There’s something significant about a five year marker. Half a decade is quite the amount of time. I have made it past the “must survive, keep paddling” first year of self-employment, the habit forming, breaking and then reforming. The loss of structure from corporate and over the honeymoon period and into—this is just life now.
When I left, I truly didn’t know whether I’d make it through my first year, and I also never expected to be in the situation I’m in now.
This annual review is delayed, but I hope that it was worth the wait, because in my mind, this is the biggest year I’ve had yet.
You can catch year one lessons here, year two lessons here, year three here, and year four here.
The Income Update
I re-listened to the fourth annual lessons update and laughed because in the intro, I said I was slightly down on the previous year’s income (year three) but that I thought it would look very different by the end of year 5.
How right could I be? It was such a throwaway comment at the time, and the carelessness with which I lobbed it out made me snort laugh. Oh, dear, sweet naive Sacha. How little I knew.
So broad brush strokes here:
Between year 3 and 4 my income dropped by 7.71%, a lot of that loss was in sales. The reason? 2022 was the last time I published nonfiction. The Anatomy of a Bestseller launched July 2022. I didn’t launch a book again until February 2023. Seven months, which, while that’s not long in Traditional publishing terms, it’s a fucking glacial age in the old ways of rapid release indie publishing.
So income has risen by 140.43% between year 4 and 5.
I did promise when I broke six figures that I’d do a Rachael Herron and give you actual numbers. Vomits
Be nice guys or I won’t do it again!
Okay, so I broke 100k by the skin of my teeth. I think the equivalent when I checked google currency conversion was 130,115 USD. Just over 102,500 GBP.
Now, I was a little miffed by this because the tax year ended on a bank holiday, so we didn’t get paid for extra days, so sadly the number didn’t hit what I thought it would. But the upside is, I started this year with a bang.
In terms of progress, if I look at this “calendar” year as opposed to tax year, I’ve already surpassed this figure. Which, honestly? Is a bit astounding. I have no idea if it will continue, but if it does, then there’s the potential to be a multi six figure author by the end of this calendar year. Big IF tho. It’s an election year for both the UK and USA and with the potential for TikTok to be banned, it could easily come crashing down.
So while that would be great, I’m not counting my chickens? Hens? Eggs? Whatever. I’m being cautious is the point.
Year 5:
The biggest change is the amount of income coming from sales. This jumped from 31.6% in year 4 to 66.2% in year five. But the really astonishing figure is the monetary amount of sales is 400% of what it was in year 4.
There’s a corresponding drop in freelance income, but mostly because the sales are so much higher not because it reduced hugely.
That said, I have now ceased freelance more or less completely. I do some consulting bits every quarter, but essentially that figure is likely to be single digits by the end of year 6.
The other positive is that the everything else column reduced too. That shrank by 7% I think because I’ve shrunk a lot of what I was doing. With the nonfiction, there were so many facets to running it that I had little bits of money coming in here there and everywhere. This, actually, makes me more comfortable than relying on one or two sources. But also runs me ragged. So the reduction is needed.
One other figure I wanted to share is that I started shopify in December 2023 (the 13th I believe) and since then, so 6 months as I write this, it’s turned over 18.5k GBP. So it’s doing four figures a month. I believe most of this is generated through TikTok. I’m not advertising. And all of this is fiction. While I do have nonfiction direct store, it’s not particularly selling.
I know advertising spend is important to people when they take the context of income. I spent approximately 5300 GBP on AMS ads over the course of the year. I believe there was one bookbub which was low cost because LGBT fiction is a small niche. This does not account for all my costs obviously, I have covers and edits and subscriptions and accountants etc etc. But those are the numbers most people are interested in.
What I am most proud of is that when I left my day job five years ago, 75% of my income was from freelance sources.
I think for those of you who are new to this podcast, it’s important to know that I am NOT an overnight success. I am not a unicorn. While this explosion of income did happen rapidly, it was built off of YEARS of work.
Bear in mind I started writing in late 2013. I first publishing in 2017. I quit my day job relying on freelance in 2019. It’s only as of August 2023, but safely without as significant of a risk December 2023, that I could reliably rely on my business income and not freelance money.
11 years from the first word on the page.
6 years from first publishing.
