By HJ Perry
When I joined Dirty Discourse, I was in my 40s and had 3 young children. I needed to earn some money from work that fitted around looking after kids.
I was confident I could write fiction. The stumbling block was how to turn my creative words into money. I’d self-published a few books with almost zero sales. Writing the story was the easiest part!
At the first DD in-person gathering in January 2016, people talked about the many different aspects of marketing. It wasn’t just Facebook ads (they still scare me), but the basics of book cover and blurb.
I realized the way I thought about stories wouldn’t ever persuade strangers to buy them. I didn’t need to scrap all my story ideas; I needed to learn how to sell them using evergreen tropes. Straight away, I made changes to the book I was about to publish, which went on to be the first of my books to ever make more than £100.
Warrior has now made a little over £1,000 in profit since it was published in January 2016. It was supposed to be part one of a series, but I left the second book in note form. Even though I loved the SF Warrior world, I couldn’t justify taking the huge amount of time it would take to write more in that series for such a small return: did I mention I had 3 young children?
I took what I learned from DD and pivoted to write other stories. In 2016 I earned around £20,000 from my books. This was fantastic, though it was less than the average wage in the UK and not a great return on the hours I put into the work.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed writing the stories, and I’m proud of my achievement. And I was there for my kids every day at the end of school. The best thing about the books I wrote in 2016 is that those books still bring in a trickle of money to this day. And today, those three little children are all taller than I am.
I’ve never completely abandoned my earlier story ideas, and I hope to write the next book in the Warrior series one day.
HJ Perry is the author of the Sky High Scaffolders series, Gay Footballer Romance series, Warrior and many more
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