I just did a little cleaning and purging and thinking about things. Any of you who’ve read this blog for any length of time know that my biggest problem as a self-publisher is that I write across too many pen names. If I’d written that many words for one author name and in one inter-related area, I’d probably be making twice as much as I am if not more.
(Although I did just hit the $50K mark, so I’m not totally sucking at this.)
But anyway. I’ve decided it really is time to narrow the focus. (Sort of, kind of, as I do.)
Which means of the eight pen names I’ve used to-date, I’m focusing in on only three–the one that does romance novels, the one that does YA fantasy novels, and this one that does non-fiction with respect to finances, Microsoft Office products, and writing. But even there I’m focusing in a little bit more and I don’t expect to publish more books about self-publishing or writing or to further revise the existing ones.
Part of this decision was actually motivated by an opportunity I received to present at a conference about AMS. And it was a pivot point for me. I realized I could do that presentation and build more of a name for myself with respect to AMS and move in the direction of being one of those go-to authorities on self-publishing. And I was going to do that. It was part of why I listed the consulting services option here on the website.
But then Amazon made more changes to AMS. They renamed them, changed the website address, and added new features to new sponsored product ads. And that made me realize that if I wanted to be know for AMS, that AMS would need to be my focus. It couldn’t be one thing I happened to use for myself and talk about for others.
But AMS is too shaky a foundation to build on.
Don’t get me wrong, those ads are driving a large part of my sales still and I love them and will continue to use them. But being an authority for others is a whole different thing and when it came time to make that leap in that direction I realized it wasn’t the direction I wanted to leap.
So I’m not going to. I’ll leave the book and video course up because they still provide value. I just won’t be revising them or trying to keep them current going forward.
I also turned off all ads for four of my pen names. Again, I’m not unpublishing those books because I think they provide value, but I realized that if one of those books really took off it wouldn’t be a direction I would want to pursue. So best to just leave them to their own devices at this point.
You’ll note that I also pared back the books listed on this site to just the ones under this name. That’s to narrow things down and focus in on what matters going forward. I doubt that most folks who come here for Excel guidance really care about my non-Office and non-finance non-fiction. And I certainly don’t think they care about my YA fantasy series. (The romances were never listed here.)
Of course, at the same time I’m paring back to just the three names that represent 94% of my revenue, I’m likely going to be adding a pen name, too. That for the cozy mystery I’m going to publish later this year.
(I know. After what I just said above. But this is my big write-to-market experiment. And I’ll either see that I’ve learned what that means or that I still have a long ways to go to learn what I need to learn to succeed in this business.)
But just wanted to post this to say that there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that something didn’t work or work as well as you want and letting it go in order to pursue something better. Sometimes that’s the only way to make the leap to get to where you really want to be.
M.L. Humphrey 