared:

If your books aren’t working together, no amount of marketing is going to fix it.

Oof.

Because so many of us — myself included, at different points — have blamed our sales on our ads, our covers, our blurbs, our lack of a newsletter, whatever. And sometimes those things are the problem. But sometimes? The books just aren’t built to work together. They’re not stacking. They’re not pointing at each other. And when that’s the case, every book you publish feels like starting over from scratch.

Dana has this line: “That’s when you stop chasing readers and they start chasing you.” And isn’t that what we all want?

So let’s talk about how to actually get there.

Your Books Are a Body of Work, Not a List of Titles

The big mindset shift Dana opened with is this: stop thinking about your books as individual projects and start thinking about them as stepping stones in a brand.

When you write in series — and I mean intentionally in series, not just “I’ll figure out book two later” — you’re not just writing stories. You’re building a living ecosystem where every book you publish stretches the marketing dollars of every other book. Each new release sends readers back to book one. Each book one sells book two, three, four without you lifting a finger.

That’s marketing built into the creative process itself.

Dana said: readers don’t fall in love with just one book. They fall in love with a world. Whether that world is a small town, a found family, a workplace, a magical realm — the world is what keeps them coming back, not just the trope. You can write a Grumpy Sunshine all day long, but if your books aren’t tied together by something deeper, readers will finish and walk away. They won’t be hunting down your backlist at midnight.

The 5 Steps to a Bingeable Series

Dana teaches a five-step framework for building a series readers can’t stop bingeing. I’m going to walk you through all five because every single one of them made me want to go back and look at my own books differently.

Step 1: Choose Your Series Spine

This is the big one. The series spine is the emotional thread that holds your entire series together — the through line that runs from book one all the way to the final book.

Think of it like this: if you don’t have a spine in your body, you’re squishy and wishy-washy. And we are not having wishy-washy series around here.

The spine needs to be bigger than the individual love story or plot. It’s not just “siblings finding their true love.” It’s the world they inhabit, the emotional journey that connects them. It might be healing. Redemption. Found family. Second chances. Rebuilding. Justice. Some larger emotional or thematic current that your reader is going to feel in every single book.

You want to figure this out before you think about tropes, titles, or characters.

Start it in pencil — give yourself permission to let it evolve as you build out the other steps — but you need a spine before you build the rest of the skeleton.

Dana suggests starting with three to five questions:

• How are the characters connected? (Siblings, co-workers, same hometown, found family, a shared mission?)

• How many books will the series include?

• What emotional or thematic thread runs through every story?

• What would make readers feel like they’re “coming home” every time they open a new book?

I want you to notice that last one. Coming home. That’s the feeling you’re going for. A reader who finishes book five should feel like they just visited their favorite place.

Step 2: Select Your Series Tropes

Okay, if you’re a romance writer, you already know tropes are everything. But Dana adds a layer to this that I hadn’t fully considered before:

Your tropes need to vary across books while staying in the same family.

What does that mean? It means parallel but not repetitive. Your reader picks up each book and gets a familiar flavor — they know this is your kind of book, your kind of world — but each story still feels fresh. You’re not writing Grumpy Sunshine six times in a row. You’re writing stories that feel like they belong together but give readers something new to fall into.

And here’s the brand question she poses: What are the tropes and themes readers come to YOU to read? What is your flavor? Because when you know that, you can build your entire series around it — and readers who love book one will devour the rest because they know exactly what they’re getting.

The goal is that a reader who picks up book two (without even reading book one) should still want to go back for book one. That’s how you build a series that markets itself.

Step 3: Define the Series Arc

This is the overarching storyline that creates breadcrumbs across all of your books.

Now, Dana is clear that this doesn’t have to mean cliffhangers or a trilogy structure where everything is unresolved. Even if your books can stand alone and be read in any order, the series arc creates a deeply satisfying payoff for the readers who follow you from beginning to end. They get something extra. A reward for loyalty.

Think of it as the larger emotional journey that the entire world is on — not just each individual couple or protagonist. It’s what makes binge-readers feel like the series was building to something, that their investment paid off.

Step 4: Build a Cast That Sells

This step is all about your secondary characters — and Dana is pretty direct about it: no dead-weight characters.

Every major character in your series should be pulling their weight. Specifically, they should be making readers excited to see them get their own book. Your secondary characters from book one are your book two sales pitch. If readers finish book one and aren’t actively asking “wait, when does she get her story?” — you’ve got some character work to do.

This is one of those places where writing in series actually makes your individual books stronger, not just your business. When you know that a character will carry their own book later, you write them with more depth, more complexity, more history. Readers feel that richness even before they know there’s a whole book coming for that person.

Step 5: Create Book Capsules

Book capsules are pre-writing blueprints for each individual book in the series — and the reason Dana includes them as a step is that they’re what allows everything above to actually hold together when you sit down to write.

A book capsule is designed so that you can plan the individual book arc alongside the series-level arc at the same time. So you’re not writing book three and then realizing it accidentally contradicts the spine you established in book one. You’re not burning out halfway through the series because you’re discovering plot problems as you go instead of before you start.

Think of them as the thing that lets you be strategic before you get into the emotional whirlwind of drafting.

The Mindset Shift That Ties It All Together

Here’s what I keep coming back to after this training:

We’re not hobbyists. We’re professional writers. And part of being a professional writer is recognizing that your creative work and your business aren’t separate things — they’re deeply, beautifully intertwined. A series built with intention is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have. Not because you’re gaming the system, but because you’re giving readers the experience they actually want.

They want to fall in love with a world and stay there.

Build them that world — and they’ll follow you everywhere.

Dana said it best: “Find that intersection between what you love to write and what readers love to read. That is the best possible place to be.”

And so, wherever you are in your writing process — whether you’ve got ten books out or you’re still working on book one — it’s not too late to start thinking about this. Start in pencil. Ask the questions. Let the spine take shape.

You’ve totally got this.

Your Free Resource: The Series Spine Workbook

I put together a free workbook to help you work through all five steps from Dana’s framework. It’s got prompts and fill-in sections for each step — from defining your series spine to sketching out your book capsules — so you can actually do this instead of just thinking about it.

Members can grab it below!

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

Subscribe now

I went through a training by Dave Chesson — the founder of Kindlepreneur and Publisher Rocket, and he’s probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to how Amazon’s algorithm actually works. He’s consulted for major publishing houses, he’s been cited by Amazon KDP themselves, and he’s published nine international bestsellers. So when Dave talks about discoverability, I listen.

And here’s the thing he said that stopped me cold:

89% of people who search Amazon for a book end in a purchase.

Not browsing. Not wishlist-ing. Buying. They go to that search bar because they’ve already decided they want a book — they’re just trying to figure out which one. And if your book shows up in those results, you are not competing with a browser. You’re competing for a buyer who already has their wallet out.

That reframe alone is worth everything. Let’s talk about how to actually get there.

The Formula That Runs Amazon Discovery

Dave breaks it down simply: Keywords + Categories = Discoverability.

That’s it. Those two things control how Amazon surfaces your book to the right readers. Not your follower count, not your ad budget, not how many BookTok videos you’ve made. Keywords and categories. And most authors either ignore them, rush through them, or pick them without strategy.

Here’s the good news: once you understand how they work, you have a massive competitive advantage over authors who don’t.

The Search Bar Is Where the Money Lives

66% of book shoppers start their search on Amazon’s search bar. More than half. And because those searchers are buyers (not browsers), getting your book in front of them is one of the highest-ROI things you can do as an author — and it’s completely free.

When you publish on Amazon KDP, you get seven keyword boxes. Think of those boxes as your chance to walk up to Amazon and say: “Here’s exactly how readers describe the kind of book I wrote. Here’s how to shelve it.” The more accurately and strategically you fill those boxes, the better Amazon can match your book to the right shopper.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Dave shared some data that I’ve been thinking about ever since.

When your book ranks #1 for a keyword phrase, 27% of the people who searched that phrase will click on your book. When it ranks #2, that drops to 12%. By the time you’re at positions 5 or 6, you’re looking at about 6-7% click-through. The #1 book gets almost twice as many clicks as the #2 book.

And so, if 1,000 people a month are searching a keyword you rank #5 for, that’s about 70 people clicking on your book. If you rank #1 for that same phrase? 270 people a month. From a single keyword.

Multiply that across dozens of keywords and you can see why this compounds fast.

The 5 Types of Fiction Keywords (Most Authors Miss #5)

Dave identified five types of keywords that fiction readers use when searching — and this framework is so good that Amazon actually added it to their own FAQ after he published it.

1. Settings & Time Periods Victorian, medieval, modern, small-town, prairie — these evoke a type of story immediately. If your setting is central to your book’s feel, this should be in your keywords.

2. Character Types & Roles Billionaire, ex-cop, werewolf, bodyguard, Amish woman — who is your main character, and what makes them interesting? Readers search for archetypes constantly.

3. Plot Themes Summer fling, enemies-to-lovers, war-torn love, forbidden romance — what is the plot actually about? This is where your tropes live.

4. Events / Situations / Catalysts What kicked the story off? Kidnapping, fake engagement, plane crash, small-town homecoming — these “catalyst” keywords attract readers who are specifically looking for that scenario as a backdrop.

5. Story Tone (this is the big one) Wholesome, steamy, Christian, dark, cozy, Hallmark — this is the flavor of your genre. Dave calls it “the most important fiction keyword type,” and I completely agree. If you don’t have a tone keyword, you’re leaving the door wide open for your book to show up in front of completely wrong readers.

Think about it: if someone searches “Victorian romance” they might get anything from sweet and inspirational to very steamy. But if they search “wholesome Victorian romance,” they know exactly what they’re getting — and so does Amazon. Most readers refine their searches by adding a tone word when the first results don’t match. Your keywords need to be waiting for them when they do.

Here’s the key: shoppers typically combine 2-5 of these types in a single search phrase. So you’re not just picking one keyword per box — you’re building phrases that stack these types together. “Steamy billionaire enemies-to-lovers romance” hits character type, plot theme, and tone. That’s one well-built phrase targeting a specific reader.

Categories: Your Path to the Orange Badge

The other half of the discoverability formula is categories — and there’s a specific reason to be strategic about them beyond just where your book lives.

When you become the #1 bestseller in a category, Amazon puts an orange “Best Seller” badge on your book. That badge shows up in search results. And here’s why it matters: it functions as social proof for every reader who sees it. Other people have bought this. Other people liked it. This is legit. That alone improves how many people click through to your page, and how many of those clicks convert to sales.

Dave’s advice: don’t just pick the obvious big categories. Look for categories where you can realistically compete for that #1 spot. A smaller, well-targeted category where you can earn the badge will do more for your discoverability than sitting on page 47 of a massive category where no one can find you.

Start Here

You get seven KDP keyword boxes. Most authors either leave them half-empty or fill them with single words that are too broad to rank for. Instead:

Think in phrases, not single words. Build each phrase by stacking 2-5 of those keyword types together. Make sure at least one of your keyword phrases includes your story tone. And choose at least one category where you could realistically earn that bestseller badge.

I made a free tracker to help you do exactly this — it’s got a spot for every keyword phrase, a section for tracking your category options, and prompts to help you make sure you’re covering all five keyword types.

Grab it below, and if you open it while you’re publishing (or re-optimizing) your KDP listing, you’ll finish with keyword boxes that are actually working for you.

You’ve totally got this.

And if you’re a member, you get access to the Amazon Keyword & Category Tracker!

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If you’ve ever had to relearn how to do something because you don’t do it frequently, or maybe you do something that you’d like to handoff to an assistant someday, this course is for you.

Learn the exact system I use to track the repetitive tasks that I do so I can hand these off to my assistant so she knows exactly what she’s supposed to do.

Check out the Author SOP System

Or become a paying member for instant access to the full course:

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

Subscribe now

You ordered author copies. You were probably excited — there’s something about holding your actual book that never gets old. But when the box arrived, the excitement curdled fast. Broken spine corners. Peeling covers. Pages stained or warped. A different book’s pages inside your cover. Maybe — and this is the part that makes my stomach drop — actual mold.

Here’s the thing people outside the indie author world don’t always understand: author copies aren’t usually just for your bookshelf. Most of us order them so we can sell our books ourselves — at live events, markets, signings, and conventions — or ship them directly to readers as signed copies. Selling direct means a significantly higher royalty than you’d ever see from an Amazon sale. It’s one of the most important revenue streams in an indie author’s business. So when your author copies arrive damaged, it’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s lost inventory, lost sales, and lost income — and the hours you spend fighting for a refund are hours you’re not writing, marketing, or doing anything that actually moves your business forward.

You contacted Amazon. They offered a return and a refund. You accepted.

And then it happened again.

And again.

Here’s what most authors don’t find out until they’ve been through this cycle three or four times: Amazon doesn’t always destroy those damaged returned copies. They reship them. Your refunded, damaged, moldy book — the one you sent back because you wouldn’t hand it to a reader — goes back into the warehouse and gets mailed to a customer who ordered your book. Your book. With your name on it.

And then that customer leaves a one-star review about the damaged copy they received. As if it were your fault. As if you and KDP were the same thing.

This isn’t just a shipping inconvenience. This is a reputation problem and a revenue problem. And the return-and-refund loop Amazon keeps offering you? It’s not a solution. It’s a holding pattern.

So let’s talk about what to actually do.

The Belief Most Authors Are Operating Under (And Why It’s Costing Them)

When Amazon offers a return and refund, it feels like resolution. You got your money back. The problem is logged. Someone at Amazon knows this happened.

The reality is that customer service reps — even after an hour and twenty minutes and six different agents — are not empowered to fix the underlying print quality issue. They can issue credits. They cannot change what’s happening at the fulfillment center. And they have no incentive to tell you that your damaged copy may go right back into rotation for the next customer who searches your title.

But here’s the mistake most authors are making before they even get that far: they’re contacting the wrong team entirely.

If you’ve been calling Amazon’s regular customer service line or using the standard returns portal, you’ve been talking to people who handle consumer orders — not author copies. They’re offering you a customer refund because that’s the only tool they have. Author copy issues go through KDP. Full stop. Multiple experienced authors in the 20Books50k community have confirmed this is the single biggest shift that changes the outcome.

The authors who get traction are the ones who stop treating this as a customer service issue and start treating it as a business escalation through the right channel.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Your Damaged Author Copy Playbook

Step 1: Document Everything Before You Touch Anything

Before you repack the box, before you process your frustration, take photos. Lots of them.

• The sealed box before you open it (shows it arrived this way, not damaged in your hands)

• Every damaged copy, individually

• Close-ups of specific damage: broken corners, mold spots, stained pages, peeling spines

• The barcode on the inside of each book — KDP support specifically asks for this

• The packing slip or order confirmation visible in at least one shot

• A comparison shot if you have a good copy nearby — side by side tells the story faster than words

Keep a running log: order date, order number, number of copies ordered, number of copies damaged, type of damage. Do this every single time. This documentation is your paper trail.

One more thing to photograph, and this one matters a lot: if Amazon asks you to return the books and you do, photograph what you put in the return box before you seal it. One author sent back 8 books, and Amazon later claimed they only received 1 — and reversed most of her refund. Once that box is sealed, you have no way to prove what was in it. Don’t let that be you.

