SFFMP 178: Making Good Money with Serial Novellas and YA Fantasy with Sarah K.L. Wilson
On this week’s show, YA fantasy author Sarah K.L. Wilson joined us to talk about the successful Dragon School serial she’s publishing on Amazon (and in Kindle Unlimited). She’s put out nine installments since the beginning of the year, publishing a new one every 18 days, and she’s kept them selling with Amazon ads and sheer momentum.
Here’s a little more of what we covered:
- Going from writing novels to publishing a (planned) 20-installment fantasy serial.
- How complete each story is and whether Sarah employs cliffhangers.
- Whether she’s got it all outlined or she’s pantsing it.
- The challenges of finding your readership on Amazon (or any online store) when you’re targeting a teen audience.
- Handling cover art for serial installments that you’re publishing frequently.
- Sarah’s pricing strategy of 99 cents for the first installment and 2.99 for the others and whether there’s been any pushback from readers.
- Finding success with Amazon ads by monitoring them daily and tweaking whenever necessary, including adding new ads to the rotation regularly.
- Sarah’s less than stellar results with Facebook ads.
- How her income breaks down, sales versus KU.
- What a typical launch looks like for her now that she’s almost 10 installments into her serial.
- The link to Michael Cooper’s read-through calculator, which Sarah is using to calculator her ROI: https://www.facebook.com/groups/781495321956934/1111894655583664/
You can visit Sarah on her website and also check out her books on Amazon. The first installment in her serial is Dragon School: First Flight and is currently 99 cents or free to read with a KU subscription.
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Great podcast today. Fascinating how Sarah has set up her series to be just like long television series with cliffhangers at the end of some books. A Dragon soap opera. Makes sense when you consider that’s what some like on TV. I went to a conference earlier this year (20booksLondon – great stuff) and someone talked about entry points to long series and suggested making an entry point every 3 books so a new reader wouldn’t have difficulty jumping in although the series can still have an overall arc. I wonder if Sarah has considered this.idea. Keep up the great podcasts.