Sometimes it’s difficult to see the point when everything changes. It can be hard to know precisely when and why things click and come together. But other times, it’s as easy as breathing.
Tipping points are those proverbial “last straw” moments, where all of your work, effort, time, and commitment finally combine with enough weight to move the boulder of success. Tipping points are why we talk about it taking years to become an overnight success, because your career can go from barely moving at all to rocketing forward in the blink of an eye. That’s how it worked for me, and it’s true for most authors’ careers I’ve observed.
For me, the turning point at which my author career shifted gears, from trundling along to reaching rocket speed, was as clear cut as it gets. The year was 2016. I’d written a bunch of books already and started indie publishing in 2011, but nothing had stuck. Worse still, I was in the midst of the classic newbie writer oops: I’d written a few books in several series across a variety of subgenres. By spreading my efforts out, I was making it much harder for myself than I could have.
But in the spring of 2016, this guy named Michael Anderle created a new group to talk about writing. He called it 20BooksTo50K®, and I was one of the first couple dozen members. Anderle got a cold reception from a lot of folks. His message—that treating our writing like a business was key, and that success was more a matter of working hard at the right things long enough than anything else—was not popular at the time. Many folks wanted an easy button, and Anderle was telling them the best way forward was to work hard.
For me, however, it was precisely what I needed. I dug into the group and worked hard at watching those further ahead than I, learning from everything they did. All around me were people making it. I watched several authors, none of them with as much writing experience as I already had, killing it. Some of these writers were guys nobody had ever heard of, like Craig Martelle and T S Paul, and they were bringing in more money in a month than my writing did in a year.
There’s never a better sign that you’re in the right place to learn things than when you see people with less experience doing better than you. Seriously! That might turn some folks off, but it made me hungry. I wanted to know what they were doing that I wasn’t, so I worked and studied. It’s a lesson I’ve taken with me ever since: to work hard at surrounding myself with smart people who are further along in various ways than I am.
More than that, I asked for help, and I got it. That, too, is a powerful thing; learning to ask can catapult us forward. Anderle, Paul, and Martelle all offered their advice on more than one occasion. Paul stood out, though. He spent a lot of time working with me, and I’ll be forever grateful.
My covers were not on point, for starters; I hadn’t yet learned the primary job of a cover, which is to tell the reader precisely what sort of book this is, in two seconds or less. A cover that does that well is a good cover. One that doesn’t is not; it doesn’t matter how pretty it is. If I wanted to sell books, I needed my covers to grab the right readers.
Paul taught me another lesson that was probably even more important: Storytelling is king. His early books were riddled with typos. They had more errors per page than some of my books had in the entire novel. Yet they were selling like mad. What was getting readers to love his work, bad grammar and all, was the story. If the storytelling is good, it can rise in spite of other issues. If it’s not spot on, though, nothing else will save the book.
I learned about rapid release by watching all three of them. The idea of putting out books at a superfast clip hadn’t really crossed my radar much, but it was one powerful way to gain visibility, both then and now, and it’s a method that worked perfectly with my personal strengths. That’s important; you want to focus on the methods of reaching a tipping point that best resonate with your personal strengths, and when you look at people to emulate, aim for those whose careers are currently where you want yours to be. There are many paths up the mountain of success as an indie author, and it’s up to each of us to choose paths that best match our personal strengths.
By 2016, I’d already learned some about productivity from Sci-Fi author Dean Wesley Smith, so I was already publishing a few books a year. But it was via the 20BooksTo50K® crowd that I began learning how to write a quality book in a month or less.
It was August 2016 that I put it all together.
I had a set of five novelettes I’d released to crickets a year earlier. I took those novelettes and merged them into two short novels. Then I wrote the third. I released all three short novels a week apart from one another. Then I kicked out the fourth only a month after that, and the fifth a month later. I’d fixed my covers, too, replacing the old novelette covers with new ones that were spot on for the subgenre.
August 2016 was the second month I’d ever made over a thousand dollars in a single month. I’ve never made less than four figures a month from my work again.
That’s why I think about that month, that moment, as a tipping point in my career. I’ve still had ups and downs; we all do. That’s a normal part of a creative career. But I’ve always been able to make my rent every month, from then until now.
Perhaps even more important to the longevity of my career, that early advice has stuck with me and helped inform and build my current process. What I do as a writer and publisher has thankfully matured a lot over the past eight years. I’ve become even better at cover design, even getting hired for it on occasion by others. I’ve become better at writing swiftly and maintained a book a month for about a five-year span until 2023, when I slowed down a little. I’ve learned over time that I enjoy writing long series, too, so my current project is doubling down on that and making several new twelve-book or longer series. The longer a series is, the more effective and profitable my ads become, thanks to read-through from one book to the next.
But if there’s one thing that has stuck with me the most, it’s the idea that great storytelling is the key. If the story is strong, the book can thrive, even if everything else isn’t quite perfect. A focus on telling the best tales I can—and understanding what my readers want from their books, so I can deliver that—has carried me a long way.
Reaching one’s tipping point can take time. It was over six years for me. It takes a lot of effort and energy, too—a commitment to keep doing the work. But we can speed that day along by doing the right things well. Surround yourself with people who are where you want to be, focus on learning the paths that best match your strengths, and you can push that tipping point much nearer.