Step 2: Go Through KDP, Not Amazon Customer Service

This is the step that changes everything, and the indie author community is unanimous on it.

Go to kdp.amazon.com/en_US/contact-us and report the damage there, with your photos. Do not call the general Amazon number. Do not use the customer-facing returns portal.

One heads-up: when you land on the KDP contact page, it opens with an AI chat assistant. Work through it — you can get to a human agent, and that’s who you want for a pattern issue like this.

When you contact KDP support directly:

• They often won’t require you to return the books at all — which means the damaged copies stay out of circulation

• They have access to your actual publishing account and can see your order history as an author

• You’re framing this correctly as a print quality issue, not a customer complaint

Include your photos and the barcode from inside each damaged copy. Frame it as a pattern (”this is the third shipment in a row with significant damage”) rather than a one-time complaint. Ask explicitly: “I’d like a replacement, not a refund, and I will dispose of the damaged copies myself.” Several authors have had great success with this approach — they get fresh copies sent, they keep the damaged ones, and the books never go back into Amazon’s fulfillment system.

One more framing tip from the community: if the damage involves wrong pages, unreadable text, or the wrong book inside the cover, tell them exactly that — “this book is not readable / contains the wrong interior.” Authors report that this specific framing often results in KDP telling you to just keep it and issuing the refund with no hassle of a return required.

Important note if you order at high volume: the no-return, self-dispose approach tends to work consistently for smaller orders and first-time escalations. If you’re ordering hundreds of copies and reporting damage frequently, Amazon may start requiring returns because the volume of claims raises flags on their end. If that happens, you’re back to the deface-before-returning step I’ll share below — and this is also a signal that it’s time to seriously evaluate alternative printers for your event stock.

Step 3: If You Have to Return Copies, Deface Them First

This is a tip that’s been circulating in author communities for a while now, and it’s one of the more practical things you can do if Amazon insists on a return: make the copies unsellable before you send them back.

Here are the methods authors are actually using:

• Cut the front covers off before returning. No cover, no resale. This one is confirmed to work: one author told the KDP rep she was happy to return the books, but that she’d be cutting the covers off first so damaged copies couldn’t accidentally be added back to inventory. The rep said that was fine.

• Write “DAMAGED — BAD PRINT JOB — DO NOT SELL” across the edges in thick red Sharpie so the damage is visible from the outside

• Tear the front cover so it’s clearly destroyed

• Write a note inside — one author wrote her social media handle inside each damaged copy before returning, asking any reader who received it to contact her. One person did. She used that as documentation when following up with Amazon.

The sequence that matters: document the damage with photos first, then let KDP know you’ll be defacing the copies before returning them. Having your documentation on file before you alter the books protects you from any pushback about the condition of the return.

This practice actually has precedent in the publishing industry: for decades, bookstores returning unsold inventory would strip and return only the cover, destroying the book itself. It’s a recognized way to confirm destruction without reshipping the full product. You’re not doing anything unusual — you’re applying a standard industry practice to a very modern problem.

If Amazon tells you they won’t accept defaced returns, push back. You’re protecting readers from receiving defective copies. That’s a legitimate reason — and it’s one Amazon’s own stated policies support in theory, even if their CS reps don’t know what to do with it.

Step 4: Check the Print Location Stamp — It Might Be One Warehouse

Here’s a diagnostic tip most authors don’t know about: open to the last page or two of your book. Amazon stamps the location and date of printing there. If you’re getting consistently damaged copies, it’s worth checking whether they’re all coming from the same fulfillment center.

Amazon has several different printing warehouses around the country (and internationally), and quality varies significantly by location. If your damaged copies are all stamped from the same warehouse, that’s important documentation to include in your escalation — it shifts the conversation from “this was a fluke” to “there is a specific quality problem at a specific location.”

Step 5: Use the Refund Strategically — The Workaround Savvy Authors Are Already Using

Here’s something a lot of authors are quietly doing, and honestly, it’s clever: when Amazon issues a refund and doesn’t require you to return the copies (which happens more than you’d think when you go through KDP), some authors are selling those damaged copies (As long as they’re still readable) at a discount directly to their readers.

Think about it. If the spine is slightly creased but the pages are fine, or a corner is bumped but the interior is clean — that’s a “seconds” copy. Plenty of readers are thrilled to get a signed book at a reduced price, especially when you’re transparent about it. “Oops copy — slightly imperfect, discounted and signed” is genuinely appealing to your most loyal readers.

This isn’t deceptive. It’s honest, it’s resourceful, and it turns a loss into a connection opportunity. Just be clear about the condition and only sell copies you’d actually be okay handing someone in person.

This only works for minor cosmetic damage. Mold, wrong pages, structural issues, missing or garbled text — those should be properly disposed of. Don’t pass on anything you’d be uncomfortable handing someone.

Step 6: Test Your Storefront as a Customer

This is something more authors need to do: order your own book as a regular customer. Different shipping address, different account if possible. See what actually arrives.

If you’ve been assuming the damage only affects your author copies, this will tell you whether your readers are also getting poor quality. If they are — and multiple authors have confirmed they are, including covers of one book arriving with the interior of a completely different title — that changes the urgency of your escalation significantly. Customer-received copies are even stronger documentation than author copies when escalating through KDP.

Screenshot or photograph those copies too.

Step 7: Consider Smaller, More Frequent Orders (If You’re Ordering in Bulk)

One practical tip from authors who sell heavily at in-person events: ordering smaller batches more frequently — rather than large bulk orders — seems to reduce the damage rate. Some authors cap their Amazon orders at 5 copies at a time.

I know — if you’re trying to stock a full event table for a weekend market or convention, ordering 5 at a time feels wildly impractical. That’s a real tension, and it’s one more reason the “use Amazon for online sales, source your event stock elsewhere” hybrid approach is worth looking at seriously. If the copies you’re selling in person are coming from a printer with better quality control, you’re protecting your most direct-to-reader revenue stream.

There’s also a theory in the community that when Amazon pre-prints and holds copies in reserve for authors who order frequently or in large quantities, those stored copies sit in warehouse conditions and can develop quality issues — which might explain the mold and dampness some authors are seeing. It’s not confirmed, but it’s worth considering if you’re ordering at event-stock volume.

Step 8: Make Noise in the Right Rooms

This is a widespread problem, and it’s getting worse — and it’s not limited to indie authors. Readers of traditionally published books are being affected too. Authors in the community have seen big names tagged in posts where readers received copies with the wrong interior pages. This is a systemic print quality issue, not an indie-specific one.

That matters, because it means there’s more collective pressure available:

• Report it in author groups. Posts in communities like 20Books50k are building a documented public record that this is happening at scale.

• Connect with author associations. ALLi (Alliance of Independent Authors) actively monitors KDP practices and has advocacy resources — alli.pub

• Join the Indie Authors International Facebook group. It’s a large community with some collective clout for issues exactly like this one.

📌 Save This: Your Damaged Author Copy Response Checklist

When a damaged shipment arrives, run through this in order:

• [ ] Photograph the sealed box before opening

• [ ] Photograph every damaged copy individually

• [ ] Photograph the barcode inside each damaged copy

• [ ] Check the print location stamp (last page or two) — note the warehouse

• [ ] Log the order number, date, total copies, and number damaged

• [ ] Assess: is any damage minor/cosmetic? Could these be sold as discounted signed “seconds”?

• [ ] Contact KDP support directly at kdp.amazon.com/en_US/contact-us — NOT Amazon customer service (the page opens with AI chat; work through it to reach a human)

• [ ] Ask for a replacement or permission to self-dispose, not just a refund

• [ ] Frame it as a pattern with documentation, not a one-time incident

• [ ] If returning is required: deface copies first (remove or tear cover, write DAMAGED on edges)

• [ ] Photograph what you put in the return box before sealing it

• [ ] Order a customer-facing copy to check the storefront experience

• [ ] Save all documentation in a dated folder

On Alternatives: What Authors Are Actually Using

This is where the community’s experience is really worth paying attention to. Here’s a realistic breakdown:

IngramSpark — Multiple authors have made the switch and are reporting dramatically lower damage rates. One author tracked her numbers carefully: after switching to IngramSpark, she received 4 damaged copies out of 105, compared to a 35–40% damage rate from Amazon across roughly 500 copies in the same year. IngramSpark also uses higher-quality stock for matte covers — the textured feel that KDP used to have and has since dropped. The caveat people mention most: IngramSpark’s general customer service is notoriously slow and frustrating. However — their damage claim process is reportedly fast. If you receive damaged copies, you file a claim and they quickly reprint and ship replacements. So it’s not that they’re slow across the board; it’s specific to general CS issues. For many authors, fewer problems in the first place (plus a functional reprint process) is worth the tradeoff. And yes — if you publish with IngramSpark, your book can still be found and purchased on Amazon, because Ingram distributes to Amazon’s marketplace.

Book Vault — UK-based print-on-demand with strong quality reports, especially for paperbacks. Some authors are reporting that Book Vault’s US hardcover quality hasn’t matched their UK hardcover quality yet, so it may depend on what you’re printing. Worth ordering samples before committing.

Elanders Americas — A name that came up in the community that I hadn’t heard before: Elanders Americas, based in Davenport, Iowa. Competitive pricing with Amazon, strong quality reports, and good customer service. Worth researching if you’re looking for alternatives for your event stock.

Local or offset printers for event copies — If the bulk of your sales are in-person (and if you’re ordering 500+ author copies a year for events, you know exactly what I mean), a local or regional print shop running a batch order may match or beat Amazon’s per-copy pricing at volume — with significantly better quality control and no mystery damage. You’ll want to own your ISBN for this route. Worth asking around in your local author communities for recommendations.

None of these are perfect replacements for Amazon’s distribution reach for online sales. But using Amazon for your ebook and online paperback sales while sourcing your event and direct-sale copies elsewhere is a completely viable hybrid approach — and one more authors are moving toward every month.

Here’s What I’m Watching

This is a moment where the indie author community can either absorb the problem individually — one return at a time, one wasted hour at a time — or create enough collective noise that Amazon has to respond.

The return-and-refund loop works for Amazon because each incident looks isolated. A pattern of posts, escalations, association involvement, and author advocacy? That looks different. That gets routed differently.

And the stakes are real: every damaged copy that reaches a reader is a potential negative review that reads like it’s criticizing your book, when it’s actually criticizing Amazon’s fulfillment. Readers don’t always know the difference, and some will never find out that the damage wasn’t your fault. That cost is invisible until it isn’t.

If you’re experiencing this, document it, escalate it through KDP (not customer service), and talk about it publicly. Not just for yourself. For every reader who’s going to receive a damaged copy with your name on the cover.

And in the meantime — yes, order the IngramSpark sample packs. Yes, look at Book Vault and Elanders Americas. Don’t wait for Amazon to fix this before you have a backup plan. You’ve totally got this. Annoyingly bureaucratic as it is.

Not Sure What Your Next Right Move Is?

If you’re on your author journey and thinking I don’t even know where to start with all of this, I have something for you.

Take the Your Next Right Move quiz — it’s a short, specific tool that helps you figure out where to focus your energy in your author business right now. Not a generic result. An actual next step based on where you are.

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Have you dealt with Amazon print quality issues? Drop what’s worked for you in the comments — this is one of those problems where the community’s collected knowledge is genuinely more useful than anything Amazon’s help center will tell you.

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Okay, so I’ve been sitting with this training for a few days now, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I went into it thinking it was going to be another “write good scenes” pep talk — and instead I walked away with a complete framework that basically explains why every middle I’ve ever struggled with went sideways. And the fix is so much simpler than I expected.

The training was from Jamie Nash, a professional screenwriter and one of the Save the Cat authors (he wrote Save the Cat! Writes a Horror and the Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Workbook). And look — I know some of you have complicated feelings about Save the Cat. I get it. But what Jamie teaches is not “follow the formula or fail.” It’s more like... here are the tools that will tell you exactly where your story broke. And you can fix it from there.

So let me share what I took away, because I think this is going to be genuinely useful wherever you are in your manuscript right now.

The Real Problem with Your Middle

Here’s the thing Jamie said that hit me the hardest:

If you’re stuck in the middle, it almost always goes back to one of three problems.

Your hero doesn’t have a clear goal. Your obstacle isn’t big enough. Or your stakes aren’t big enough.

That’s it. That’s the whole problem, most of the time.

He calls this Story DNA, and it’s four things:

• A hero — who are we rooting for?

• A goal — what do they desperately want in the heart of the story?

• An obstacle — what’s standing in the way, and is it substantial enough to fill a whole book?

• Stakes — what horrible thing happens if they fail?

And the reason this matters so much for the middle specifically is that your Act 2 — all those scenes of Fun & Games, the Midpoint, the Bad Guys Closing In — those scenes are literally your hero pursuing the goal with the obstacle in the way. That’s what they are. If you don’t have a clear goal, your hero has nothing to do. If your obstacle isn’t big enough, they’ll overcome it in a chapter and then you’re shuffling your feet for the next 40 pages. If there are no stakes, your hero has no reason to keep going when it gets hard.

Jamie used Indiana Jones as his example and I want to use it too because it’s so clear: Indy’s goal is to find the Ark of the Covenant. His obstacle is the Nazis (and the mystery of its location). His stakes are that if he fails, the Nazis win the war. Every single scene in the middle is Indy pursuing that goal. He’s getting the headpiece. He’s finding someone to translate it. He’s decoding the staff of Ra. Sub-goal after sub-goal — all pointing toward the same destination.

So before you do anything else: can you state your Story DNA in one sentence? Hero, goal, obstacle, stakes. If you can’t — that’s probably your problem right there.

Why Your Hero Keeps Making Weird Decisions

The second thing Jamie shared that I absolutely loved is something he calls the Broken Compass.

Your hero is flawed, right? That’s what makes them interesting. But a lot of us write the flaw in the backstory or in the character bio and then we kind of... forget to use it in the actual scenes. The Broken Compass is a way to take that flaw and turn it into a playbook for your middle.

It works like this: you make a list of your hero’s internal rules. The things they tell themselves. The “I will always” and “I will never” statements that their flawed mind clings to — even when following those rules is making everything worse.

For example, Jamie walked through Better Call Saul. Jimmy’s broken compass includes things like: I will never take help from my brother. I will do anything to prove them wrong. I will never trust anyone to play by the rules. And the whole show is basically a series of situations that push directly against those rules — making Jimmy’s life so much harder because he won’t bend.

That’s what your middle scenes can do. If you know your hero’s broken compass, you can build scenes where the easiest way out would require them to violate it. Either they don’t, and they fail because of it. Or they do, and it breaks something in them psychologically. Either way — there’s conflict. There’s character. There’s momentum.

And so when I was thinking about my own WIPs after this, I was like... okay. Does my hero have an actual broken compass? Not just a vague “she doesn’t trust people” in the synopsis. But a real internal code that I can push against in every single scene?

That’s the question to ask.

How to Fill the Fun & Games Without It Feeling Like Filler

Okay so here’s where it gets really practical, because this is the part most of us struggle with.

The Fun & Games section is the biggest section of your book. It’s the heart of Act 2 — the section that delivers on your premise. And it can feel like this giant open space with no guardrails.