It was a long motherfucking journey to get here.
Last, just a quick update on the assets.
As I write this I’m in the works of publishing my 21st book. I used to flip flop on how many because I wrote a couple that got combined and I ghost wrote another. For the sake of ease. I’m just counting what you see above:
10 nonfiction titles
11 fiction titles.
2 self narrated audiobooks and 3 rights licensed with another 1 about to release.
2 Korean nonfiction titles released
There are German translations in the works but those won’t show till next year.
I also took the decision to close my courses, I wasn’t selling enough of them to warrant the fees each month and I felt that because I wasn’t producing courses regularly enough it was ‘another thing’ I was neglecting.
Never say never though. I like change and love teaching. I’m just in a fiction era right now which brings me to lesson 1.
Lesson 1: All in Works for Me
This was difficult to write because it feels like confessing something. I quit my day job to write fiction, and then spent four years not writing fiction. Which wasn’t great and made no sense. I worked through that, to release Trey in April 2022, knowing that it would flop. Which it did. Two years later it still isn’t in the black.
It was at this point I was starting to feel like I’d just created a “job” for myself rather than running a business or creating a life I wanted. So I knew I had to do something.
I tried again and released The Anatomy of Bestseller in July 2022. It was ‘alright’ it didn’t launch as well as Prose did and admittedly it was a rushed launch because we were headed out of the country for almost three weeks for my sister’s wedding. So I threw it out and hoped for the best and unsurprisingly didn’t see a roaring success of a launch. But the wedding and the rush launch was really it was all smoke and mirrors – I was frustrated with feeling beholden to everything but fiction.
I also had a problem because I wasn’t earning enough really, to take huge risks. If I switched focus to fiction and it flopped I was looking at having to go and get a day job or pick up a lot more freelance.
Neither were options I wanted. But staying in the system I’d created also wasn’t what I wanted. So I took a risk on letting the nonfiction dip for a short while – afterall if I’d created that business once, I could do it again.
So I had a choice: take the risk and go all in on fiction for a chance at writing fiction for the majority of my days, or continue half assing everything.
I don’t do half arse. So even though it was a risk, even though I had to watch my income take a dip last year, and sales slump, it was clearly worth it.
Risk is a tricky thing because it’s full of uncertainty, but what I knew is that I’d rather try and fail than stay miserable.
When I did release in Feb 2023, it was fiction to a brand new genre with no audience. I started from scratch. But what that enabled me to do was fully immerse myself in the market, the genre, study both sides of the sapphic and also romantasy markets.
So for the last 18 months all I’ve done is read, write and study romantasy and sapphic fiction. If you want more info on how I started a new pen name in 2023, then I have the lessons learned episode from Ruby in the show notes.
All in doesn’t work for everyone. But just like, I can only write one book at a time, giving myself the space and grace to just focus on fiction for a while enabled me to make it work. That’s not to say I’ll never come back to nonfiction, I will. But I feel like I’m in this growth and learning phase and once I’m settled in that I’ll come out the otherside ready to teach again.
Lesson 2: Capitalise if You Can
Off the back of going all in, is the realisation of what being indie really means. We are exceptionally fortunate as indies to be able to pivot quite literally overnight.
Not only did I pivot marketing to TikTok, but On the 10th December I had my first viral video, I noticed that the amount of physical orders had spiked far more than ebooks. Shopify happened to have a 3 months for 3 pounds deal so I hopped on it. By December 13th I had the store up and running. I put the site live and before I’d even managed to test the shipping I had orders coming through – thankfully I’d set it up right, but that was definitely a shit-your-pants moment.
The point is, I saw an opportunity and I capitalised on the traffic that I was generating and redirected it to my own website, by putting it as the top link in my bios, referring to my website first in comment replies etc.
With TikTok’s status in the USA in jeopardy, I’m trying to take a stoic approach. I will capitalise on it while I can. If it does get banned, I’ll pivot again.
Instagram is trying to compete with TikTok, which means they’re giving preferential treatment to reels. I’ve never been able to get instagram to do anything for me. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been posting somewhat consistently and repurposing all my TT reels. I’ve seen a huge surge in visibility, follows and purchases on my website directly from instagram.
