You don't need a million readers. You need 1,000 who buy everything you write. Cheryl, Shar and Wendy take Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans model — 1,000 people spending $100 a year — and work out what it actually looks like for an indie novelist right now.

Wendy has a reader group of 1,000 and gives away a signed print copy with every release. Her bonus epilogues run 3,000 words and jump five or ten years ahead. Cheryl writes hers the day she finishes the book, sets it a week later so it leads into the next one, and delivers it through BookFunnel with her also-by page attached. Shar's position is that a newsletter signup can be worth more to you than the next book sale, because the list is the only reader relationship you own.

Ad costs are climbing and social reach keeps shrinking — one author they follow has 25,000 followers and around 1,000 of them see a post. So the conversation is about what you can control: the list, the reader group, your own store, and the bonus content that makes people want to stay. Plus Amazon's new limits on how many titles you can upload a week, why being a human being being a human is the one thing the AI flood can't copy, and the professional line between talking to your readers and using them as a sounding board.

In this episode:

• The 1,000 True Fans model, and why a number to build towards beats firing off in five directions
• You're not after a stadium — you're after the people who buy whatever you make
• Turning a reader into a superfan: the extras, and giving a little of yourself
• Why the email list is the foundation — it's the one thing you own
• Reply to readers who email you, or acknowledge them in the next newsletter
• Reader groups: giveaways, questions, and the posts that only they get
• What to give away — signed print copies and special editions beat mugs and chocolate
• Direct sales: better margins, promo codes, and the release two weeks early
• Growing the list: the link in the back of the book, and what to offer for the signup
• Bonus epilogues — Wendy's and Cheryl's two completely different approaches
• Delivering bonus content through BookFunnel, and giving it to your existing subscribers
• Amazon's upload limits, AI pulp, and where human connection actually wins
• Make yourself easy to find, and check your links
• Keep the behind-the-scenes troubles off your reader-facing platforms
• Send the tech problems to BookFunnel — that's customer service done well
• Be authentically you, pen name or not
• Start with 10 true fans, not 1,000
• Author buddies and brainstorming

🔗 CONNECT WITH THE SPA GIRLS:

🌐 Website & free self-publishing resources at www.selfpublishingauthorspodcast.com

🎧 Subscribe to our weekly episodes on your favourite podcast app — search "SPA Girls Podcast"

❤️ Watch our episode recordings on the SPA Girls Podcast YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/c/SPAGirlsPodcast

💗 This podcast is supported by our amazing Patreon community! ⭐ Join at the $10 tier for access to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group where we discuss marketing, writing, and answer your burning questions: http://www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast

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🔁 CLASSIC REPLAY — This episode was originally recorded in 2023 and the writing craft advice is just as relevant today.

Matt Bird is a screenwriter and the author of two craft books for writers, The Secrets of Story and The Secrets of Character: Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love. For the second book he read the first ten pages of dozens of great novels, memoirs, movies and TV pilots, and found the same three moves in nearly all of them: the reader has to believe in your hero, care about their circumstances, and invest their hopes in them. In this episode of the SPA Girls Podcast (EP573) he shows how to land all three before your plot has even started.

Whether you're drafting an opening chapter, working out why readers aren't connecting with your lead, or looking for concrete character development tools you can use today, this one is practical from end to end. Matt covers the first page of The Hunger Games, giving a character a unique object and a metaphor family, why repetition beats surprise early on, and how to set, upset and reset reader expectations. Plus why readers pick your hero for you, what James Bond's first scene tells us about vulnerability, and the single thing he'd tell every writer to do — put an ironic object in their hand.

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About Matt Bird

Matt Bird is the author of Secrets of Story, and creator of The Secrets of Story podcast and blog. He has an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University. He lives and writes in Chicago where he and his wife Betsy are raising two delightful kids.

All episodes of his podcast with James Kennedy, The Secrets of Story: A Screenwriting & Novel Writing Podcast can be found on podcast apps.

