It’s Been A Strange Year

First, for anyone looking for info on AMS ads, it’s one of the categories on this site so just look for posts listed under that category.

Second, I just had a random pleasant surprise. I was doing my usual evening ritual of surfing various websites and dropped by Joanna Penn’s site to see what she had up. It’s an interesting article about what people look at on Amazon book pages that’s well worth a read in and of itself. But the surprise was that the author of the post, Michael Alvear, gave my book AMS Ads for Authors a shout out.

Which brings me to how this has been such a strange year for me. I did far better this year than any previous year, but how I did that is the part that’s so strange. Back in May I was preparing for Taos Toolbox and didn’t want to start on a new novel so decided I’d work on some non-fiction titles instead. I had three presentations planned at RMFW in September and two of them (one on CreateSpace and one on ACX) didn’t tie into anything I’d written yet. So the idea was to write a book about each.

Instead I wrote a book about AMS. I’d been finally seeing consistent long-term sales across titles and I could chalk almost all of that up to the use of AMS and thought I’d learned enough to share it. Little did I expect that that book would actually sell. I mean sure, I used AMS to get it out there and that helped. But what I hadn’t expected was that members of one of the writings forums where I participate would pick it up, too, and that some of those members would share with others how useful they’d found it. (Thank you to all of you who did so either through a review or a forum post or just a private comment.)

That was the first odd outcome of the year. Writing a book on a whim and having people actually like and recommend it.

The second was when an AMS ad I’d had running for almost a year took off in June and stayed hot for close to four months resulting in far more sales of a book I’d released in 2014 than I’d ever expected from that title. I could’ve never predicted going into this year that one of my top revenue producing titles for the year would be one I’d published two and a half years before.

The third was what happened with the Excel guides. I wrote those four books and the whole time I was writing them I thought I was wasting my time. I figured Excel for Writers and Excel for Self-Publishers would each sell maybe a handful of copies. But once I’d started writing them I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to get down on paper how I used Excel for my writing.

And then, even more bizarre than the first two surprise outcomes of the year, I had an opportunity to put those two books into the NaNo StoryBundle. Suddenly, books I’d thought would sell a handful of copies had a chance to sell thousands.

And the more general guides that I wrote because I’d written the other two, Excel for Beginners and Intermediate Excel, have been doing better and better, giving me my best-ever month for print sales this month.

I’m glad that those passion projects have turned out well. It’s made it a much better year than it would’ve been otherwise. But I have to say it does make trying to figure out what to do next even more confusing. At this point in my career, this is all I know:

This is a constantly changing market. What works today will likely not work tomorrow or not work as well tomorrow. The more product you have out there, the better. (As long as it’s good work that its audience will enjoy.) And for me, personally, it’s better to write eclectic projects that I enjoy and that keep me writing than to try to force myself to write what I think is in demand. (Although if I could write reverse harem or alphahole romance I’d certainly be doing so right now…)

Anyway. It was an interesting year to say the least. Here’s to another one in 2018.

Author: M.L. Humphrey

M.L. Humphrey is an author who has been published under a variety of pen names and across a variety of subjects and genres. You can contact M.L. at mlhumphreywriter [at] gmail.com. View all posts by M.L. Humphrey