See an opportunity, take it. If it doesn’t work, dump it. If it does, rinse and repeat until it stops working and then find something else.
As business owners we should all be living in a perpetual state of experimentation. Accepting losses and failures in order to gain 1% margins and the occasional big win. 1% increase is still a win.
Being indie means being flexible, something my #31 Adaptability is thrilled about, haha. But it also means we have to take responsibility for everything: our income, our business, our strategy, our products.
I intentionally wrote the first Girl Games series for KU. I wanted to capitalise on the little organic juju visibility juice I’d get from it. And I have to say, being in KU does make a difference when you look at ranks. My wide books (despite earning more) are ranked considerably lower than my KU ones.
But I favour bank over rank. So I don’t care that it looks like my books aren’t selling if for example, one book makes 80 quid a day with a great rank and another one makes 180 a day but it’s rank is shit, I’ll take the shit rank and higher income all day every day. And that’s coming from a #1 Competition. I had to ask myself what was it I wanted to win? Was I bothered about rank or money?
The answer was money. Status is meaningless if you can’t cover your mortgage. And that was a hard pill to swallow, believe me.
The point is, I chose to go wide with my second series. I knew I didn’t want to be all in with KU and the amount of sales via my website and the continually decreasing KU % meant that I had nothing to lose. And actually, I’m now making more money because I’m wide than I would have in KU. That’s backed up by seeing spikes from viral videos. For example, on one day I had a video blow for my wide vampire book and that one book sold £1500 in one day. Another video blew with the same amount of views but for the KU book and I earned £600. It’s a dramatic difference. And of course I’m not suggesting it’s easy to be wide, or that everyone will benefit.
But when I knew my KU heavy friends were 70-80% income from KU and mine was between 10 and 19% I figured I should try wide as I obviously wasn’t captialising on KU income.
The other thing it, and the reduction in freelance income, made me do was aggressively prioritise income generating activities. I think I’d always been relying on the safety blanket of freelance income. But actually that created a reliance that turned into resistance. I’m a risk taker by nature so when I stop taking risks, it’s a problem.
Lesson 3: Visibility is Queen
I don’t think I ever really understood the game I was playing. For a long time I’ve known we need to drive traffic to our sales pages. But I’ve never really equated traffic with visibility OR, more importantly, the compounding effects of it.
What do I mean by that?
More visibility, more eyes on your work, means a natural increase in sales. If you send 100 people to your website and 4 convert to a sale of one book, you might make £20 in paperback sales. If you send 1000 people to your website and 40 convert to individual sales of one book per customer, you might make £200 in paperback sales.
What happens when you have a 15% returning customer rate.
Compound. Instead of making £5 per customer you might make 25 or 55.
But the compound is more than that.
Visibility means that instead of 100 people seeing your book and 1 loving it and telling one of their friends about it. You’ll have 10,000 see it, 100 love it and maybe 50 telling their friends of which they will tell their friends and so on and so forth.
It’s more than that though, because with increased visibility, comes increased opportunity. Some of those eyes on your books are not just individuals but booktokers and book box owners, publishers and translators. It proliferates very quickly.
I feel like we climb a giant hill with tiny marginal gains, your legs are burning, everything hurts and then suddenly we’re over the precipice and everything goes real fast and snowballs.
I think we often think publishing is a game of popularity and it isn’t. It’s a game of visibility. The caveat to that is, not just any visibility but the right visibility. If your readers aren’t on Facebook, let it go. I barely post a thing there anymore. Very rarely even open the app.
Lesson 4: Boundaries Are Important
More income = more readers = more notifications and requests.
This is a tricky one for a few reasons.
First of all, we’re often taught to say yes to everything, especially early in our careers. Yes to the opportunity, yes to the talk, yes to replying to comments and DMs.
But secondly, I have a lot of yellow clifton strengths, which means I love having access to readers and people. I WANT to talk to them all. I want to reply to everything. I want to help all of the people.
But when you have rapid growth, the number of notifications, requests and invitations increases dramatically.
The move from saying yes to everything and replying to everything, to being selective has been really painful. There’s a certain amount of fear running through the reactions because we’ve learned to say yes to it all. It’s like if I don’t reply they won’t like me, or the readers will go away, or the money will dry up or I won’t get another speaking opportunity.