Matt's latest podcast, A Good Story Well Told with co-host Jonathan Auxier, is also on all podcast platforms.

http://www.secretsofstory.com/

🔗 CONNECT WITH THE SPA GIRLS:

🌐 Website & free self-publishing resources at www.selfpublishingauthorspodcast.com

🎧 Subscribe to our weekly episodes on your favourite podcast app — search "SPA Girls Podcast"

❤️ Watch our episode recordings on the SPA Girls Podcast YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/c/SPAGirlsPodcast

💗 This podcast is supported by our amazing Patreon community! ⭐ Join at the $10 tier for access to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group where we discuss marketing, writing, and answer your burning questions: http://www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast

#authortube #SelfPublishing #IndieAuthor #romancewriter

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This is a concrete, numbers-heavy conversation about what diversification actually means for a working author. Million-selling author Craig Martelle has published over 200 books since 2015, across 28 series, and has around 25 different sources of income.
Craig's definition of Author Diversification is multiple revenue streams, and he counts formats, distributors, languages, genres and co-authors as part of it. He walks through where to start when you've only got five books out, why paperback belongs in your Amazon ads, what a SAG-AFTRA narrator really costs and why he pays it anyway, and how he translated nine books into German for almost nothing using three AIs checking each other.

Craig is also very open about his pace pace of publishing. In 2019 he published 30 books in 30 weeks, quadrupled his costs, halved his revenue and ended up having heart surgery the following January. He publishes 12 to 20 books a year now, reads every word of every collaboration, and takes the dog out for two hours a day. The three medical thrillers he co-writes with a surgeon are his current bestsellers, and every dollar they earn goes into an investment account for his grandchildren.

And the golden nugget is the best argument against perfectionism we've had on the show: if you rewrite one book ten times you still have one book, but if you write ten books you have ten books' worth of experience.

In this episode:

• From Marine Corps intelligence and Russian linguist work to law school to full-time author in October 2015
• Over 200 books, 28 series, and roughly 25 separate sources of income
• Buying his first series back from its traditional publisher — and earning the buyout fee back in one month on free YouTube audio
• Audiobooks on 40 distributors, plus 70 to 80 titles in libraries while staying in Kindle Unlimited
• Why genre counts as diversification: readership ceilings and burnout in a single niche
• "Write with the reader in mind" — the Venn diagram of what you know and what people actually read
• The first step with five books out: one genre, one series, and learning read-through
• Where to diversify next, and how to choose an adjacent genre
• Translations and which markets are worth translating for, and which ones aren't
• Formats first: why paperback and a full-wrap cover are the cheapest diversification there is
• The Amazon ads trick — bundling ebook and paperback in one sponsored ad to drop your cost per click
• Crowdfunding an audiobook you can't otherwise afford, and the snowball effect across campaigns
• Why some books sell and some don't
• Marketing the backlist

About Craig

Craig Martelle is a science fiction, thriller and fantasy author who has sold millions of books worldwide.

Before he became an author, he had a long career in the Marine Corps, specifically in the military intelligence community where he worked with most of the U.S. Government's three-letter agencies. When he retired from the Marine Corps, he attended law school, graduated summa cum laude, and went into business consulting.

Craig was also the original organizer of the 20Books Conference in Las Vegas, which he ran for many years, and he now organizes writing retreats for both beginner and more experienced authors around the world. He also writes non-fiction to help indie authors be more successful in this industry.

Through a bizarre series of events, Craig now lives in in Fairbanks, Alaska. He says he never expected to retire to a place where golf courses are only open for four months out of the year, but he and his wife get to watch the northern lights from their driveway and their dog has lots of room to run - until temperatures reach fifty below zero.

🎧 Subscribe to our weekly episodes on your favourite podcast app — search "SPA Girls Podcast"

❤️ Watch our episode recordings on the SPA Girls Podcast YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/c/SPAGirlsPodcast

💗 This podcast is supported by our amazing Patreon community! ⭐ Join at the $10 tier for access to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group where we discuss marketing, writing, and answer your burning questions: http://www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast

#authortube #SelfPublishing #IndieAuthor #romancewriter

#SelfPublishing #romancewriter #writingpodcast #writingcommunity