Jamie had two things to say about this that I found incredibly helpful.

First: think of Fun & Games as the Promise of the Premise.

When someone reads your blurb or hears your pitch, they start imagining things. If your book is about a baker who discovers she has magic and has to stop a curse in her small town, your readers are already imagining magic bread and cozy bakery scenes and a witch with secrets. That’s a contract. Your Fun & Games section is where you fulfill that contract. You’re delivering the scenes that only your book can deliver.

So: what did you promise in your premise? What scenes did readers start imagining when they heard your pitch? Write those down. Those are your Fun & Games.

Second: use the Five-Point Fun & Games when you get stuck.

This is a tool Jamie developed for writers who are deep in the middle and don’t know what comes next. It’s a mini-cycle that goes like this:

1. Gather the team / Prepare — your hero figures out what they need

2. Execute the plan — they go for it

3. Roadblock — something goes wrong (a twist, a setback, a broken compass moment)

4. Regroup / Oh no, now what? — they reassess

5. Execute Plan B — they try again, but now things are harder

The key is that each time you run this cycle, the stakes have to be higher than the last time. You can’t start big and then coast. It’s a roller coaster, and the coaster only goes up.

And here’s the thing I love: you can run this cycle in one scene, or you can spread it across five chapters. It’s a framework, not a formula. It’s just a way to check in and say — is my hero actually doing something? Are they hitting a setback? Are they regrouping and escalating? If yes, great. If no, that’s why it feels like filler.

The Midpoint — And Why You Probably Have It Wrong

I used to think the Midpoint was just the scene in the middle of the book. Like, a halfway-point check-in. I was wrong.

Jamie described it as a false victory or false defeat — a moment where your hero either thinks they’ve won (but they haven’t) or suffers a devastating loss (but the story isn’t over). And it’s important because it shifts the energy of everything that comes after. Before the midpoint, your hero is on an upward arc. After the midpoint, things get personal and tense. The bad guys are closing in. The stakes feel real.

Some of his ideas for what the midpoint can do:

• Ticking clock — something happens that adds time pressure (the gas is running out, the photos are fading, the boat is sinking)

• Things get personal — the villain now knows who your hero is and is coming for them

• Look in the mirror — your hero has a moment of reckoning where they start to wonder if the way they’ve been doing things is actually working

• Big twist — a revelation that changes everything (the villain’s true identity, a shocking betrayal, the real stakes)

• Sex at 60 — okay he gave this one a screenwriting name but it basically means: if there’s a romance arc or an intimacy escalation, this is often where it peaks for the first time

The point is — your midpoint should change the game. Something is different after it than before it. If you can read right through your midpoint without noticing it, that’s a problem worth fixing.

And Then the Bad Guys Close In

The section after the midpoint — Bad Guys Close In — works a lot like Fun & Games, except now everything is more tense and more personal. The five-point cycle still applies. The promise of the premise still applies. The difference is the emotional weight.

Your hero is now fighting with more to lose. The obstacles feel harder. The broken compass is really getting tested. And your reader should feel the pressure increasing with every chapter.

Jamie said something I’m going to write on a sticky note above my desk: it’s the exact same things — just more tense, more personal. Escalation is the whole job of this section.

The One Question That Fixes Everything

So here’s my takeaway — the thing I keep coming back to when I think about this training.

If you’re stuck in your middle, before you do anything else, sit down and ask yourself: Can I state my Story DNA in one sentence?

Can you name your hero? Their goal? What’s in the way? What happens if they fail?

If you can answer those four things clearly, you have a map. You know what your middle scenes are doing — they’re your hero pursuing that goal, pushing against that obstacle, with those stakes hanging over everything.

And if you can’t answer those four things? That’s your next thirty minutes of work. Not writing new scenes. Not reorganizing your outline. Just figuring out the DNA.

Because once you know the DNA, the middle doesn’t feel like a mystery anymore. It feels like a mission.

You’ve got this.

Want to Map Your Own Magic Middle?

I put together a free toolkit — The Magic Middle Mapping Kit — that walks you through everything in this article in worksheet form. It’s got a Story DNA builder, a Broken Compass template, a Fun & Games brainstorm, a Five-Point cycle tracker, and a Midpoint options checklist.

It’s exactly what I wish I’d had every time I’ve ever gotten stuck in Act 2.

Grab it below — it’s included with your membership. 💛

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You have a posting schedule. You stick to it. You’re on social media, you’re sending your newsletter, you’re showing up — and your sales are still pretty much exactly where they were six months ago.

So you try posting more. More platforms, more content, more effort. And still... crickets.

Here’s what I figured out after going through some seriously eye-opening business strategy training: consistent marketing and effective marketing are not the same thing. And most authors — including me — are working really hard inside a loop that was never going to get them where they want to go.

Let me show you what I mean, and then I’m going to give you a really simple framework that will change how you think about your marketing entirely.

The Belief That’s Keeping You Stuck

Most authors believe the reason their books aren’t selling is that they need to be more consistent. Post more. Show up more. Try one more platform.

But here’s what’s actually happening for a lot of us:

You’re incredibly consistent — but you’re marketing to the same 200 people every single time.

This is what I’m calling a closed circuit marketing loop. You send your newsletter on schedule — to the same list. You post to your Facebook reader group — the same members who’ve been there for a year. You share on Instagram — to the same followers you’ve had since last spring.

Nobody new is coming in. The top of your funnel is basically empty.

This is business math. If the same number of people are seeing your content every week, a predictable (and small) percentage of them will click through and buy. You can work on your sales page, your covers, your Amazon page — and those things matter — but if no new people are ever entering the picture, you’ll keep hitting the same ceiling.

The fix isn’t to do more of what you’re already doing. It’s to make sure your marketing is actually moving people through a real funnel.

The 4-Step Author Sales Funnel (Most Authors Are Missing Step 1)

Here’s how book sales actually work — broken down into 4 steps:

Step 1 — New Eyeballs. People who have never heard of you see your content. This is organic reach: TikTok, posting in other Facebook groups, newsletter swaps, BookBub, Goodreads, podcasts as a guest, influencer partnerships. These are people entering your world for the first time.

Step 2 — Indicated Interest. A percentage of those new eyeballs raise their hand. They follow you, subscribe to your newsletter, join your reader group. Now they’re in your world — they’ll keep seeing your stuff.

Step 3 — The Buy. A percentage of your interested followers click over to your sales page and buy.

Step 4 — Superfans. The readers who loved the book become evangelists — they leave reviews, recommend you to friends, and repeat-buy. They essentially restart the whole cycle for you.

Most authors are spending almost all of their marketing energy on Steps 2–4 while barely doing anything at Step 1. And so:

→ They’re emailing the same subscribers who already bought
→ They’re posting to the same followers who’ve already seen all their books
→ They’re nurturing people who are already fans — which is wonderful, but it’s not growth

The funnel only works if new people are entering it. The more new eyeballs you bring in at the top, the more buyers come out at the bottom. It’s just math.

The Funnel Rule to Screenshot:
New eyeballs → indicate interest → buy → superfan → repeat
More in at the top = more out at the bottom. If your sales are flat, check your Step 1 first.

Two Ways to Approach This (And Which One Is Right for You Right Now)

Once you accept that getting new eyeballs is the job, the next question is: where do you focus?

There are basically two schools of thought.

Breadth marketing means being active on a lot of different platforms at once — TikTok every day, Instagram, Facebook group, newsletter swaps, etc. The advantage is you’re visible everywhere. The challenge is it’s a lot to manage, and it can be hard to gain real momentum on any single platform.

Depth marketing means choosing one or two platforms and going all in. You get faster results because you’re not splitting your energy, and you can actually get good at something instead of just showing up half-heartedly in twelve places.

I’d recommend most authors — especially if you’re earlier in your marketing journey — start with depth. Pick 2–3 strategies max. Get traction. Then expand.

And yes, I know that’s hard to hear when the list of options (newsletter swaps, BookBub, TikTok, Instagram Reels, Amazon Ads, influencers, Facebook groups, Goodreads...) is approximately a mile long and everything sounds like a good idea. I’ll show you exactly how to choose in a minute.

Why You’re Allowed to Post a Lot (The Numbers Prove It)

One thing I hear from authors all the time is “I don’t want to be annoying” — so they post once or twice a week and then wonder why nobody’s seeing their stuff.

Here’s the reality of social media reach:

• Facebook business page posts: 1–2% of followers see them (Facebook wants you to pay for reach)

• Facebook personal page: 2–10% of friends see each post

• Your own Facebook group: 5–10% of members see each post in their feed

• Instagram: up to 20% of followers see each post

• TikTok: less than 0.5% of your followers see any given video

And so this is why it’s actually okay to post a lot. Most of your audience isn’t seeing your stuff anyway. If you post once a week, a huge percentage of your followers will go the entire month without ever running across you. You’re not being annoying — you’re barely visible.

The goal is to post enough that people actually encounter you more than once every six months.

The 3:2:1 Formula for What to Post (So You’re Not Just Promoting All the Time)

Okay so you need to post more, but what do you actually post?

Here’s a simple formula that works really well — think of it per 6 posts (or per week, if you’re posting 6 times a week):

3 Value Posts — for fiction authors, value = entertainment. Behind-the-scenes writing content. Photos of your dog, your coffee, your aesthetic. Sneak peeks of your book. Your writing process, your wins, your struggles. Sharing another author’s new release. You have a naturally creative brain — use it. This is you making deposits into the goodwill bank with your audience.

2 Engagement Posts — posts designed almost entirely to get likes and comments. “What are you reading right now?” / “What’s one trope you’ll always pick up?” / “If I wrote a taboo trope, what would you want it to be?” Questions and polls. Comments and engagement tell the algorithm to show your content to more people. (And don’t post and ghost — respond to people when they comment!)

1 Promotional Post — this is where you ask for something. “Grab your copy here.” “Join my newsletter.” “Check out my new release.” Only one out of six posts should be a pitch.

TV networks figured out a version of this decades ago — roughly 14 out of every 60 minutes of programming is ads. That’s about 1 in 4. Because more than that, and viewers tune out. Same principle applies here.

The 3:2:1 Posting Formula:
Per 6 posts → 3 value (entertainment) + 2 engagement (questions/polls) + 1 promotional (CTA)
Never let promos exceed 1 in 4 posts or you’ll start losing followers faster than you gain them.

The 3-Number Method for Picking Your Marketing Strategies

Here’s where it gets really practical, and this is my favorite part of everything I learned.

Instead of looking at a list of 30+ marketing options and feeling overwhelmed, run each strategy you’re considering through 3 simple scores on a scale of 1–10:

Score 1: Eyeball Potential. How many new readers could this strategy realistically bring in? A 1 would be something with very low reach (like starting a podcast from scratch — possible, but slow). A 10 would be something like paid ads, which is basically what you’re buying with those: raw eyeballs.

Score 2: Easiness to Execute. How hard is this to actually do? A 1 means you’d need to hire someone, take a course, or spend months learning. A 10 means you could start this week and it would feel easy.

Score 3: Your Excitement. How pumped are you to actually do this? This one matters more than people think. You will do a strategy you hate about 60% as well as one you love. A 1 = you’d rather do anything else. A 10 = you’re already excited to start.

Add up your three scores. Pick the strategies with the highest totals.

And so if TikTok scores an 8 on eyeball potential, a 4 on easiness, and a 9 on excitement — that’s a 21. If newsletter swaps score a 6, 9, and 5 — that’s a 20. Those two strategies are neck and neck, but TikTok wins slightly. Easy call.

This is not a perfect science, but it cuts through the noise and gets you to a decision quickly. I’d recommend landing on 2–5 strategies max for the next 90 days. Not more. Depth over breadth, especially while you’re building.

📌 The 3-Number Strategy Scoring System:

Strategy 👀 Eyeball Potential ✅ Easiness ✨ Excitement Total (your strategy) /10 /10 /10 /30 (your strategy) /10 /10 /10 /30 (your strategy) /10 /10 /10 /30

→ Choose your top 2–5 by total score.

Once You Pick Your Strategies, Here’s What to Do Next

Choosing the strategy is only half the work. The other half is getting specific enough that you’ll actually do it.

For each strategy you select, figure out:

The timeframe. When are you starting? When do you want results by?

The tactics. What does this strategy actually look like in practice? “Post on TikTok” isn’t a tactic. “Post 1 faceless BookTok video per day at 7pm using audio trending in the romance space” is a tactic. Get specific enough that you can check it off as yes or no each day.

The prep steps. What do you need to do before you can even start? (Download the app, set up the account, batch-create 10 posts, buy the course, etc.) List these out so you’re not surprised by them.

How you’ll measure success. What numbers will you look at to know if it’s working? New followers gained? Newsletter signups? Page reads? Give yourself a start number and a goal number.

If you want to dig deeper into exactly how I run my marketing funnel — specifically the content that’s driving 60,000+ KU page reads a month for me on months with no new release — I wrote about it in 5 Steps to Get Thousands of Page Reads Every Week. And if faceless content is something you’re interested in (doing TikTok without showing your face), that’s a whole system I teach in the Faceless Content System.

Here’s What I’m Doing Differently After This

If I’m being real with you: I was 100% in a closed circuit loop. My newsletter goes out reliably. My social content gets made. But I wasn’t doing enough at the top of the funnel to bring in genuinely new readers.

And so I ran my own strategies through the 3-number system. My top two came out pretty clearly: newsletter swaps (because I’m already connected in the author community and they score high on easiness and excitement) and doubling down on TikTok content for my pen name. Those are my focus for the next 90 days.

I’ll report back.

In the meantime — I have a downloadable workbook below for members that walks you through the entire framework: the strategy list, the prioritization scorecard, and the per-strategy planning pages (timeframe, tactics, prep steps, measuring success). It’s the resource I wish I’d had when I first started trying to put a real marketing plan together.

Download it, run your own numbers, and pick your 2–5 strategies. Then commit to them for 90 days. That’s the whole plan.

You’ve got this.

— Dani

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You spent weeks on your outline. You know your inciting incident, your midpoint twist, your all-is-lost moment. You’ve got conflict. You’ve got stakes. The plot works.

And still — your beta readers say things like “I liked it, but I didn’t really connect with the main character.” Or worse, they put it down somewhere in the middle and can’t quite explain why. You refreshed your KDP dashboard that first week hoping things would pick up, and then just stopped checking because it was demoralizing.

If any of that sounds familiar, I want to tell you something I learned from developmental editor Lori Puma that completely reframed the way I think about character: the plot is only half the machine.

Want the Additional Resources?

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Most Authors Think Plot Is What Hooks Readers — Brain Science Says Otherwise

Here’s the belief that most authors (including me) have been operating under: if the plot is compelling, readers will keep turning pages.

And it’s partially true. But it’s missing something huge.

Brain science — specifically the work that Lisa Kron digs into in Story Genius — shows us that readers don’t actually come to fiction just for entertainment. They come looking for information to help them navigate real life. Stories let us safely simulate dangerous, difficult, emotionally complex situations and practice how to handle them — without the real-world consequences. Fiction is, essentially, nature’s virtual reality system.

And for that VR system to work, readers need two things:

1. They need to know what happens. (That’s your plot — the external events a camera could capture.)

2. They need to know why what happens matters to your protagonist. (That’s the internal world — the meaning they make of events, their justifications, their visceral feelings, the things happening inside them that a camera can never capture.)