None of those things are true, because first of all, not everyone shares our wiring, and also we don’t control other people’s reaction to us. It’s not our responsibility to manage their reactions. It’s what our wiring tells us, and changing and rewiring our brains is hard.
It wasn’t until I said no to answering questions in a DM for the first time a couple of months ago, that I realised quite how much of myself I was giving away.
I was physically relieved at saying no to answering the question. I sagged and then felt lighter. Which was the point I then realised I’d given away too much of myself. There were no boundaries at all. I would answer every inane question that came into my DMs alongside all the lovely and thoughtful questions with no differentiation. But even then, I am only one person, and if I wake up every morning with dozens of DMs and comments to reply to – enough that it takes me 45 minutes to get through it every morning, it’s crossed a line. I don’t want to spend the first hour of every day on my phone replying to things. I want to get out of bed and get on with my day.
But boundaries are important even with yourself. This is the hardest piece I’ve been working on. I’m trying to get myself in a position where I have less on my plate and more time to do restorative things that give me more energy pennies. But when so much of my self worth has come from output and achievement, it’s a brutal change to push myself through.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to even allow myself to stop. I think this has been extra highlighted by the fact my wife took a new job and is now out of the house for an extra 2-4 hours a day. Meaning I will just keep working until she’s home. Not healthy. But giving myself permission to stop and sit and read or just BE has been exceptionally hard. I feel lazy, like I’m wasting precious time when I sit and do something other than smashing work out. And yes, I do know that those things are lies my brain are telling me, but brains are convincing and I am a work in progress.
Lesson 5: Growth is Brilliant and Painful
The growth this year hasn’t just been financial. 20BooksVegas was one of the most magical life changing weeks I’ve had. I will never forget the gift I was given being able to stand in front of 2000 or so authors and telling my story. I won’t forget the kind people who took the time to come and tell me my words mattered.
Something shifted in me that week. As a lot of you will know I’ve done coaching and therapy in equal measure this year. I’ve spent a long time trying to move past the doubt, the self loathing, the lack of self worth and the lack of self love. These are hard things to even admit. But that week in vegas was the start of an enormous change in me personally. Standing on stage taught me that I love to speak. That for whatever reason, I have a way with words and a way of motivating people when I talk. You might all be laughing at this, because perhaps that’s why you listen to the show, but I didn’t recognise that in me. Honestly I find it a bit awkward even saying it now. I find it hard to say out loud that I am good at things. It feels clunky and uncomfortable and arrogant. But Vegas was overwhelming. There were too many people saying too many nice things for me to deny that I have a skill with speaking. And the reason that’s significant is because I think it’s the first time I’d ever been able to accept something good and positive about me.
UGH this is hard!
Let’s move on.
One of the most significant issues I had when experiencing all of the explosive growth, was cash flow. I started the shopify shop not expecting to receive many orders. Within a couple of weeks (by the end of December) I’d seen £1680 in sales. In January I did £3184. Now, because of the way most online stores work, you don’t get paid for 60 days. SO I had to get through February too. Where I did a further £3220 in sales.
Why is this an issue? WELL, when someone buys from your store, you get charged immediately for both the cost of printing the book and the shipping they’ve chosen. And usually costs are around 55% (profit 45%).
So before I’d been a cent of the boosted sales, I had to shell out approximately £3600 in costs. When I tell you I did not have 3k to shell out, I really mean it. It was a very strange position to be in because on paper I had several thousand pounds coming in to me, but in reality I didn’t have a penny to my name. I lived off nothing for those two months and poured everything I had into the upfront costs. In the end, I had to get a credit card for the business, which I swore I’d never do after getting out of debt, but because I knew the money was coming in, I was extremely strict with spend. But let me tell you, those were some bum squeaky moments. What was I going to do? Stop Shopify because I didn’t have the upfront cash? No way, I wasn’t stopping sales that were free flowing.
So this is definitely something to think about.
Growth means that eventually you’re going to need to outsource or you’ll hit a brick wall with what you can do.
Outsourcing is a learning curve in itself. I think because we do so much ourselves as indies, we do everything from the start of an idea to the completion and publication or implementation of our idea. So having to release part of that process is really difficult especially when not everyone works the same way you do.
