How I Make A Six Figure Income With My Writing

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• Thanks for sharing so much detail about your sales figures, its interesting to see how they break down. Mine are children's picture books so in many ways the panorama is very different but I eagerly follow your posts because they are always substantial. Thanks. Beck.

• It's always a joy to learn from these posts! I visit the Creative Penn daily to learn!

• This data is so helpful, especially regarding ebook sales. Thank you! And congrats for adding your husband to the business. So cool!

  • Thanks :)

• I found your website a few weeks ago while searching for Scrivener tutorials. I can not express how thankful I am that I found you. Your advice is priceless. I have since bought all but one of your non-fiction books. I got print versions because I prefer to read non-fiction that way.
  I have also purchased Desecration and taken advantage of your free ebooks. You have changed the way I think about self-publishing. I do have a traditional book deal, but I have so many other ideas that I will definitely be going down the self-publishing route, once they are ready.

  • Thanks Natalie and I'm so pleased to have changed your mind about self-publishing. Just make sure your trad pub deal allows you to self-publish if you want to :) I recommend checking out this book for help on clauses to watch out for: http://amzn.to/1KW8IsT

    • Thanks Joanna I will.

• Love this, Joanna! Thank you for sharing! It really IS possible for writers to prosper and live off their writing!

  • absolutely :) I know you know this too!

• Great blog Joanna, a lot of useful figures in there.
  I had two questions (I understand if you can't offer definitive answers)

  What are some of the affiliate deals you have? (if you're able to share that)

  Do you have any personal tips on finding the right affiliate deals?

  Keep up the great work!

  • Hi Gary - you can see a lot of them here: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/tools/ and another example would be the author website stuff with bluehost - http://www.thecreativepenn.com/authorwebsite/ - also I'm an affiliate of Nick Stephenson, Chandler Bolt, Scrivener Coach, Author Marketing Club, Amazon, iBooks and others - there is a disclaimer on the sidebar ->
    Basically I promote any services I think are useful and that I use myself - which is basically my criteria for choosing affiliates.
    In the video on 11 ways to make money as an indie author, I include affiliate income: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/freedom
    I hope that helps :)

• Thanks so much for sharing this encouraging information and "opening" your books for us. A rising tide raises all ships and that includes us as indie authors!

• Joanna,

  Congrats, you deserve all of this for the hard work and value you bring.

  It's so exciting to see how you have progressed and are now able to have your husband working with you in the business!!!

  Here's to your continued success!

  • Thanks Shawn and I am excited to see what happens in the next year :)

• Cool! I've been a casual observer, but supportive, of the whole indie author movement for a few years now. I'm now taking far more positive steps to move myself in that direction. Always good to learn good info like this.

  One thing that has moved me in this direction is something said by a writing friend — he's a professional novelist/editor of the traditional variety. He recently made a comment that moving to indie is really only helpful/beneficial for traditional writers who already have an audience, that if you haven't an audience, it won't do you any good. Total rubbish, of course.

  What really convinced me that he knew less about indie publishing than I did, however, was when I discovered that he had 5(!) novels that are out of print, and the rights have already reverted to him. Has he taken advantage of the e-publishing revolution, though? Absolutely not. This makes no sense to me. Although 20 years old, these novels are perfectly fine. I've read one of them, in fact. They've already been edited, so he doesn't have that expense. All he needs to do is to have fresh cover art created for them, and have them converted to ebook format. And — voilà! — he has five new streams of income from those books. Convert them to audio books, and there's another small income stream from each book.

  Instead, his books are being sold as used copies via Amazon, earning OTHER people money and nothing for himself. Ridiculous. But, hey, if that's how he wants to do it, good for him. I wouldn't do it that way.

  I attended the online conference Chandler Bolt put together. I really enjoyed your interview and the things you said, as well as the great information put together by Nick Stephenson. I'm now hard at work on some short stories. My plan is to start with a couple of small anthologies — one I'll put up for free on Amazon, and the other I'll offer for free on my site (which I'm working on) to build my email list — and I'll also write some more short stories to try to sell to print and online magazine markets, largely to see if I can gain any readers that way (probably only a little, I suspect), but also to make my name known in wider circles, and, of course, for the little bit of income that such sales would garner. Meanwhile, I've been planning and researching a novel I have in mind.

  My genre is fantasy — some historical, of the gaslamp variety (the fantasy version of steampunk), but some more high fantasy — although I could easily see myself writing some non-fiction, too.

  • Hi Gary, it sounds like you know what you're talking about :)
    I really see a lot of opportunity for any rights holders - but only if they take an entrepreneurial attitude and exploit them. The backlist IS powerful but there are always new authors starting out.
    I'm glad you enjoyed the summit - I learned a lot from it too. This industry is full of people sharing great info :) all the best with your writing.

• Hi Joanna,

  Thanks for sharing. Fascinating to see all the numbers stuff. :)

  Meg