If either piece is missing, the story doesn’t feel real. Readers won’t get that inside look at human behavior they came for — even if they can’t articulate that’s what they wanted.

Most writers are really good at the what happens part. The why it matters part — the internal world — is where a lot of stories fall flat. And it’s exactly what we’re going to fix today.

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The Two Types of Heroes (And Why It Changes Everything)

Before we get into how to build a protagonist’s internal world, you need to know what kind of protagonist you’re writing — because the approach is different.

Episodic heroes are like TV sitcom characters. No matter what happens in the episode, they reset to baseline. They don’t grow, and they don’t fall into darkness — they just... are who they are. Jack Reacher. James Bond. Cozy mystery sleuths. Their mental world is stable.

Sequential heroes are like plants — they either grow or decay over the course of the story. Their mental world evolves. Most of you are writing sequential heroes, and that’s where the internal world work really matters.

Here’s the thing about episodic heroes though: if they don’t change, how do you keep readers engaged? The secret ingredient is contradictions — two opposing values that live inside the character and never fully resolve. Readers never know which one will win in any given moment.

Jack Reacher is the ultimate loner who constantly gets involved in other people’s problems because his sense of justice overrides his desire to be alone. That tension between indifference to others versus responsibility to others is what makes him endlessly readable. Stephanie Plum is both a spectacular failure and weirdly tenacious — she succeeds through bizarre strategies and eccentric allies. The contradiction between failure and success drives every scene.

If you’re writing an episodic hero, you want one primary contradiction that your plot can test over and over again. But most romance, fantasy, and women’s fiction authors are writing sequential heroes — so let’s go there.

Where Your Protagonist Comes From (This Is Your Secret Weapon)

Your sequential hero doesn’t start from neutral on page one. Their mental world has already been shaped by everything that happened before the story begins.

Here’s how it works: your hero moves through life, having experiences — making friends, losing jobs, facing disappointments, getting hurt. Most of the time their predictions about the world are accurate. But sometimes, something happens that completely upends their understanding of how the world works. A traumatic experience — physical or emotional — that shatters their belief system.

And here’s the key: for a novel, it’s not just one event. It’s a series of experiences that compound over time, each one chipping away at a part of your hero’s heart, until they build a protective shell around what’s left.

Lori used this example and it’s stuck with me: imagine a klutzy girl who believes honesty is always the best policy. On the playground, she accidentally elbows a boy and gives him a nosebleed. She runs to tell the teacher — and the boy claims she did it on purpose. The adults believe him. She gets punished.

That’s not the whole story though. Over and over again, speaking her truth goes badly. Until she cuts off the part of herself that believed honesty mattered. She builds a shell. From now on, she tells people what they want to hear.

That’s what’s in place when we meet her on page one.

And here’s why this matters more than almost anything else in your book: that backstory is your ammunition. It’s what lets you pack devastating emotional punches at pivotal moments in the plot.

Think about the Hunger Games. When Effie calls Peta’s name at the Reaping, we have no reason to care about him beyond “another kid Katniss might have to kill.” But then we get the backstory: Peta once gave a starving Katniss bread. He took a beating for it. That bread rekindled her hope — it reminded her she knew how to hunt, right when she was ready to give up. And now she might have to kill the boy who saved her life.

The chills you get from that scene? They don’t come from what’s happening in the story present. They come from the backstory that transforms a stranger into someone she cannot kill.

That’s the power of building your protagonist’s internal world before page one.

The Three Pieces You Need at Page One

For sequential heroes with a growth arc (the most common type), there are three things in place when your story opens:

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Okay, I have to tell you about something I just went through that completely shifted how I think about writing — and honestly, about why I write at all.

I just finished watching a NovNov training called Turn Your Secrets Into Superpowers by Lauren Brill, and I’m still kind of sitting in it. Lauren is a former TV broadcaster who created a platform called The Unsealed — a global storytelling community where people share open letters about their real lives. Over a million page views a year. Readers in 180 countries. And the whole thing started because Lauren wrote one honest letter about something she’d been carrying for years and it went viral.

I’m sharing what I learned with you today because I think it applies to everything we’re doing as fiction authors — maybe even more than we realize.

The Thing You’ve Been Avoiding Is Exactly the Story You Should Be Telling

Here’s the idea that Lauren built her entire platform around, and the one I can’t stop thinking about:

The very thing you’ve been carrying — the shame, the struggle, the secret — is the same thing that has the power to reach someone else who’s been carrying the same thing alone.

Lauren calls it turning your secret into your superpower. And when she first shared it in the context of open letters and personal essays, I was nodding along. But then she said something that stopped me completely:

Even in fiction writing, when you’re vulnerable, it shows through. It shows in your characters. It shows in the stories you choose to tell.

And I thought — oh. Oh, that’s everything.

Because I think a lot of us are trying to write great fiction while keeping ourselves safely at arm’s length from it. We’re crafting characters who feel things we’ve felt, survive things we’ve survived, want things we’ve wanted — but we’re doing it from behind glass. We’re thinking about it intellectually instead of letting ourselves actually feel it on the page.

And readers can tell. They always can.

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The Three-Part Shape Every Powerful Story Has

One of the most useful things Lauren taught was something called the monomyth — the idea that every strong personal narrative follows the same basic shape:

Moment of Disruption → Turning Point → New Understanding

Something shatters the ordinary. A decision or moment of courage shifts the trajectory. And the person comes out the other side changed, with something to offer.

She used the example of a young dancer who developed alopecia (sudden hair loss) while working on a cruise ship and was fired. That’s the disruption — losing her hair, losing her job, losing the appearance-based career she’d built her life around.

The turning point? She auditioned for Sports Illustrated, made it to the finals, walked down the runway — and at the end, in front of all the judges, she ripped off her wig. Bald head, full swagger.

The new understanding? She became the first bald model in Sports Illustrated. She now runs a program for young kids with alopecia. She is, by every definition, living inside her superpower.

Now here’s what I want you to notice: this is also the shape of your characters’ arcs.

Your protagonists have disruptions — moments where their ordinary world cracks open. They have turning points — the moments they decide to step into something harder and truer. And they have new understandings — the way they see themselves and the world differently by the final page.

The difference between a good story and a story that makes readers cry at 2am is whether those moments are felt. Whether the emotional truth is real. And that emotional truth? It can come from you.

“Change the Facts. Keep the Emotion.”

This is the line from Lauren’s training that I immediately wrote down and underlined three times.

She said it in the context of fiction specifically, and I think it’s the most practical thing any author can do with this information:

Start with your real feelings — fear, shame, grief, longing, rage, hope — and give those to your fictional characters.

You don’t have to write your own story. You don’t have to put yourself in the book. But you can take the emotion of an experience — the specific texture of how it felt to be humiliated, or lost, or wrongly accused, or overlooked, or devastated by someone you trusted — and you can put that into your character.

Change the facts. Keep the emotion.

Because here’s what creates a reader connection: not the plot. Not the circumstances. The human experience underneath it. The feeling. And you already have access to those feelings. You’ve lived them.

Your readers have lived them too. That’s exactly where the connection happens.

Want the Additional Resources?

Most articles come with a workbook, checklist, plug-and-play template, or other download built to help you implement what you just read — and it’s all reserved for paid members.

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Full Access to All Downloads — every workbook, checklist, and template across all articles, all in one place. No hunting around. Just grab what you need and go.

Deep-Dive Articles — the stuff that doesn’t make it into the free posts. Full systems, behind-the-scenes breakdowns, and the exact strategies I’ve learned from 6 & 7-Figure Authors and have made my own.

The Full Resource Vault — every tool, template, and download from every article, organized and ready to grab. I update it regularly so it keeps growing as I publish more.

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Free subscribers get the articles (like this one!) and monthly community updates — and I’m so glad you’re here for those. But if you want the tools that go with the teaching, the membership is where it’s at.

And here’s the thing: the price goes up every single month. Locking in today means you keep your rate forever — while everyone who joins later will be paying significantly more for the same access. I’d highly recommend grabbing your spot now while it’s still this low.

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Why Honest Writing Always Beats Dramatic Writing

Lauren said something that I think a lot of us need to hear, especially if you grew up being told that good writing is flowery and elaborate and impressive:

With truth, you don’t need to oversell it. When you’re honest, the power comes from the honesty — not from exaggeration.

She showed an example of a letter she’d written for a man who’d grown up homeless, hungry, without a parent — and the writing wasn’t emotional or overwrought. It was just honest. Direct. Conversational. Plain sentences describing plain facts.

And it was devastating. Not because it was written dramatically, but because it was true.

This applies so directly to fiction. The scenes that land hardest are almost never the ones where you’re trying hardest. They’re the ones where you got out of your own way and just let the moment be what it is.

Concise, honest truth is more powerful than embellished emotion every single time. If you ever find yourself over-explaining, adding extra adjectives, or trying to telegraph how the reader should feel — stop. Trust the truth of the moment. It’s enough.

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The “Delay the Reveal” Technique (And Why It Works in Fiction Too)

One of Lauren’s writing techniques is something she calls delaying the reveal. It goes like this:

Hint at the thing early. Let the reader sense that something is building. Build their investment. Then deliver.

She opened her own letter (the one that went viral and eventually became The Unsealed) with:

“After years of being too scared to write all of you, now I’m hoping the world will share this letter so it can actually find each and every one of you.”

You know something is coming. You don’t know what. But you’re already leaning forward.

Think about your own WIP right now. Where is your character carrying something — a wound, a truth, a secret — that the reader senses but doesn’t fully understand yet? Are you doing enough to hint at it? Are you letting it build tension naturally before the reveal?

The reveal is most powerful when the reader has been quietly prepared for it. When the pieces were always there. When they feel, in that moment of disclosure, both surprised and like they always knew.

A Note for Authors Who Write Fiction — Not Memoirs

I want to make sure I say this clearly because I know some of you are going to read this and think: I write paranormal romance / fantasy / thrillers. This doesn’t apply to me.

It really does.

Lauren talked about how some of the most enduring fiction of all time — The Lovely Bones, Frankenstein, The Alchemist — carries the emotional fingerprints of its author. Not because the story is autobiographical, but because the author wrote from their real emotional experience.

Your books are about the things you care about most. The themes that keep showing up — found family, redemption, love that breaks you open, worth that isn’t earned — those are yours. They come from you. And that’s not an accident.

The more you let that be intentional, the more your books will feel like the ones readers can’t put down.

And if you ever feel weird about this — like it’s too raw, too personal, too exposing — Lauren made a point I love: even if you change every single fact about the story, the emotional truth is still yours. And that’s the part that matters.

What This Means for Your Author Brand (Your Note, Your About Page, Your Marketing)

One last thing, and then I’ll point you to the free download I made to go with this.

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You published your book. You posted about it. You told your newsletter. You refreshed KDP for a week straight, watched the sales trickle in, and then... nothing. The algorithm forgot about you. The launch momentum faded. And now that book is just sitting there, technically available on Amazon, technically part of your catalog, technically earning you money — except it’s making $1.66 a month and you’ve stopped looking at the dashboard because it’s demoralizing.

You told yourself you’d figure out the marketing eventually. Maybe once you had more books. Maybe once you understood ads. Maybe once you had a bigger audience.

Here’s what a six-figure author told me: that’s exactly backwards.

I recently sat in on a training with Golden Angel — USA Today bestselling author, 60+ books published, six-figure pen name — and she shared the actual data from her own books. Not hypotheticals. Real before-and-after income numbers from a series most people would have given up on.

One of those series was averaging $1.66 a month. Not a typo.

She made one pricing change and spent about $400 on promotion. The same series started averaging $43.71 a month. Still not a huge number in isolation — but she nearly tripled her annual income from that series, and she didn’t write a single new book to do it.

What she did instead is what I want to walk you through today.

The Belief Most of Us Are Marketing From (And Why It’s Costing Us)

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: most indie authors believe that if their backlist isn’t selling, the answer is more money. Better ads. A BookBub. A PR company. Something expensive that will finally make the algorithm pay attention.

Golden Angel’s data says something different.

She doesn’t run Facebook ads. She doesn’t run Amazon ads. She has built a six-figure pen name almost entirely on free and low-cost tactics done consistently on a schedule — and the biggest mistake she sees authors make is skipping straight to the expensive stuff before the free stuff is even in place.

The free tactics aren’t a consolation prize for authors who can’t afford ads. They’re the foundation. And most of us haven’t actually built it yet.

So let’s build it.

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Before You Market Anything: The 3-Question Book Audit

Before Golden Angel talks about any tactic, she asks three questions about the book you’re about to promote. If you can’t answer yes to all three, no amount of promotion is going to save you — because you’ll be driving traffic to a page that isn’t converting.

1. Does your cover look like it belongs in your genre? Not identical to other books — but like it belongs on the same shelf. Pull up the Amazon top 50 in your genre, scroll to books ranked 20–50 (the top 20 are often outliers), and put your cover in the middle of them. Does it fit? If it stands out in a bad way — if it reads more literary, more trad pub, more “design-y” than on-genre — that’s your problem, not your marketing.

(If you want to go deeper on getting your entire Amazon page working for you — not just the cover, but your categories, keywords, and book description — my course, Author Page Magic walks through the whole audit step by step, and paid members get complete access included in their membership!)

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2. Would a stranger buy your book based on your blurb alone? Not someone who already follows you. Not someone who saw your TikTok and likes you. A complete stranger who landed on your Amazon page. Your blurb needs to hook them in the first two lines and make them feel something before they’ve read a word of your actual book.

3. Does your back matter tell readers where to go next? When someone finishes your book, there should be a clear link to the next book you want them to read. If it’s the last book in a series, send them to book one of your next series. If it’s a standalone, recommend the book that’s most similar. If you let Amazon choose what to surface next, it might not be one of yours.

Cover fits the genre shelf → Blurb converts a stranger → Back matter captures the reader.

If any of these three are broken, fix them before you spend a single dollar on promotion.

The System (5 Steps, in the Right Order)

Once your book is actually ready to be promoted, Golden Angel’s system looks like this:

Step 1: Optimize — cover, blurb, back matter, series page

Step 2: Discount — lower the barrier for new readers to enter your world

Step 3: Promote — get the discounted book in front of new eyes

Step 4: Profit — the read-through does the work

Step 5: Repeat on a schedule — this is where almost everyone falls off

That fifth step is the whole game. Because most authors do steps one through four for a new release, watch the launch window close, and then never touch that book again. Meanwhile, the book is sitting there, waiting to be activated.

The more books you have, the more important it is to be doing something for your backlist every single month. Not just new releases. The backlist is compounding interest — but only if you keep making deposits.

Want the Additional Resources?

Most articles come with a workbook, checklist, plug-and-play template, or other download built to help you implement what you just read — and it’s all reserved for paid members.

Here’s everything you get when you upgrade:

Full Access to All Downloads — every workbook, checklist, and template across all articles, all in one place. No hunting around. Just grab what you need and go.

Deep-Dive Articles — the stuff that doesn’t make it into the free posts. Full systems, behind-the-scenes breakdowns, and the exact strategies I’ve learned from 6 & 7-Figure Authors and have made my own.