However, I’m definitely at the crossroads of having to choose whether to do less or outsource more. Currently I’m choosing to outsource more.
You’ll have heard me talk about people pleasing behaviour. What I’ve realised is that I am bad at customer service for this reason. If there’s a printing delay or issue I take that customer service issue as a personal failure even if it’s entirely out of my hands. Also I just shouldn’t be doing customer service like this, when the thing I need to do is write books. I never anticipated needing to outsource customer service, but with the size of shopify and the fact that a lot of fantasy romance readers have come from Amazon, they have Amazon expectations. This means we have to do some customer re-education. Template text and giving this job to an assistant is extremely helpful to save my mental health.
Lesson 6: The psychology of money, success and winning.
Last, we come to the big one. The psychology of money, success and winning.
First of all, hitting six figures is without doubt, brilliant. I am very proud and still shocked and delighted in equal measure every single day when I look at the sales dashboards and see the figures.
BUT, there are a lot of psychological changes that happen when you hit goals, not least of which are monetary goals. I know that there’s going to be some folks out there who can’t accept the things I’m about to say and who will have negative judgements, but I have always spoken truthfully and kept shit real with you, so good, bad, ugly, I’m going to tell you.
First up then, I had about a week of elation when I realised I was going to hit. It was a LONG waiting game because I knew if the bank holiday effected the payment dates (which it did) I was MUCH less likely to hit, it would be down to the wire. The kickstarter and not knowing how that would do was also a factor, so when I ran the math and realised that no matter what, I was going to break six figures it was strange because I knew it wouldn’t “officially” happen right until the last few days of march.
What I was counting was the figures in my accounting software system. I needed it to say 100k+ in there or it didn’t count. BUT, like with shopify, I also knew that it was guaranteed to come in long before the money actually hit. So I was living in a bit of a limbo for a while. What happened is that I accepted I’d hit the goal and then I fell apart.
They often tell marathon runners to book another race for a few weeks after the marathon because of the crushing low you get once you do it. This is essentially what I failed to do with my goals. I’d been working so hard for so long, nothing else existed in my head. And yes, while I know getting to 6 figures is great but you have to stay there too, it didn’t matter. I think this is especially so for someone with high competition. In my mind, I’d won.
So I struggled with motivation, I was exhausted, down, unmotivated and never wanted to get out of bed. It was a shell shock to my system because I’m always motivated. It wasn’t until I spoke to my strengths coach and she pointed out that I’d won and that I needed new goals that I got invigorated again. Though it took me quite some time to actually reconcile the fact that money goals didn’t quite sit the same way they once had.
I guess I was feeling like, yes of course the ambition in me wants multi six, and eventually seven figures of income, but beyond a certain point, more is just more. It doesn’t create any more meaning. I didn’t change on the inside. I think I thought I’d feel a certain way hitting six figures. That I’d be happy and bouncy and everything would be right in the world. I feel naive and a bit stupid saying it. But it is what it is.
When I actually got there and realised I’d hit the goal, I realised exactly how goal driven I am, and that six figures was a completely arbitrary figure. I know why I write, but I had to figure out why I was pushing with monetary goals.
The conclusion I came to was the one I always had: I am seeking total freedom, physical, mental, emotional, financial and any other ‘al’ I can think of. So the goal now is to buy “years of freedom”. I don’t think I’ll ever retire, but I want to know that if I chose not to work, I could. I’ve calculated a modest living figure for a year and broken it into months, and now I have bingo cards and every time I save the equivalent of a month’s income I put a sticker on it. Each month is a goal, each year a bigger goal. I’ve printed 10 bingo cards for now. Ten years of freedom. When I’ve saved that, I’ll save another 10 until I have financial freedom.
Then there’s the real elephant in the room. Excess cash. Now, when you get all this money in your bank, it’s obviously tempting to buy a new this, get a new that. But I’ve lived with debt and have noooooo desire to go back there. So I had to reeducate myself quickly. It’s in large part thanks to Joanna Penn, her mentorship and constant discussion of money and giving book recommendations and resources that I’m in a better position now.
I actually have a pension – which I admit – I didn’t before. I have some savings and each month that passes I add a little more. You’d think I suddenly had wads of cash in the bank, but with an increase in income comes extra costs. We’ve fixed some things, sorted some private things and invested back into the business.
