How to design a signature series

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It is almost impossible to make money on a stand-alone book. In order to drive ads you need enough read-through to additional titles break even.

Whether it’s ads on Amazon, Facebook, Bookbub, Google, or buying newsletter placements.

Anywhere.

It is generally accepted that outside of thriller or romance, a series needs roughly 3-5 books to have a reasonable chance of breaking even.

This is because of series read-through. If a person reads one book, and it’s self-contained, they generally don’t continue reading books from the author.

However, if you have a 10-book series, some percentage of fans will keep going, which helps you recoup ad costs for the first book.

A single book that sells for even $9.99 on Amazon only received $7 in revenue. Meanwhile, a 5-book series, even selling for $4.99, would return $15 in revenue if somebody buys the whole series.

It’s just easier to make money on a series because there is more money to be made.

The simple fact is that, usually, it costs more than the revenue gained from one book to find a new reader. The more money a book makes, the more you can spend on advertising.

The more money you can spend on advertising, the more people know about your book, and the easier it becomes to make money on it because people know about it.

Depending on the series it can be quicker, but a reasonable expectation is 3-55 books. If you can’t turn a profit advertising 5 books, you have done something very wrong with your series.

I have written standalone books available to paid members of my Substack, but otherwise, very few people buy them because I can’t profitably run ads to them, or talk about them for long enough to get traction.

A 5-book series gives you five times you can talk about a series instead of one.

A major goal of a publisher is to build an author’s catalog so that when one goes into a bookstore or library they see several inches of work from an author taking up space on a shelf, and that makes them more likely to buy/read that author.

I have often seen publishers more in favor of stand-alone books once somebody has built a name. Until then, they tend to want something meaty they can use to introduce a new author and build their name.

If one looks at the history of publishing, the overwhelming majority of uber-successful authors have a long series they used to build their careers.

I used to do only standalone, but it is not feasible as an author or publisher to make a living that way.

That said, now that I am a known commodity, a stand-alone book is actually profitable for me, but only because people know my name and seek out my work.

It’s almost impossible to launch a career with stand-alone books.

The average book costs roughly $35,000 to get out the door. There are editors, proofreaders, audiobook narrators, printing, marketing, and dozens of other line items that balloon the costs.

By some metrics, books sell an average of 3,000 copies over time.

Research suggests that the “average” self-published, digital-only book sells about 250 copies in its lifetime. By comparison, the average traditionally published book sells 3,000 copies, but as I mentioned above, only about 250-300 of those sales happen in the first year.

Other articles state that books don’t sell more than 1,000 copies on average over their life.

Combine the explosion of books published with the flat total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. According to NPD BookScan—which tracks about 85 percent of bookstore, online, and other retail US print sales of books (including Amazon) — 789 million print books were sold in 2022 in the US in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction (Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2023). Thus, the average book published today is selling less than 300 print copies over its lifetime in the US retail channels. Even if e-book sales, audio sales, sales outside of the US, and sales outside of retail channels are added in, the average new book published today is selling much less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime in all formats and all markets. What is skewing these figures down are the tiny sales of most self-published books that have flooded the marketplace. However, sales of traditionally published books are also shockingly small. Kristen McLean, lead publishing industry analyst for NPD BookScan, recently revealed findings from BookScan’s study of print retail sales in the US of new titles by the top ten publishers in the US trade market (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley). BookScan found that only 6.7 percent of the new titles released by these companies were selling more that 10,000 copies in their first year of sales, only 12.3 percent were selling more than 5,000 copies in their first year, and only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year (Kristen McLean response to the blog “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2022).

A book needs to sell roughly 10,000 copies to be considered a success, and almost no books get there on their own.

Most authors need multiple books to get traction, and a series is an effective way to do that efficiently.

So, how do we even start thinking about a series that could define our career? Well, having written three major ones in my career (The Godsverse Chronicles, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga) I have thought about that question a lot.

Before I get started, I will tell you these are my opinions. You might hate them all, but I don't care. You can plan a series any way you like, but this is how I do it and what works for me.

I will also specifically be talking about a signature series, which is one that has a million+ words in it and spans several books. For comics, this is at least a maxi-series, with 12+ issues in it.

First and foremost, there are many reasons to write a book, but the reason to write a signature series is to make money and define your career. There are plenty of smaller series and standalone books which you can write for fun, but a series is about pulling in the type of money that allows you to do this full-time.

It's an absolute mind-numbing amount of work and stress. There is no other reason to do a signature series than to define your career and create something that has long-term sales potential.

Here are the main questions you should ask before starting a signature series.

What genre do I want to be known for?

A good signature series might span many subgenres, but it needs to clearly be defined by a single main genre. Readers are looking for a specific genre when they search for a book, at least a first book in a series, and the more tightly you can define that genre, the better your sales will be, and since signature series are mainly about both short and long term sales, defining your series well is critical for success.

There are five main genres that indies can hope to have success in, and this is in order of probability of success, as defined by the popularity of the genre in the self-published space.

1. Romance - the most popular genre by far, and accounts for more book sales than all other genres conbined.

2. Thriller/Mystery/Crime - easily the second most popular genre, far ahead of all the others,save romance.

3. Science Fiction - the surge of sales from military sci-fi has vaulted sci-fi past fantasy in total sales.

4. Fantasy - close behind science fiction.

5. Horror - far behind all other categories listed.

Now, there are many subgenres and categories underneath each of them. You can have epic fantasy or urban fantasy, military sci-fi or alien invasion, contemporary romance or historical romance, but you need to define your main genre, the one that you will be placed by readers for the rest of your career.

If you write in another genre, find a way to make it feel like one of these genres, because those are the ones that sell.

Remember, though, that this is the series you will be known for and what you expect new readers to pick up first when they hear about you, so don't choose a genre unless you intend to write in it for a long time and are comfortable with the majority of readers knowing you are that lind of writer.

It is very hard to change the trajectory of a career once you have a signature series, so only go into one once you know for sure they type of thing you want to be known for by the majority of people who find your work.

That might take 5-10+ books before you figure that out, or maybe you already know it, but this is a big commitment. Don't go into it lightly.

What subgenre/tropes will define this series?

Every genre has some enduring tropes and subgenres that are timeless, and you will want to choose a timeless trope for your series as you want them to be bought for the rest of your life and beyond.

For instance, paranormal romance shifters or vampires will probably endure for at least the next decade.

The same thing with fantasy and fairy tales or dragon riders.

Military sci-fi and space opera dominate the sci-fi charts as well, so sometimes a small niche subgenre is responsible for an oversized part of a genre's success, and writing in any other subgenre would be folly.

Once you have your genre, it's really important to pick a subgenre that is robust and enduring as you want to make sales on this series for years into the future. Even if the sales are middling at the beginning, a signature series gains value over time, as every reader who sticks with it buys more books the longer the series goes on.

What kind of series is this going to be?