The Full Resource Vault — every tool, template, and download from every article, organized and ready to grab. I update it regularly so it keeps growing as I publish more.

The Mini Course Library — A new mini course drops every month and once per quarter I go deep into a subject. These are the trainings I wish I’d had when I was starting out, and you get all of them the moment you join.

Free subscribers get the articles (like this one!) — and I’m so glad you’re here for these. But if you want the tools that go with the teaching, the membership is where it’s at.

And here’s the thing: the price goes up every single month. Locking in today means you keep your rate forever — while everyone who joins later will be paying significantly more for the same access. I’d highly recommend grabbing your spot now while it’s still this low!

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Wide vs. KU: Where Your Strategy Splits

At this point, your path looks different depending on where your books live.

If you’re wide:

Your primary tool is the permafree first-in-series. Make book one free, drive traffic to it, and make your money on read-through as readers move through the series. Golden Angel showed data from one of her wide series where making book one permanently free (and raising books two and three from $2.99 to $3.99) took that series from $1.66/month to $43.71/month in average earnings.

You can also do price stacking: first book free → second at $0.99 → third at $2.99 → rest at full price. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for a reader to fall in love with your series before asking them to pay full price.

If you’re in Kindle Unlimited:

You have two tools that Golden Angel says are criminally underused:

• Kindle Free Book Promotion — up to 5 days free every 90 days

• Kindle Countdown Deals — discounts where you still earn 70% royalties (yes, even at $0.99)

Every time you use one of these, Amazon boosts the book algorithmically. You don’t have to do anything extra. Just run the promo. The page reads don’t spike instantly — there’s a 1.5–2 week delay — so don’t panic if nothing seems to happen right away. The readers are reading. The algorithm is watching.

Her take on why Amazon makes these tools so generous for KU authors: it’s basically Amazon making it as easy as possible for you to stay in KU. Whether or not that’s the motive, the tools are real and most KU authors aren’t using them consistently.

The Free Tactics (Start Here. Seriously.)

Before you spend anything, these are the moves Golden Angel makes first. They cost time, not money.

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I’m going to be really honest with you about something.

When I first started sending out ARC copies of my debut novel, this fear lived rent-free in my head. Like — what if I send out hundreds of free copies of a book I poured my whole heart into, and I just… get nothing back? What if people take the book, read it (or don’t), and just never leave a review?

It’s a completely valid fear. And I’d be lying if I said it never happens. Some people genuinely forget. Some people read slowly. Some people just aren’t reviewers by nature and didn’t quite realize what they were signing up for.

But here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: whether or not your ARC readers follow through has almost nothing to do with luck — and almost everything to do with the system you put around them.

Why Most ARC Copies Don’t Get Reviewed (It’s Not What You Think)

When authors come to me frustrated that their ARC readers ghosted them, the reason is almost always the same: they didn’t have a follow-up system. They sent the book, maybe sent one reminder, and then just… hoped.

And here’s the thing — your ARC readers are not bad people. They have lives. They have other books in their queue. They saw your message at 10pm when they were already half-asleep and meant to get back to it. Life happens.

The authors who consistently get reviews aren’t the ones with the most charismatic personality or the biggest audience. They’re the ones who built a gentle, consistent system to keep their ARC team engaged from the moment they applied all the way through launch week.

That’s a learnable thing. And it’s exactly what the ARC Reviewer Engine teaches you.

Argument #1: The Right Readers Review — And the System Finds the Right Readers

One of the biggest reasons ARC copies go unreviewed is because the reader wasn’t the right fit in the first place. And this happens all the time when authors use paid agencies or platforms — you get people who read across every genre, who treat your romance like a literary critique, or who picked up your book because they needed to fulfill a quota on the platform.

The ARC Reviewer Engine works differently. It finds readers who are already diehard fans of your genre — people who saw your TikTok content about your book, resonated with the tropes and vibes, and chose to raise their hand. These are readers who love exactly the kind of book you wrote.

And so right away, you’re working with a more motivated group. They wanted your book. They’re reading it because they’re genuinely excited, not because they were assigned it. That changes the follow-through rate significantly.

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Argument #2: The Follow-Up System Makes Following Through Irresistible (Not Annoying)

Here’s something that surprised me about my own launch: I didn’t just send out the ARCs and wait. I built out an email sequence that kept my ARC team warm, reminded them of the timeline, and gave them a really compelling reason to finish.

I offered a random drawing for a $50 gift card — and here’s the important part — not for leaving a review, but just for letting me know they finished the book by a certain date. That distinction matters because Amazon’s rules are specific about not tying incentives to reviews. But finishing the book? Totally fine to celebrate that.

Out of my 900+ ARC applicants, 433 people filled out the “I finished it!” form. And a huge portion of those people went on to leave a review — because once they’d finished and filled out the form, I made it incredibly easy to go straight to Goodreads and Amazon with direct links.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a system.

Argument #3: The Numbers Are Actually On Your Side

Here’s how I like to think about this: if roughly one in three ARC recipients leaves a Goodreads review, and one in ten leaves an Amazon review, then this becomes a math problem — not a mystery.

Want 50 Amazon reviews at launch? You need about 500 applicants. Want 30? You need around 300.

The ARC Reviewer Engine is built to help you get as many qualified applicants as possible — which means even if not every single person follows through, you still hit your review goals because you had the volume going in.

And honestly? I got significantly better ratios than those averages because of the follow-up system. More than half of the people who actually downloaded my book left a Goodreads review. I still think about that number.

Here’s How the ARC Reviewer Engine Addresses This Directly

20 Done-For-You Email Templates — Including Every Follow-Up You’ll Ever Need

This is the part that takes all the guesswork out of it. You’ll get templates for your welcome email, your “here’s your book” delivery, your mid-period check-in, your “have you finished yet?” nudge, your launch week reminders, and more. Every email in the sequence is designed to keep your ARC team engaged and make reviewing feel easy and natural — not like a chore. You don’t have to figure out what to say or when to say it. Just fill in your details and send.

The “Finished the Book” System (Including the Gift Card Strategy)

Inside the course, I walk you through exactly how I set up the form that asked readers to let me know when they finished — and how I tied it to a drawing that got 433 people to respond. I’ll show you how to set it up, what questions to ask, how to stay within Amazon’s guidelines, and how to use that moment of connection to get people clicking straight to the review pages. It’s one of those things that feels small but genuinely moves the needle.

The Application Design That Attracts Committed Reviewers

The ARC application itself is designed to filter for readers who are actually going to follow through. The questions I include, the way the application is structured, the confirmation they agree to before submitting — all of it is intentional. If someone takes the time to fill out a thoughtful application, they’re telling you something about how seriously they’re taking this. And the template I give you makes it easy to replicate that filtering for your own book and genre.

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What the Numbers Looked Like for My Debut

I launched my first book as a debut author with a system like this in place — and I ended up with over 300 Goodreads reviews and over 100 Amazon reviews in my first week. Not from luck. Not from having a massive platform. From a deliberate, repeatable process that kept my ARC team engaged from the moment they signed up through launch day.

Most debut authors launch into the void. You don’t have to.

Ready to Build an ARC Team That Actually Shows Up?

The ARC Reviewer Engine gives you every template, every script, every system, and every strategy you need to not only gather hundreds of qualified reviewers — but actually get them to follow through.

You’ve totally got this. And your book deserves readers who will actually tell people about it.

Check Out the ARC Reviewer Engine

Or if you’re an All-Access Member, you get the complete ARC Reviewer Engine included with your membership!

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

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Okay, I have to tell you about a training I just went through, because I’m still thinking about it.

A woman named Karolynn St-Pierre sat down and pulled back the curtain on exactly how she hit six figures as an indie author — and honestly? Everything she shared is more doable than I expected.

Here’s what made her stand out: she’s not a household name. She’s what she calls a ‘solid mid-list author.’ She has almost zero social media presence. She’s never done a book signing. She doesn’t have a big team. She’s a recovering attorney living in Canada, writing under two pen names, one of which she won’t even say out loud at a conference. (She literally called it her Super Secret pen name and I respect that energy completely.)

And she’s clearing $15,000+ a month in pure float — meaning that’s what she makes even when she’s not actively pushing a new release.

So I took notes. A lot of them. And I want to share the biggest takeaways with you today, because I think a lot of what she said is going to stick with you the same way it stuck with me.

You Are the CEO of Your Author Brand. Start Acting Like It.

This was her first point, and she didn’t mince words about it: if you want to earn six figures, you have to treat your writing like a business — because it is one.

That means having a professional author website (not just a GoDaddy placeholder), a professional email address that matches your author name (she specifically said ditch the Gmail), and a setup that looks like someone who takes their work seriously.

Setting up a professional author email and website doesn't have to be overwhelming or expensive — but it does need to be done right. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough on getting your author newsletter running (including how to set up your professional email, build your subscriber list, and send weekly emails in under 20 minutes), that's exactly what I cover inside The Low-Effort Newsletter Masterclass:

Check Out the Masterclass

Now, I know what you might be thinking: that sounds expensive. But here’s the thing she shared that blew my mind — she moved her hosting from GoDaddy (which was costing her $300 a year just for one email address) to a service called NameHero. Her cost now? $3.10 a month. Unlimited email accounts, website hosting, all of it. So that’s officially not an excuse anymore.

She also talked about investing in a takedown service. She uses Book Defender, which runs about $125 a month, and it monitors for piracy across the web. She said yes, pirates are part of the business, and you’ll never stop all of it — but having that service means she’s not doing it herself, and it gives her real peace of mind. For 30+ books? Absolutely worth it.

And she talked about her editing team: a developmental editor she’s worked with since her second series, four volunteer beta readers who came directly from her ARC pool, and a copy editor for the final pass. Her point was simple — invest in your product, because your product is your business.

Oh, and one more thing. She fired a copy editor who held her manuscript hostage and demanded more money. Just wanted to include that as a reminder that you are the CEO, and CEOs make hard calls. You’ve totally got this.

Discipline Gets You There. Systems Keep You There.

Karolynn writes 3,000 words a day. She publishes six books a year — three per pen name. And she does it while raising kids, running a household, and managing two completely separate author brands.

Her advice on discipline was real: it’s a job, and sometimes jobs are hard. But she also gave a practical tip that I loved — if you sit down and your brain won’t cooperate, just start typing whatever your mind is doing. Get your fingers moving. You can always come back to your story once you’ve worked through the mental noise.

She also talked about building a repeatable process, even as a pantser. She does light planning upfront — works out her series name, her character lineup, and her series arc in a notebook before she starts — not to plot every scene, but so she’s not rewriting entire books because a character showed up out of nowhere in book seven. A little scaffolding goes a long way, even if you’re not a full plotter.

The bigger takeaway here: write before busy work. She was very specific about this. Playing with covers, tweaking ads, updating your website — those feel productive, but they’re not writing. Writing is the thing that generates the income. Everything else supports it. Do the writing first.

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Your Backlist Is an ATM — But Only If You Set It Up Right

This is where I started furiously scribbling notes.

Karolynn has three things she does with every book that she calls her ‘backmatter ATM,’ and once she explained it, I could immediately see the money flowing.

First: Box sets. She puts every series in a box set at full price — no discounting. In Kindle Unlimited, the goal isn’t the purchase price, it’s the page reads. And for readers who want to binge a complete series? The box set is right there waiting for them. She said creating a box set is basically free — new cover, upload it, and it’s done. It’s your IP, already written, working harder for you.

Second: Backmatter with hyperlinks. Amazon lets you use 10% of your book for backmatter. She puts the first chapter of the next book in the series right there at the end — attention-grabbing, high-tension, designed to make the reader immediately want more. By the time that next book comes out, her pre-orders have already paid for all of her editing and cover costs. And she lists all her books with hyperlinks in every single one, so a reader who finds her through any book in the catalog can always find their way to more.

Here’s something most authors don’t think about until it’s too late: once a book is published, you can’t update those backmatter links — unless you set them up the smart way from the start. What if the pre-order page expired? What if you want to send readers to your newsletter instead of Amazon? With the right link system in place, you can change where any link in any published book goes — any time, without republishing. That’s exactly what I teach in Link Leverage for Authors, and it’s one of those things that takes an afternoon to set up and pays off for the entire life of your backlist.

Grab the Link Leverage Training

Third: Bonus content for email capture. This is a big one. Her ‘Super Secret’ pen name grew to 10,000 readers within a year by using bonus content as an email magnet — things like exclusive wedding scenes, a map of the fictional town, relationship contracts between characters. You give readers something they desperately want from inside the world of your book, they give you their email address. Win-win.

She also said something I want to say again louder: Do not use your backmatter click to ask for a review. That’s a wasted click. If someone is on an e-reader, Amazon already prompts them to review. Use your one backmatter ask for something that builds your business long-term — a newsletter subscriber or a pre-order.

The Link Leverage Training takes this link to the next level!

Pick a Lane and Own It (Your Readers Won’t Get Bored, I Promise)

One of the most freeing things Karolynn said was this: your readers do not get bored the way you do.

She talked about authors like Nicole Snow, who has 30+ books and has built her entire brand around Enemies to Lovers. Or Catarina Maura, whose covers always have flowers and always feature arranged marriage. Or Melanie Harlow, whose readers know every single book is going to be Small Town, Single Dad — and they read every single one because of it.

She used K-Lytics to find her second pen name’s niche — a highly desired, low-competition subcategory of contemporary romance — and once she found it, she committed. And she said that pen name overtook her main pen name in less than a full year.

The strategy here is so much simpler than we make it: find the lane your readers love, and give them more of it. They’re not rolling their eyes at you for writing another arranged marriage romance. They’re pre-ordering it at midnight.

Marketing: What Actually Moves the Needle

Karolynn gave her number-one marketing tip and I want to make sure you don’t scroll past it: ask your readers to follow you on Amazon and BookBub.

Amazon will notify your followers when you put up a pre-order. When your book is close to going live. When you release. They do the work for you — because they make money when you make money. And BookBub starts recommending you to new readers as your follower count grows, which means discovery you didn’t even have to pay for.

For advertising, her advice was stage-appropriate. If you have one to three books, start with Amazon ads — they’re simpler to set up, and they focus on getting eyes on your book right there in the store. When you have a bigger backlist and more read-through to lean on, layer in Facebook ads.

She also talked about newsletter swaps (find authors at a similar level and share each other’s books to your lists), loss leaders (99-cent books to pull new readers in — she uses 99 cents over free because in KU, 99 cents still earns page reads), and BookBub Featured Deals and New Release announcements as boosters.

And she left us with the mindset shift that tied everything together:

To earn $100,000 a year, your time is worth $48.08 an hour.

That’s the math: $100k ÷ 2,080 working hours = $48.08. So every hour you spend refreshing your Facebook group that isn’t converting? That’s $48.08 gone. Every hour you spend writing? That’s $48.08 invested in your business.

She said it simply: Your time has value. Act like it.

The Thing That’s Sticking With Me Most

There was a moment near the end of Karolynn’s talk where she quoted David Baldacci’s preface from Absolute Power — this line where he says, “When writing isn’t a job or a hobby, it’s who you are and how you identify yourself. You will persevere. Failure is guaranteed if you stop writing.”

And she looked at everyone and said: keep going.