But we’re approaching the point where the cash is starting to build up and that causes problems that no one thinks is polite to talk about like: how do you take money out of your business in the most tax efficient way? This is a problem. When you’ve worked as hard as we have as a community and then you can’t take money out without having to lose 40% of it, it stings.
I had other financial issues arise, I had to change accountants, I’ve also now got a book keeper where before I’d been doing it all myself. Even this change took a lot of time and I’m still getting used to the new systems.
Essentially, I’d had some bad advice which led me to believe I was only allowed one business account. So Focus was in agony trying to separate out money into different pots and I couldn’t. Thankfully I discovered that you could and opened up several accounts so that I could save for tax in one pot, VAT in another, put money aside for investments and I’m trying to save several months wages as a just in case.
I had one major accounting issue which I don’t want to talk about on the podcast, but essentially it took me approximately three weeks of working time to fix, I don’t think I’ve ever been more stressed over it and I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone about it publicly. I am not a numbers person, and I got very worked up because I couldn’t handle all of the shit that was happening. There were definitely a few tears shed, but it only arose because of the explosion in income.
While I will never say that earning more is a bad thing, it’s a positively fucking brilliant thing. BUT there are issues that come up that cause headaches, that require you to learn new things quickly, that require you to make executive decisions and it is hard.
Then there’s reconciling the following two things:
- I work the same level of hard now as I did a year ago. But now I earn more.
That was a strange thing to try and process. Nothing really changed day to day, I still do my job, still change the dishwasher, still feed my kid, still struggle to write some days and vomit words other days. But the bank balance is different. I don’t know what I thought would be different, but nothing is. And I suppose that was a surprise to me.
2. Accepting that I was a six figure author was uncomfortable. I think I’d spent so long — essentially a decade wanting to get there. It was long enough that I’d stopped believing it would ever happen. I thought that what I earned would be it for me. And before I say this, please understand that I do recognise that the position I was in was still one of privilege, even if it wasn’t one of wealth.
I thought we’d have one solid holiday a year, we’d be able to pay our bills, we’d have just enough but that would be it. I recognise this is a good place to be. But I also thought we’d never have savings, or a back up plan. We always lived in fear that one of our cars would break or something would go wrong and we wouldn’t have the money to fix it. There were definitely some months like this.
We were fine. We weren’t in dire straights, but we were always worried and I don’t think either of us ever thought that would go away.
I am still acutely aware of the fragility of business and the whiplash way the market and technology can change. So I am trying to be as conservative and strategic as I can without stopping myself from also having a few moments of happiness and celebration.
Lesson 7 No Matter What, This is Always Better
This is the same lesson I come back to every single year and I hope I continue to come back to year after year.
This year though, it feels even more poignant. I always share the photo from my darkest day in corporate. But this year, I bring you my own little rebellion photo.
I talked about this photo and showed it in my keynote in vegas. And I did it to show the complete journey I’d been on. I made my wife drive me back to where I work on a saturday when I knew the building was shut and we snuck onto the private property and took a photo of me giving the tree I sobbed in the birdie. And that is the photo I share this year and the one I ended my keynote with.
No one said being a creative would be easy. They didn’t say it wasn’t without risk, or emotion or rejection.
This life, if you choose to lead it, is grueling and hard.
But as much as it is those things, it is also full of beauty and growth and inspiration. It’s filled with people who were brave enough to keep going. With people who refuse to be broken, who get knocked down nine times and get up ten.
I am constantly in awe of you, dear listener. The incredible humans in this community who write their truths. Who continue to fight for visibility because deep down they know there’s a kid out there that wants to be an astronaut and their words will inspire that. Your words matter, they give hope to cleaners and carers, to little girls who want to be a princess when they grow up and the other girls that want to be a kickass assassin. We save people from dark days in corporate offices and sick beds. We make people smile and laugh and cry.
We are fucking magicians and each of you will change lives with your words.
I will never take this life for granted. I will always appreciate it on the good days, the bad days and all the days in-between because no matter what, this is better. This is the life I dreamed of and I am so fucking grateful for it.
Thank you, and here’s to another year.
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