I happened to notice that this July marks 10 years of self-publishing. I started out with just paperback books of The Little Book of Gold in 2009 and now I have more than ten books in ebook, paperback, and audiobook (plus even a few books in foreign languages).

Checking the numbers… holy cow! I’ve sold more than 52,000 books! And on top of that, 2019 has been my best year so far (and I still have five months to go!).

For as much as I’ve enjoyed the process, it’s a continual learning process. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned so far.

I should have stuck to one genre. Moving from instructional nonfiction to mysteries to science fiction and then bouncing back and forth in between them was a big mistake. It’s not that I haven’t been happy with my sales, exposure, and the joy of exploring different genres. But there’s a very strong sense I have that I never gave my mystery series long enough to grow an audience before I moved onto the next thing (science fiction, as it happens).

And within my mystery series there was another big lesson: I shouldn’t have changed genres between Book 1 and Book 2! So people who like The Saints Go Dying didn’t necessarily like The Marinara Murders after that. And I don’t blame them, it’s a big shift. I love both these books. But they shouldn’t have been in the same series.

It’s taken me a lot of work, but I’ve actually been able to (kind of) retroactively sort out these two lessons. My solution: split my mysteries into two series with different pen names. So here’s what I’ve done:

Suspense/Thriller pen name – Erik Emery, author of The Saints Go Dying

Cozy Mystery pen name – E.E. Bailes, author of The Marinara Murders and The Con Before Christmas

Previously these three books were all written about the same character, Arthur Beautyman. Now, The Saints Go Dying is about Arthur Freeman. And the cozy mysteries follow Arthur Beautyman. The covers are very different, the author name is different, and now the stories don’t cross genres. If I ever go back to suspense novels or cozy mysteries I have two paths to follow and they don’t overlap. Fixing this was incredibly difficult. I really wish I’d gotten it right from the start.

For now, my science fiction and my nonprofit books are still together under my name. Partly because I couldn’t bear to put my sci-fi under a pen name. And partly because it was such a pain to separate out those mysteries I didn’t want to have to do it with my sci-fi books too.

Another lesson, this time more positive: the long game works. I’m not a multi-millionaire author (not in the slightest). But most authors are not multi-millionaires either. At the same time, let’s be realistic: 52,000 sales over 10 years is better than a huge number of authors, perhaps the majority of authors. On average, most authors who are traditionally published don’t earn out the advance on their first book and aren’t offered a contract for a second one. In that way, self-publishing has been really great for me. My takeaway: if you write and publish, write and publish, write and publish, year after year after year, it will eventually be worthwhile. That’s true even at the pace I’m going (roughly one book a year, which is considered very slow in the self-publishing world).

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the self-publishing world, the early days of Kindle publishing (2009 – 2012 roughly speaking) are now seen as a gold rush. And it was in some ways. I was writing and publishing during that time and there was a sense of being a part of something really new. It was great. Even if I wasn’t a massive success like Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking, I was having fun with the process and I was finding readers. But the truth is, 2019 is just as good of time as any to start self-publishing.

I’ve written a novel a year since I was a freshman in high school, with the exception of the four years after graduating college where I lost the habit). So I know I will likely always have a novel going on the side. But I like the business challenge of self-publishing too. Navigating the changes in the business have been as interesting as the writing.