That’s what she did. She started in 2017 with what she called a ‘terrible manuscript.’ She made mistakes. She spent money on things that didn’t work. She figured out what did. And now she’s a mid-list author who clears $15,000 a month, writes 3,000 words a day, and is genuinely proud of what she’s built — with no social media, no book signings, and a Super Secret pen name she won’t even tell a conference full of authors.

You can do this. I really believe that.

Grab Your Free Checklist

I put together a free PDF download — The Six-Figure Author Strategy Checklist — based on everything Karolynn shared during her talk. It covers all five strategy areas with specific action steps you can start on today, plus the $48.08/hour time-value calculation so you can start making smarter decisions about where your time goes.

And if this resonated with you, share it with an author friend who needs to hear it. We’re all in this together. 💛

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

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Okay, let’s just say the quiet part out loud.

Every fiction author I know — including me — has had this thought at some point. You’re deep in a manuscript, you love your characters, you’re genuinely excited about this story. And then the little voice shows up:

Is anyone actually going to buy this?

We don’t usually say it out loud. It feels uncomfortable, like admitting you care about the money side somehow makes you less of a real writer. But here’s what I actually believe: if you want to keep writing books, your author business needs to work. Caring about the financial side doesn’t make you less of an artist. It makes you a sustainable one.

So when I sat down in Dr. Trina Boice’s session at Inkers Con 2025 — “Will Your Book Make Any Money?” — I was all in. Dr. Boice is a bestselling author of 35 books (with more coming out every few months), a university English professor, and a professional author coach who works with both fiction and nonfiction writers. She coaches brand-new authors AND published authors whose books aren’t selling — and she says the same things usually need to be fixed in both cases.

What she shared was specific, actionable, and kind of sobering in the best way. I took a lot of notes, and I want to share all of it with you — especially if you write fiction, because she had things to say specifically for us.

P.S. Members get access to the spreadsheet and an 8-Page workbook! So be sure to grab yours at the end!

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The Statistic That Made Me Sit Up Straight

Dr. Boice dropped this early in her session and I literally wrote it in all caps in my notes:

The average book sells only about 250 copies a year. Over the entire lifetime of a book, it only sells about 2,500 copies.

And it gets worse: 60% of physical books that people actually buy don’t even get opened, let alone read.

That’s not to scare you. It’s to wake you up — because most of the time, that outcome isn’t happening because the book is bad. It’s happening because the author wrote the book they wanted to write without thinking about the market first. And then they did the same with the marketing.

Dr. Boice said exactly this: “One of the biggest mistakes I see authors make is that they write the book they want to write without even thinking about the marketing.”

And she’s right. We’ve all done it. I’ve done it. But it doesn’t have to be that way — and that’s exactly what the rest of her session was about.

Fiction Authors: Don’t You Dare Discount Yourselves

I want to pause here because Dr. Boice said something that I think a lot of fiction authors need to hear.

She listed out all the reasons people buy books — things like wanting to feel better, escape, relax, attract love, eliminate emotional pain. And then she said someone in the room might be thinking, “Wait, that sounds like nonfiction.”

Her response? Don’t you dare discount fiction.

“We’ve got a lot on our plates,” she said, “and to be able to relax and escape is absolutely valuable and helps people feel better.”

And then she talked about romance specifically. I have to share this directly because she said it so perfectly:

“Romance writers — man, that is such a profitable niche because those readers eat those romance books like potato chips. They just can’t get enough of them and keep those authors really busy and doing very well.”

Romance readers are not a nice-to-have. They are one of the most voracious, loyal, and profitable reader bases in the entire publishing world. And if you write romance — or any kind of emotionally-driven fiction — you have something people genuinely need and will keep coming back for.

So let’s stop apologizing for writing fiction. And let’s start setting it up to succeed.

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The Question You Need to Ask Before You Write the First Word

Here’s the thing Dr. Boice’s whole session hinged on, and it’s the thing most of us skip entirely.

She teaches authors to ask “will this book make money?” before they write it — not after. Not after the drafting, the editing, the cover design, the formatting. Before.

And she quoted Jay Abraham to frame it: “If you have something of value to bring to the world, you have a moral obligation to serve as many people as possible.”

The way you serve as many people as possible is by understanding what the market actually wants right now — not just what’s in your heart. (And I know, I know — writing to the market sounds scary. But stay with me, because she reframes this really well.)

Her point isn’t that you should abandon your creative instincts. Her point is that she’ll sometimes talk to a client who has three book ideas, and when they look at the market together, the market actually wants book two — not book one. And she’ll say: write book two now. Book one might have its moment next year. That’s not selling out. That’s being strategic.

Get Obsessively Clear on Your Avatar

Before you research a single keyword, Dr. Boice wants you to know exactly who you’re writing for. She calls it your ICA — your Ideal Customer Avatar — and she takes it seriously.

Not just “women ages 25-45 who like romance.” She means demographics and psychographics.

Demographics: age, gender, location, employment, whether they have kids. Psychographics: what do they value? What’s their lifestyle? What are they struggling with? What do they wish their life looked like?

And here’s her method: find a picture of this person online. Print it out. Put it next to your computer. Write directly to that person.

She says when your reader picks up your book and thinks “this author gets me — it’s like they’re in my head” — that’s when they buy every other book you’ve written. That’s the goal.

She also made a smart point about using AI for this: you can ask ChatGPT “I want to write a medieval romance murder mystery — who is my perfect target audience?” and get genuinely useful demographic and psychographic data. Not to write the book for you, but to understand who you’re writing it for.

And here’s what your avatar actually determines: everything. What you write, how you write it, where you market, when you post, what words you use. All of it flows from knowing your reader.

“The Smaller the Niche, the Bigger the Market”

This quote is from Dan Sullivan, and Dr. Boice used it to make a point that I think is so important for fiction authors specifically.

She asked: is your book a romance? Or is it a medieval royalty mystery thriller romance?

That niche version of your idea isn’t limiting you. It’s actually what makes you findable. Because when a reader goes to Amazon and types in “medieval royalty romance” — they’re already looking for exactly what you wrote. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what keyword research is designed to help you create.

Broad titles and broad positioning mean you’re competing with everyone. A niche positioning means the right reader finds you, reads the whole thing in a weekend, and immediately looks for your next book.

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The Research You Should Be Doing Before You Outline

This is where Dr. Boice got really practical and specific. And I loved this section because she gave us actual tools — not just “go do research” vibes.

Here’s what she recommends:

Start on Amazon. Type your genre into the search bar and pay attention to the autocomplete suggestions. Those autocomplete results are Amazon telling you what people are searching for right now. That is free, real-time market data.

Look at the Bestseller Rank (BSR). For any book you’re considering writing into, you want to see a BSR under 200,000. Under 150,000 is even better. If you’re seeing BSRs of two million? That genre/niche may not be profitable enough to be worth the effort right now.

Use KDSpy (a paid Chrome extension) to analyze a category at a glance. It gives you average monthly revenue for books in that niche, average price, average number of reviews, and a red/yellow/green viability rating. Dr. Boice literally demoed this live and showed how tweaking a genre from “dystopian sci-fi murder mystery” to “romantic sci-fi murder mystery” dramatically improved the viability score — because romance makes everything more profitable.

Free tools she loves:

• AnswerThePublic.com — shows you what questions real people are asking about any topic right now (5 free searches/day)

• trends.google.com — shows search volume trends over time for any topic or genre

• BuzzSumo — shows trending content by topic

• wordtracker.com — seven-day free trial; confirms whether your keywords are landing

Paid tools worth considering:

• Publisher Rocket — helps with titles, subtitles, keyword research, and category selection; Dr. Boice thinks this one is fantastic

• K-Lytics — real-time market statistics and genre trend data

And she uses all of this research to fill out what she calls a Book Profitability Worksheet — a color-coded spreadsheet where green means go, yellow means maybe, and red means pump the brakes. The goal is to look at it and immediately know which book idea is the smartest to write right now.

(I’ve included a link to the worksheet at the end!)

Your Title Is Not Just Cute. It’s a Keyword.

I want to spend a second on this because it’s something a lot of fiction authors completely underestimate.

Dr. Boice was direct: “Long gone are the days when titles that sold well were really clever and witty. It’s so important to put in some keywords because if you have some random title, nobody’s going to be searching for that.”

Your title and subtitle are the words readers type into search bars. They’re the words Amazon uses to match your book to someone actively looking. If your title is evocative but contains zero searchable terms, you’re leaving discoverability on the table.

This doesn’t mean your title has to be boring. It means your subtitle — that second line — should be doing real keyword work. And Publisher Rocket can help you figure out exactly what those keywords should be.

Series = The Biggest Opportunity in Fiction

If you write fiction and you’re not thinking in series, Dr. Boice wants you to start.

She put it simply: “The hardest book to sell is the first one because nobody knows what it is. They don’t know the characters. They don’t love the characters yet. And so once you really hook them in with that first book, they want more — and series could be very profitable.”

Your first book is your reader acquisition engine. It’s how someone discovers you. Everything after that — if you’ve done your job — is momentum. They binge book two in two days. They pre-order book three. They tell their friends. They join your email list and wait for announcements.

And she also mentioned low-content companion products as an add-on revenue stream — things like recipes, maps, or guidebooks that go with your fiction world. (Which honestly? I think is an underused opportunity for romance authors especially.)

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Why Your Fiction Might Not Be Selling (And It’s Not Your Writing)

Dr. Boice coaches published authors whose books aren’t selling, and she goes in and looks at three things: the marketing, the content, and the copy.

Almost every single time, the book is good. The problem is how it’s positioned.

For fiction authors, this usually shows up in one of a few places:

Your cover isn’t speaking the right language. Readers make purchase decisions in under three seconds based on your cover. If it doesn’t instantly signal your genre, they’ll scroll right past it — no matter how good the story is.

Your blurb isn’t making the right promise. Dr. Boice talked a lot about promises: the things you’re implicitly promising your reader from the moment they see your cover. If the reader’s expectations aren’t met — by the cover, the blurb, the opening pages — they’ll leave a bad review. And the flip side is true: when you make the right promise and deliver on it, you get the reviews that build your reputation.

Your keywords and categories are off. You can have a stunning cover and a killer blurb and still be invisible because you’re sitting in the wrong Amazon categories with the wrong keywords. Category and keyword research is non-negotiable.

You launched without enough social proof. This one I want to sit with for a second, because Dr. Boice mentioned reviewers specifically: “Your goal is to court those reviewers and let them know about your book.”

When a reader who doesn’t know you finds your book, they look at reviews before they buy. A book with three reviews — no matter how good it is — reads as a risk to a stranger. A book with fifty, a hundred, three hundred reviews? That’s a book that feels safe to try. That’s the social proof that tips someone from browsing to buying.

This is exactly why I built the ARC Reviewer Engine — to create a system for getting those reviews before launch day, not scrambling for them after. My debut launched with over 300 Goodreads reviews and over 100 Amazon reviews, and I genuinely believe that social proof was the difference between momentum and silence. If your review strategy isn’t solid yet, that’s worth addressing before your next launch.

The Most Valuable Marketing Asset You Have

Near the end of her session, Dr. Boice made a point that I’ve said a hundred times myself — and hearing it from someone with 35 published books made me want to stand up and clap.

“The most valuable marketing asset is an email list.”

Social media platforms can disappear. TikTok threatened to vanish from the US. Instagram changes its algorithm constantly. But your email list? You own that. No algorithm, no platform policy, no sudden change can take it from you.

And here’s the thing about your ARC process that I think is so underappreciated: when you build your ARC campaign correctly, you’re not just getting reviews. You’re building your email list at the same time. Every person who raises their hand to read your book early becomes an email subscriber. That’s the system I teach inside the ARC Reviewer Engine — and it’s exactly why I walked away from my debut with 1,700 email subscribers and 900+ ARC Reviewers. The reviews and the list grew together.

Dr. Boice’s advice: don’t wait until book two to start building that list. Build it now, with this book, before it’s even out.

Check Out The ARC Reviewer Engine Now!

Where to Actually Spend Your Money

She wrapped up with clear advice on this, and I appreciate how specific she was.

“If you’re going to spend money, the best money spent is probably going to be with an editor and with a cover designer.”

Not ads. Not a fancy website. Not a publicist. An editor — because quality matters and your readers will know the difference — and a cover designer who understands your genre, because your cover is doing more marketing work than almost anything else you could invest in.

After that: study your bestselling comp authors. Follow them on social media. Read the comments on their posts. Join their email lists! Watch how they talk to their readers — because that reader is your reader too. Your avatar research doesn’t stop when you write the book. It continues every time you show up online.

The Line That Is Going to Stay With Me

Dr. Boice closed with this, and I wrote it down three times:

“People who are making money with their books are researching before they write their books. That’s the bottom line of this whole presentation.”

Not after. Not while they’re promoting. Before. Before the outline, before the first chapter, before the cover brief. Research first. Then write.

And I want to add one thing: it’s also not too late if you’ve already published. If you have a book that’s underperforming, going back through this research process — your avatar, your keywords, your categories, your cover, your blurb — is exactly where the answers are.

The book isn’t the problem. The positioning almost always is.

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The One Thing That Ties All of This Together

Everything Dr. Boice talked about — knowing your reader, doing the research, getting the positioning right, showing up in the right places — it all leads to the same finish line question: when your book goes live, will there be readers ready to receive it?

That means reviews. That means social proof. That means having a launch team in place who’s excited about the book and ready to post.

That’s what the ARC Reviewer Engine is built for.

This is my course — the one I created because I did this whole process myself for my debut and I wanted to make sure other authors didn’t have to figure it out from scratch the way I did. It’s the exact system I used to:

• Get 900+ ARC applications without a big platform or a paid agency

• Build 1,700+ email subscribers in less than 30 days through the ARC process itself (not as a separate thing — the same system does both, just like Dr. Boice teaches)

• Launch with 300+ Goodreads reviews and 100+ Amazon reviews in the first week

And you can start it 1–3 months before your launch. Even if this is your first book. Even if you don’t have an audience yet.

Check out the ARC Reviewer Engine Now!

Because doing the market research matters. Getting the positioning right matters. But showing up on launch day with the social proof that makes total strangers trust you enough to click ‘buy’? That’s what actually moves the needle.

Also: Grab the Free Workbook and Dr. Boice’s Spreadsheet

I turned Dr. Boice’s whole framework into a fillable workbook for you: “Will Your Book Make Money? Your Pre-Launch Profitability Workbook.”

It includes:

• An avatar research guide (demographics + psychographics)

• A Book Profitability Research Worksheet with the BSR benchmarks she recommends

• A comp title research table

• A “why isn’t my book selling?” audit across cover, blurb, keywords, and reviews

• A pre-launch checklist

And she shared her spreadsheet, so I’ve included that down below as well!

You’ve got this. The fact that you’re here, doing this work, thinking about your author business this intentionally — you’re already so far ahead of where most authors start.

Now let’s make sure the book actually gets to the people who need it.

— Dani V.

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

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I want to tell you about the launch that changed everything for me.

Not because it was perfect. Not because I had some huge platform or a big marketing budget or years of experience building an author business. But because I was a brand new debut author — starting completely from scratch — and I figured out a system that got my book into the hands of hundreds of readers before it was even published.

