I want to talk today about a strategy that lots of self-publishing authors, particularly in romance, might feel pressure to follow for themselves, but that I feel can be really detrimental for the writer and for our industry at large.
The rapid release strategy makes it look like authors are dominating Amazon charts and collecting big bucks from Kindle Unlimited—but there is definitely a dark side to this practice, which leads to big ad buys, punishing writing schedules, and burnout.
What we’ve seen for the past few years, especially in romance, is this strategy of self-published authors in KU churning out multiple books per year to keep ranking high in Amazon’s algorithm so the algorithm will make them more visible in recommendations and also-boughts. (You don’t have to be in KU or be self-published to feel this pressure—lots of romance writers who release wide or through traditional publishing feel the need to produce at a high rate because this is what we’re seeing throughout the industry.) To keep feeding the algorithm, authors also often spend exorbitant amounts of money on ads to drive readers to them. After 30 days, visibility on a new book drops in the algorithm, so this is the incentive for authors to publish at least once every month—and the cycle repeats again.
Let’s assume that authors who are producing at this rate of at least, let’s say, six books a year (y’all, there are people out there doing three books a month—like, WHAT?) are doing it in totally legit ways and not using ghostwriters or scamming. There are lots who are gaming the system and making it worse for the people who are playing fair, but let’s ignore them for now. (Amazon sure does.) Why is this bad? If they can produce that much and they want to pay for the ads, it’s all good, right?
This isn’t healthy for the romance industry, and more importantly, it isn’t healthy for the author trying to keep up with this rapid release schedule and stay ahead of Amazon’s algorithm.
I get so worried for romance writers about the pressure to produce because this kind of pace simply isn’t sustainable for most. Inevitably, most writers will burn out trying to maintain that pace, and the quality of their work will suffer in the process. What else happens?
They might make some decent money, but will probably have to funnel much of it back into ads, and if they can’t constantly produce at that rate, their revenue dries up.
If they want to produce a book a month, they have to write to formula—they just won’t have the time to plot out and carefully execute a totally new story structure every month; they fall back on what they’ve done before. But this makes all of their books same-y and repetitive—they’re not “sticky” and memorable enough for readers to search out or get excited for their next release without the push from the algorithm and the ads. It’s a vicious cycle.
It sucks the joy out of writing just to write fast enough to try to please an immensely complex algorithm with 20+ years of data from millions of users behind it, and the burnout will make it necessary to take a break to refill the creative well, which puts them right back at square one—so what was the damn point?
It’s constant competition between authors, with everyone watching how other writers are selling and getting jealous at how fast they can churn out books because the imperative is to produce, produce, produce to grow their writing career and make money. This just isn’t a healthy mindset in which to write.
They haven’t spent the time building a strong brand or improving their craft (because when would they have time?) or writing books that readers care about and recommend to others and buy in multiple formats (e, paperback, audio)—so once that book comes out, it’s lost in a sea of backlist. Sure, they’ll get a nice boost to their backlist sales/page reads every time they release a new book, but remember how these usually aren’t memorable books? Once the reader realize they know what they’re getting if they’ve read a couple books from this author, they’ll move on.
Plus, competition is only going to get more fierce as more authors continue to enter the market thinking they can make money in this system, so the already crowded romance market is becoming even more saturated (which drives book prices lower so that people can compete based on price, meaning they're getting less profit). So the quality of our genre is being diminished while the market overflows with books, making it harder to get visibility in the algorithm.
So what should you do as an author to avoid this fate?
Take the pressure off yourself to produce so much so fast. I just had one of my authors (who isn't even on KU) say to me, “I think I just have to accept that I’m a one-book-a-year author” because she wanted to take the time to ensure that the quality was there, and OMG yes, this is the best way of thinking. You don’t want to burnout and lose the will and desire to write. By all means, experiment and test to see how much you can conceivably produce in a day, a week, a month, but don’t push yourself to the brink. There are very, very few writers who can produce quality work at a consistently rapid pace—there are some, certainly, but they are outliers. Slowing down the pace doesn’t mean that you can’t use strategies to help boost your visibility; it just means you don’t have to sacrifice quality and perhaps your mental health to do it. (I recommend David Gaughran’s books and newsletter to learn about these more sustainable strategies.)
Work on your craft. Especially in the early stages of your writing career, you don’t know what you don’t know, and there’s a huge learning curve. But find the ways to learn these things, whether it’s from courses, books, betas/critique partners, or editors, rather than just trying to produce as fast as you can. Write carefully and consistently rather than sloppily and quickly, and analyze your writing based on what you learn so you can improve and wow your current and future readers.
Build your brand. What is your niche? Are you really good at writing laugh-out-loud-funny rom-coms featuring plus-size protagonists? Are you a killer slow-burn writer who beautifully draws out that anticipation every time? Is there a special detail you always include in your stories? Niching down helps your ideal readers find you and become fans who will always buy your work and trust the kind of reading experience you give them.
Find balance. You cannot do everything—it’s just not physically possible, unless you can bend time and space. (And if you can, I’d like a word.) You can’t write books fast enough to beat the algorithm, you can’t cram in learning everything you need to know in one quick course or book or system, you can’t do all the social media platforms at the same time. So balance. Instead of producing as fast as you can and feeding the algorithm, take your time with your writing and stay visible to your fans on social media so you can take them on your writer journey and get them invested in you.
All of this takes time and money, I know. It’s a lot slower to make a profit and build your audience, and it means a lot of upfront payments for great editors, an eye-catching cover, and yes, ads, if that’s something you want to do. And maybe this means you can’t be a full-time writer for a while, or for a long time, or maybe even forever. But if you go at this less frenetic pace, it means you can stay a writer rather than eventually hating writing so much you never wanting to look at a blank Word doc ever again and quitting entirely.
As for Amazon, what they need to do is weed out the scammers that are gaming this rapid release strategy in dishonest ways, which would cut back on some of the quality issues and oversaturation issues and scammers dominating the charts while legit writers are just trying to get a foothold. The reason why Amazon doesn’t stop them: it doesn’t hurt them to have scammers on there because scammers are racking up sales with their sketchy practices. Amazon values quantity over quality—it’s a corporation and they want more things to sell, and as long as they’re making money, they don’t really care about the level of quality of the product being sold.
I’m not saying “don’t be on KU”—there are good reasons to be on KU, and there are romance sub-genres that do very well on it—but have a plan to use it effectively so it's not using you. Watch out for the minefields that come with being on it and don’t get sucked into the rapid-release game at the expense of quality and mental health.