And then those readers showed up and left amazing reviews.

What I Wanted (And What I Was Staring Down Instead)

When I was getting close to releasing my debut novel, I had one very clear goal: I wanted my book to launch with real reviews from real readers. Not three reviews from my family. Not a paid placement on a site where random people who didn’t even read my genre would leave a two-star critique. Real reviews, from people who genuinely loved the kind of book I was writing.

What I was staring down instead was a pretty common debut author situation: no existing email list, no social media following, no established community, and absolutely no roadmap for how to find the readers who would want to review my book.

The big problem underneath all of it was simple: I didn’t have a system. I had a book that was almost ready, and I had no repeatable, structured way to find the right readers and get them invested before launch day.

And the smaller symptoms of that were kind of everywhere. I didn’t know what emails to write. I didn’t know how to structure an ARC application. I didn’t know how to use social media in a way that actually brought readers to me instead of just... existing on the internet. I spent money on things I didn’t need — like a website that cost me $35 a month before I was even ready to sell books on it. I was piecing information together from a dozen different places, paying thousands for courses, and still not having a clear picture of how it all fit together.

I was figuring it out completely on my own. And it was slow, and expensive, and stressful in that particular way that comes from not knowing if what you’re building is going to work.

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The Decision to Stop Winging It

The real turning point was when I saw an author post about how she’d paid an agency to get reviews before her launch — and her book came out with nothing. Zero reviews. She was trying to be gracious about it, and I just kept thinking: there has to be a better way.

I started paying attention to what was actually working for authors who launched with real momentum. And slowly, by testing things and failing at some of them and succeeding at others, I started to see the shape of a system.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t nervous. I was putting my debut out into the world. I cared deeply about this book. The idea of doing all of this work and still launching into silence was terrifying.

But I also knew that doing nothing — or paying agencies that sent my book to people who didn’t read my genre — wasn’t a real option. So I committed to building it myself. And I decided that if I was going to do all this work anyway, I was going to document it so other authors wouldn’t have to go through what I went through.

What I Actually Did (The System, Step by Step)

The offer I invested in building: The ARC Reviewer Engine — the complete system I’d eventually turn into a course for other indie fiction authors.

I’m not going to walk through every detail here, because the details are what’s inside the course. But I will tell you the shape of it, because I think it matters to understand why it worked — not just that it did.

The system has three parts.

The first part was a funnel designed to warm readers up before they ever saw an application. Instead of asking cold strangers to commit to reviewing my book, I gave them something first — a way to fall in love with the story before I asked anything of them. By the time someone applied for an ARC, they were already invested. They weren’t hunting for a free book. They wanted mine.

The second part was a content strategy built entirely around finding the right readers — not building a following for its own sake. Every piece of content I created was designed to put my book in front of people who were already looking for exactly what I was writing, and to move them into my funnel. No paid ads. No guesswork.

The third part was a follow-up sequence designed to actually get readers to finish and review — which is the piece most authors completely skip. Getting ARCs out is only half the job. Getting reviews back is a system too, and I built one.

That’s it. Three parts. All of them matter. And all of them are inside the ARC Reviewer Engine.

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What Happened

Here’s what that system produced for my debut launch, starting from zero — no existing audience, no platform, no prior books:

Over 900 ARC applications. Real readers, in my genre, who chose my book.

1,700+ email subscribers built entirely through the ARC process. These weren’t people I paid to be on my list. They signed up because they wanted to read my book. (And I got those in less than 30 days)

300+ Goodreads reviews and 100+ Amazon reviews in my first week on sale. When my book launched, it didn’t look like a debut by an unknown author hoping for the best. It looked like a book that had already been read and loved by hundreds of people.

Over 2,000 TikTok followers grown organically as a side effect of finding ARC readers — not from trying to build a following, just from putting the right content in front of the right people.

A Facebook group with 300+ members before my book was even out — an early community of readers who were already invested in what I was doing next.

What’s Different Now

What feels most different isn’t just the numbers — it’s the foundation.

I launched my debut with an email list, a community, and social proof already in place. Which means that for every subsequent book, I’m not starting from zero. I’m launching to an audience that already knows me, already loves my writing, and is already waiting.

I also have a system I can repeat. It’s not a one-time lucky launch. It’s a process I now know works — and one I can hand to other authors so they don’t have to spend the time and money I did figuring it out.

That’s why I built the ARC Reviewer Engine into a full course. Because I remember exactly what it felt like to stare down a debut launch with no roadmap. And I don’t want that for you.

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You Can Do This Too

The ARC Reviewer Engine is the complete system — every template, every script, every step in the right order, with the resources you need to actually execute it.

If you’re getting close to a launch and you want to do it with real reviews already in place, this is how.

Check out the ARC Reviewer Engine!

And if you’re looking to publish your book, I’d highly recommend checking out this one about Author Branding so you can be sure you’re giving your readers the right messaging.

The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

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Okay, first? I hear you. And I want you to know something important before we go any further: that wasn’t a you problem.

It wasn’t a TikTok problem either.

It was a setup problem. And honestly? That’s the best possible news, because setup problems are fixable!

I’ve watched so many authors pour real energy into TikTok — posting consistently, trying different hooks, chasing trends, willing something to catch — and walk away feeling like the platform just doesn’t work for them.

I get it. I’ve been in that frustration too. But after growing TikTok accounts in different businesses to over 80,000 followers and pulling 90,000+ page reads in a single month — often in about two minutes a day — I can tell you with complete confidence: TikTok works. You just needed someone to show you the actual rules.

The Thing Nobody Told You (But Really Should Have)

Here’s the biggest reason TikTok doesn’t work for most authors: TikTok didn’t know what your account was about.

This sounds simple, but it’s genuinely everything. TikTok’s entire algorithm is built around matching content to the right audience. And so when a new account shows up posting about a book one day, the author journey the next day, some word count updates, and maybe a personal life thing here and there... TikTok gets confused. It tries to find an audience for all of that at once — and that overlap? It’s tiny. So your views stay low, your reach stays small, and eventually you assume TikTok just isn’t for you.

It is for you. You just need a dedicated, focused account that talks about one thing, for one audience: your book, for your readers.

And here’s the part I really want you to hear — you don’t even have to show your face to make this work. The system I teach is completely faceless. No on-camera presence required. Which means if the thought of being a “TikTok creator” felt intimidating before, I want you to set that fear down right now. You don’t have to perform. You just have to show up for your readers — and you can do that in a way that feels completely comfortable and sustainable for you.

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The “Warm-Up” Step That Almost Everyone Skips

Okay, so here’s another piece that most authors skip entirely — and it’s honestly one of the biggest reasons your TikTok’s don’t take off from day one.

Before you post a single piece of content, your account needs to be warmed up. And so what that means practically is: you spend a little time on TikTok as a consumer first. Search for content in your genre. Like and comment on posts similar to what you’ll be creating. Follow accounts that are talking about the kinds of books you write.

You’re essentially teaching TikTok what your account is about before you ever ask it to find you an audience.

I’d recommend spending about 30 minutes a day doing this for at least three to five days before you post anything. I know it might feel like you’re just scrolling — but you’re actually doing something really strategic. You’re giving the algorithm every piece of information it needs to go find your readers.

Most authors skip this entirely. They create an account and post the same day. And then they wonder why nothing happens.

A Bad Start Doesn’t Follow You

Here’s what I love telling authors who tried TikTok before and got burned: a rough start doesn’t follow you.

Because the system I teach starts with a brand-new account — new email, fresh slate. You’re not trying to revive something TikTok has already categorized incorrectly. You’re starting clean, with the right setup from day one.

Everything you did before? Doesn’t matter anymore. The confusion, the mixed content, the low views — that all stays on the old account. And this time, you have a system that walks you through every single step: the account setup, the warm-up process, finding your keywords, pulling your best scenes, writing descriptions that signal to the algorithm exactly who should see your posts. Nothing is left to guesswork.

TikTok Works. The Setup Just Has to Be Right.

When I had 90,000 page reads in a single month, it wasn’t magic. It was a method. A system I built, refined, and finally had running so smoothly that my daily marketing habit was literally two minutes — done before I got out of bed.

And I want you to know: that’s available to you too. Even if you’ve tried before. Even if you don’t want to show your face. Even if you feel behind or confused or like you’re starting from scratch — because you kind of are, and that’s actually the whole point.

This time, you know the rules. And this time, you have a system.

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That system is the Faceless Content System — and it walks you through every single step, from setting up your fresh account the right way, to warming it up, to finding the keywords that pull in your exact readers, to pulling scenes and writing descriptions that make the algorithm do the work for you. No guessing. No “I hope this works.” No showing your face. Just a clear, repeatable method that gets your books in front of readers — on autopilot.

You’ll finish with over 30 posts that you can post on repeat so you always know what to say to continue marketing your books.

If TikTok didn’t work for you before, it wasn’t a sign to quit. It was a sign you needed better information. And now you have it.

So if you’re ready to stop wondering whether TikTok could work for you and actually find out — I’d love to see you inside.

Check Out the Faceless Content System

And if you're getting your content system set up before your book launches — make sure you read this one next. There's a step most authors skip entirely before launch day, and it's honestly the one that matters most.

The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

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Okay, I have to share something with you because I genuinely wish someone had handed me this information earlier in my author journey.

I recently went through a training on visual author branding — specifically this concept called curb appeal — and I’m not exaggerating when I say it stopped me in my tracks. Not because the information was complicated. But because I realized I had been doing something really common that a lot of indie authors do, and it was completely working against me.

I was DIY-ing my branding. And not in a strategic, intentional way — in a “slap something together and hope it looks okay” kind of way.

And so if you’ve ever felt like your author visuals are all over the place, or like something looks off but you can’t quite put your finger on what — this post is for you.

P.S. Be sure to grab your Branding Checklist at the end!

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Here’s What I Was Missing

Here’s the honest truth: I wasn’t being intentional about my brand. Not because I didn’t care, but because I genuinely didn’t know I should be. Nobody hands you a branding checklist when you decide to publish your first book. You’re figuring out the writing, the covers, the formatting, the marketing — and branding kind of falls through the cracks. Or worse, you assume that whatever you put together is “good enough” because you made it yourself and it looks fine to you.

But then I started really paying attention to other authors. And I noticed something. The ones whose books I stopped scrolling for — the ones where I’d see a cover thumbnail on Amazon and just know what kind of story it was — they all had something in common. Everything about their presence looked like it came from the same place. Their cover. Their email header. Their social graphics. Their author name. It was all cohesive.

And mine... wasn’t.

That’s when I realized something that genuinely shifted how I think about all of this: this is a business, and I needed to start treating it like one.

The Concept That Changed Everything: Curb Appeal

The training I went through introduced this idea of curb appeal — and it’s such a perfect way to think about visual branding.

Curb appeal is the term real estate agents use for how a house looks from the street. Before a buyer ever steps inside, before they read the listing, before they know anything about the neighborhood — they see the outside of the house. And in about three seconds, they’ve already decided if they want a closer look.

Your author brand works exactly the same way.

When a reader scrolls past your book on Amazon, or sees your email in their inbox, or lands on your social media page — they’re making a snap judgment before they read a single word. And here’s the part that really got me:

Perceived value is free. If you look polished, professional, and consistent, readers will believe you’re worth their time and money. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to have great curb appeal. You just have to be intentional.

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Three Things I Learned (That You Can Use Too)

1. You are NOT your author brand — and that separation matters

This was genuinely a lightbulb moment for me. Your author brand is not you. It’s a deliberate persona you construct — a curated version of your author identity that you put into the world to attract the right readers. Think of it like a first date. On a first date, you show up as your best self. You’re not hiding who you are — but you’re leading with what you want someone to see first.

When you blur the line between your personal identity and your author brand, that’s where things get inconsistent and messy. The brand is the business. Keep them separate in your mind, and it will be a lot easier to make intentional decisions about how everything looks and feels.

2. Consistency is the engine of brand recognition — and inconsistency is expensive

Here’s an analogy that really landed for me: Target. No matter where you are in the country, you know you’re at Target the second you see that bullseye. The colors, the logo, the feel — it’s identical everywhere. And because of that consistency, you trust it. You feel comfortable. You know what you’re getting.

Your author brand needs that same consistency across every single touchpoint — your book covers, your email header, your social media graphics, your website, your promos, event banners, even swag. When a reader goes from seeing your book on Amazon to finding you on TikTok to opening your newsletter, they should feel an instant sense of “yep, I’m in the right place.”

Every inconsistency creates a tiny moment of doubt. And readers have too many options to sit with doubt.

3. Your book cover is your #1 branding tool — and your author name PNG is the highest-ROI investment you can make

New readers don’t find you on your website first. They don’t find you in your newsletter first. They find you on retailers — and on retailers, your book is your brand. That cover is doing all the work. It needs to communicate your genre, your subcategory, your heat level, and your tropes at a glance, before anyone reads a word.

And so here’s the big tip that came out of this training that I immediately acted on: get a professional designer to create a styled author name PNG — a transparent file of your author name in the right font for your genre. You pay for it once, and then you use it everywhere. On every cover. Every email header. Every social graphic. Every promo. It becomes the through-line that ties your entire visual identity together.

Want to get your entire Amazon page working for you — not just your cover? Author Page Magic walks you through every element of your book page: blurb, cover, reviews, A+ content, editorial reviews, keywords, and more — so when readers land on your page, they actually click buy. It’s included with your membership!

Check Out Author Page Magic

What I Did After Going Through This Training

I’m going to be real with you — going through this training was a little uncomfortable, in the best way.

I looked at my existing brand with fresh eyes and realized it needed an overhaul. My covers weren’t cohesive as a unit. My graphics didn’t all feel like they came from the same place. And I had never invested in a professional author name treatment that I could use consistently everywhere.

And so I made those changes. I invested in a professional author name PNG. I looked at my covers honestly and started addressing the cohesion issues. I approached my brand like what it is — a business, not just a creative project.

And here’s what I want you to know: it’s not as expensive or overwhelming as it sounds. Most of this is free — it’s just a shift in how you think about it. The investment I made was small compared to what inconsistent branding was quietly costing me.

“But I’m Not a Graphic Designer...”

You don’t have to be. That’s honestly the best part of this whole concept.

You don’t have to know a font from an em dash to have incredible curb appeal. You just have to understand what you want your author house to look like — and then find the contractor who can build it. The training put it perfectly: you don’t have to swing the hammer. You just have to have a plan.

Understanding the concept of author branding is enough to direct a designer effectively. And the results are worth every penny.

I even made a handy little checklist for you at the end if you’ve got a membership!

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Okay, So What’s Next?

Once your visual brand is solid and consistent — once your author house has real curb appeal — the next question is: how do you actually get readers to it?

That’s where content creation comes in. And specifically, content that drives readers to your books without you burning out trying to show up everywhere, every day.

If you want to learn how to create content that gets your newly polished brand in front of the right readers — without being on camera, without spending hours a week, and without the guesswork — that’s exactly what the Faceless Content System teaches.

Check Out the Faceless Content System!

Because your author brand deserves to be seen. Let’s make sure it is.

Check out your downloadable checklist here:

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I created a private library of short, high-impact trainings that show you exactly what to fix, improve, and optimize.

No fluff. No overwhelm. Just systems that work.

Lock in your Membership before it increases on the first of the month, and unlock full access to the mini courses ($234 Value) as well as the entire Full Resource Vault which contains all the member downloads.

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This isn’t a static course.

It’s a living library.

Every month, I add new mini trainings based on:

• What’s working right now

• What authors are struggling with

• And the fastest ways to increase your page reads and income

So your subscription doesn’t just give you access…

It keeps you getting better results over time.

May 2026:

(Coming Soon - to be released in May)

How to make SOP’s for your business so you can hand them off once you’re ready for an assistant.

April 2026:

Author Page Magic ($376 Value)

March 2026:

Canva Crash Course ($67 Value)

Link Leverage for Authors ($81 Value)

Ultimate Success Habit Tracker ($67 Value)

Book Cover Mockups ($67 Value)

This isn’t another overwhelming course.

This is a growing library of short, focused mini trainings designed to solve the exact problems that keep authors from making real money from their books.

Each one is built to be:

• Quick to consume (most are just a few minutes)

• Immediately actionable

• Focused on results, not theory

So instead of trying to figure everything out yourself…

You can plug into systems that are already working.

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

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Can I tell you something that changed everything for me as an author?

I grew a Facebook group to over 300 members — not through ads, not through a big viral moment, not through posting constantly on social media. I did it by building community inside and around my book. The story itself brought people together.

And once I saw that it was possible, I couldn’t unsee it.

Here’s the thing most authors don’t realize: readers don’t just fall in love with books. They fall in love with worlds. With characters. With the connections they feel when they’re deep inside a story that makes them feel less alone. And when you understand that — when you start writing with that in mind — your readers stop being passive. They become a community.

I know that might sound like a lot. It might even sound like one more thing you have to figure out on top of writing, publishing, marketing, and everything else. But I promise — this is so much more doable than it looks. Because you’re not adding something new to your plate. You’re just using what you’re already creating in a smarter way.

Here are the three strategies that make it happen.

P.S. Read till the end for your free download of the checklist!

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Strategy #1: Make Your Characters Feel Like Real People Your Readers Are Obsessed With

Here’s where most authors get this wrong: they think building a reader community is about being on the right platform or posting the right content. And so they spend their energy on Facebook groups and Discord servers and Instagram grids — and then wonder why readers aren’t showing up.

But readers don’t gather around platforms. They gather around people.

Specifically, your characters.

Think about every fandom you’ve ever seen go absolutely wild online. It’s never because the plot was good. It’s because people became so attached to specific characters — their contradictions, their choices, their tiny human quirks — that they couldn’t stop thinking about them. They had to talk about them. And they had to find other people to talk about them with.

That’s a community. And it starts with how you write.

When you create characters who feel fully human — flawed in specific ways, driven by something readers recognize in themselves, with little details that stick — you give readers something to be invested in. Not just entertained by. Invested in.

And so when those readers finish your book and go online? They’re not looking for your Facebook group. They’re looking for anyone who feels the way they feel. You just have to be there when they find each other.

Strategy #2: Design Tension That Gives Readers Something to Argue About

Okay, this one is my favorite — because it’s so counterintuitive.

Most authors are terrified of readers having strong negative reactions to their story. They want everyone to love everything. And I totally understand that impulse. But here’s what I’ve learned: readers who debate your book are readers who care about your book. And readers who care? They become your community.

Tension — real tension, the kind that makes readers squirm and argue and have opinions — is what turns passive reading into active engagement.

Think about it this way: when two readers are online going back and forth about whether your main character made the right choice, whether the love interest deserved forgiveness, whether the ending was satisfying or devastating — they are not just talking about your book. They are in your world. They are emotionally invested in a way that no amount of marketing could manufacture.

So when you’re writing, think about where readers are going to have strong, split reactions. What choices will half your audience defend and the other half argue against? What relationship dynamic will make people choose sides? What plot turn will people either love or absolutely not see coming?

That’s not bad writing. That’s community-building built into the story itself.

When your readers are online angry that your character did something — they are in. They are yours.

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Strategy #3: Show Up as a Human, Not Just a Brand

This one is the strategy that ties everything together — and it’s the one I see authors skip the most.

You can write incredible characters. You can craft tension that gets people talking. But if readers never feel connected to you — the person who made this story — they’ll love the book and move on. They won’t become lifelong fans.

What changes that is surprisingly simple: author notes and direct interaction.

I’m talking about sharing a little behind-the-scenes glimpse into why you wrote a scene the way you did. Responding when readers comment or reach out. Letting people see your thought process — the moments of doubt, the things that surprised you about your own characters, the chapters that made you emotional to write.

When you do this, you stop being a brand and start being a person. And readers follow people from book to book. They wait for your next release not just because they liked the last story, but because they feel a genuine connection to you.

And so this doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be a whole content strategy. It can be as simple as a note at the end of a chapter, a quick post about why a character said what they said, a response to a reader review that made you feel seen. Small moments of real connection compound over time into something you can’t buy with any ad budget.

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“But I’m not publishing serially — does this still work for me?”

Yes. Absolutely yes.

These strategies work because of how you write and how you show up — not because of your publishing format or release cadence. Whether you write standalones, a series, or anything in between, you can still create characters readers obsess over, build tension that sparks debate, and connect with your readers in ways that make them feel like they’re part of something.

The platform matters less than the intention. Start with one story. Start with one genuine interaction. And let it grow from there.

Your Next Step

If this resonated with you, I want to point you toward something that’s going to make this even more concrete.

Your earliest readers — the ones who read your book before it launches, before anyone else gets to it — are the seeds of your reader community. They’re the people who, if you bring them in the right way, become your most loyal advocates. Your word-of-mouth engine. Your people.

That’s exactly what the Beta Reader Playbook is built around. It walks you through how to find the right beta readers, bring them into your world, and build the kind of relationship that turns them from readers into your readers — the ones who show up for every book you write.

Check Out the BETA Reader Playbook

You’ve totally got this. Your story already has everything it needs to build something lasting. Now it’s just about learning how to use it.

Don’t forget your free checklist!

Download Your Free Strategy Checklist

PS…Want an all access pass to the BETA Reader Playbook and the complete library of the Shortcut Premium products?

Upgrade your subscription to a 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts All Access Membership.

When you do, you’ll receive instant access to the Faceless Content System, the ARC Reviewer Engine, the BETA Reader Playbook, the Low-Effort Newsletter Masterclass, and more.

As an All Access Member, the library is available to you!

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

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Every few months something sweeps through the author community and suddenly everyone’s doing it. Direct sales. TikTok. A new pen name. Rapid release. And a lot of authors jump in — not because it’s the right move for them, but because it seems to be working for someone else.

I’ve done it. You’ve probably done it. And it usually ends the same way: stretched thin, mediocre results, wondering what went wrong.

I was listening to a presentation recently from a seven-figure indie author with four active pen names and over 150 published titles. And before she said a single word about tactics, she said this: before you take on anything new, you need to audit what you actually have.

Four things. If you don’t have enough of them, it doesn’t matter how good the tactic is.

Members: Don’t forget your 4-Resources Audit at the bottom!

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The 4 Resources

She calls them time, energy, money, and resources. And she checks all four before she says yes to anything — a new pen name, a new platform, a new launch strategy, anything.

Here’s what each one actually means.

Time isn’t just “do I have hours in the day.” It’s honest hours. Writing hours, marketing hours, admin hours. A new initiative needs its own production schedule, its own launch prep, its own attention. When you take something on, where is that time physically coming from? What stops getting done so this can get done?

If you can’t answer that clearly, that’s not a yes yet.

Energy is different from time — and this is the one most authors underestimate. You can have hours in the calendar and have nothing left in the tank. She talked about using pen names partly to fight boredom and burnout, because writing the same kind of book over and over was draining her. Sometimes something new can restore energy. But only if the other resources are there to support it.

Adding something new when you’re already running on empty doesn’t bring excitement. It brings collapse.

Money is the obvious one, but it still catches people off guard. Covers, editing, platform fees, ads, formatting. Every new initiative has a price tag, even if you try to do it on the cheap. The question isn’t what you hope to make back. It’s what you can put in before you see a return — and whether you actually have that sitting there.

Resources is the one most authors miss entirely. She defines it as infrastructure: your newsletter list, a Facebook page, a reader group, a social media presence. When you start something new, she said, you start at zero. You don’t get to bring your existing platform with you — or if you do, you’re pulling it away from what it was already doing for your current work.

What infrastructure does this new thing require? Do you have it, or do you have the bandwidth to build it?

The Honest Audit

Her move before every new initiative is simple: make a list. Write down what you actually have in each of the four categories, and then write down what this new thing actually requires.

Not everything has to be fully resourced from the start. She’s clear about that. You can begin small and build. But you have to be honest about what “small” actually looks like — not what you’re hoping it will look like once it takes off.

She said something that really stuck with me: focus is her biggest enemy. With multiple pen names, multiple platforms, multiple books in production, the question of where to put her attention is constant. The four-resource audit is how she cuts through that noise. It takes the decision out of the realm of “this sounds exciting” and puts it into “do I actually have what this requires.”

This isn’t just a pen name framework. I use it now for everything.

Before I try a new platform. Before I sign up for a new promo. Before I say yes to a new launch approach. Four questions, four honest answers.

Pick one thing you’re currently considering — something you haven’t started yet — and write down what it would actually cost in all four categories. Then check whether you have it.

If the numbers don’t add up, that’s not a reason to never do it. It’s a reason to not do it right now.

Reply and tell me — what’s something you’ve been considering but keep putting off? I’m curious whether it’s a resource problem or something else.

Chat soon,

—Dani Valentine

Here’s your 4-Resources Audit for paying members:

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The 6 & 7-Figure Author Shortcuts Newsletter Is a Curation of Weekly Proven Systems, Templates, and Strategies to Turn Your Books Into Consistent, Scalable Income (Without Burnout Even if You’re Brand New)

New posts every Tuesday

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You finished your book. You did the thing most people only ever talk about — you actually wrote it. And now you’re staring at the manuscript wondering: what do I do next?

Here’s the hard truth no one tells you at the finish line: finishing your book is only the beginning. And what you do in the weeks and months before you publish will determine whether your launch reaches real readers — or disappears into the void without a single sale.

I’ve worked with authors who did it both ways. The ones who skipped the foundation launched to crickets. The ones who built the structure first? They launched with momentum, readers, and reviews already in place. Some of them have gone on to turn what started as a debut novel into a consistent income stream.

The difference wasn’t talent. It wasn’t even the quality of the book. It was the three steps I’m about to walk you through.

P.S. Read till the end for your free download of the checklist!

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Step 1: Choose Your Pen Name — and Research Your Market First

Before you set up a single account or design a single graphic, you need a pen name. And not just any name you like — one that’s been researched, tested, and chosen with strategy.

Here’s the thing most new authors don’t realize: the days of publishing under your real name are largely over. A pen name protects you, brands you, and gives you the flexibility to write in multiple genres without confusing your audience. Even if you only write one genre, you want the separation.

So how do you choose the right one? Start on Amazon.

Think of Amazon as a search engine, not just a store. Go look up books like the ones you’re writing. Study the pen names other authors in your genre are using. Notice the patterns — the vibe, the length, the style. Look at their covers, their titles, how they describe their books. This is your market research, and it’s free.

When you’re ready to choose your name, follow these rules:

• Keep it easy to spell and easy to Google. Four to five letters per name is the sweet spot.

• Avoid initials. They create inconsistency across platforms (A.N. Author vs. AN Author vs. Ann N. Author — readers get confused and move on).

• Be 100% consistent. Same spelling, same format, same punctuation on every single platform — Amazon, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, everywhere.

• Google it AND Amazon search it before you commit. You don’t want to accidentally share a name with a popular fictional character or an existing author in your genre.

This name is your brand. Take a few days on it. It’s worth it.

Step 2: Build Your Email List Before You Launch — with a Story Magnet

This is the step most new authors skip entirely. Please don’t be most authors.

Before your book comes out, you need to start building an email list. Not after launch. Not once you have a few readers. Before. And the best way to do it is with something called a story magnet — a free prequel or “starter story” set in your book’s world that you offer readers in exchange for joining your list.

Why does this matter so much?

Your email list is your number one marketing asset as an author. It’s the one thing you can never lose. Social media platforms get restricted, accounts get shut down, algorithms change overnight — but your email list? It’s yours. Always. It’s a direct line to readers who have already raised their hand and said, yes, I want what you’re writing.

You get to contact them directly when your next book drops. No algorithm standing between you and your reader. No hoping the platform shows your post to your followers. Just you, your book, and the people who actually want to read it.

And yes — you’ll get some freebie seekers. That’s fine. You can clean the list later. Right now, the goal is growth.

Start building before you launch. You’ll thank yourself on release day.

If you want to learn how I gained 1,700+ Email subscribers without writing anything extra? Then check out the ARC Reviewer Engine here!

Step 3: Do Your Homework While You’re Still Writing

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to wait until your manuscript is done to start building your author platform. In fact, the time you’re writing is the perfect time to lay the groundwork for your launch.

Here’s exactly what to do while you’re still in drafting mode:

Find 5 comp authors. These are authors who write books like yours — same genre, similar tropes, comparable readership. Write them down. Then go read their reviews on Amazon. What do readers consistently love about their books? Not to copy — but to understand what your ideal reader is already hungry for. If every review on your comp author’s page raves about the slow-burn tension or the witty banter, that’s a signal. Lean into what you already do well, and make sure it’s visible.

Get your cover designed to be on-market. A cover isn’t just decoration — it’s a marketing signal. It tells a reader in one glance whether your book is for them. Study the covers in your genre and hire a designer who understands that space. Your cover needs to look like it belongs.

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Choose your tropes and know them. Readers in fiction (especially romance and romantasy) shop by trope. Know which ones live in your book and make sure they’re front and center in how you talk about it.

Build your marketing plan now. Before the book is done. Before launch week. Map out how you’ll announce it, where you’ll share it, and who you’ll reach out to. Don’t let launch day sneak up on you with nothing in place.

The authors who launch with momentum are the ones who treated the writing period as a building period too.

“But Do I Really Need an Email List Before I Even Have a Book Out?”

Yes. And I’ll prove it to you.

Using this exact structure — without writing a single new book — I grew my own email list to 1,700 subscribers in less than 30 days.

Not with a story magnet. Not with months of content. With a system that grew my list and launched my book with reviews already in place at the same time. Two birds, one strategy.

The question isn’t whether you need an email list before you publish. The question is how quickly you can start building one. Every day you wait is a day you could have been growing an audience that’s ready and waiting when your book drops.

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Ready to Build Your List and Launch with Reviews at the Same Time?

If you want the step-by-step system that does both — grows your email list AND gets your book launched with reviews, without any additional writing work — then the ARC Reviewer Engine was made for you.

It’s exactly how I took a brand-new author platform from zero to 1,700 subscribers in under a month, with readers who were excited, engaged, and ready to review.

Check Out the ARC Reviewer Engine!

(Your book deserves readers. Let’s get them.)

Ready to take the next step in your publishing journey? Share this post with a fellow author who’s getting ready to launch — they’ll thank you for it.

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