I think it’s time we addressed the elephant in the room. And that would be the wealth divide in indie publishing. Buckle up, it’s going to be a long one.

One thing that completely vexes me in this industry are authors’ unwillingness to openly discuss just how much money they are investing in the marketing of their books. I can only guess that it is because no one wants to readily admit what I have been screaming from the rooftops for the past six plus years, and that is the fact that the only thing which separates a bestselling indie book from one that completely flops is how much money an author invests into their marketing efforts.

(For the sake of this article, we’re not going to discuss those authors who became bestsellers because of their connections or those who built a platform in some other industry and then decided that adding “author” to their portfolio was a good idea. That’s a whole other discussion that vexes me even more than the wealth division in the industry.)

Let’s break this down and look further into this phenomenon. Indie author Matthew Olney does a fantastic job of covering this very topic. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to reach through his article as it is very informative.

As I’ve said, most books which succeed these days have one thing in common – lots (and I mean a LOT) of money invested into the marketing and promotion of the books. As one author notes, “…I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to become successful….”

Read that again. Just one author admits to investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into her author career to launch the type of success she is currently experiencing. Another romance author boasted, “I routinely spend $1K a day on Amazon ads just to keep my books ranking in the top 10K overall on Amazon.”

In another indie author support group, after much conversing and questions, one author finally admitted that his latest “write-to-market success story” all hinged on the fact that he was running more than a dozen ads for just one book, with each ad having a monthly AMS ad spent allowance of over $1K. He was routinely spending $12-$15K each month on ads just to be “in the green” each month. Unfortunately, I could never get him to divulge how much net profit he was making . What I did get from him was a lot of gaslighting and half-responses when it came to exactly how much he was profiting each month after all expenses were taken into account.

The unfortunate reality of the situation is that success in this industry isn’t free. And hard work, along with a quality product, does not equate to success. Like with any business, it takes money to make money. And nowhere does that basic business principle come into play more so than with the publishing industry. Matthew notes, “For authors with substantial financial resources, the road to success is paved with opportunities that are often out of reach for their less wealthy counterparts.”

It has been an unfortunate fact for the better part of a decade now that readers do not care about a quality product. This is made apparent by any author who has ever looked at the bestsellers list on Amazon and wondered how on earth something with so many grammatical errors and just plain, bad writing could have sold tens of thousands of copies of a single eBook and continuously burn up the Amazon charts. Exactly what makes their book so much more appealing to the masses? The fact of the matter is – money. There is nothing special about the bestselling books out there. The authors simply had more money to invest into the marketing of the product. As Matthew notes in his post, “With the right budget, an author can ensure their book appears in front of millions of potential readers through targeted ads, social media campaigns, and high-profile book tours.” And in this industry and the sheer amount of content being posted to Amazon every day, a massive amount of exposure is the only thing which is going to change a book from just another pretty cover and blurb to a raging, trending success among readers.

But this comes at a price to the entire industry.

As noted, readers do not care about quality, nor do they care if their entertainment is ethically sourced or not. This is why the influx of AI generated books has not sunk to the bottom of the Amazon slush pile, but are rising in the ranks. It is why readers do not bat an eye at the AI generated book ads and book covers and ChatGPT-generated blurbs, but routinely buy the books and leave rave reviews. It’s why one author, who clearly states they are using generative AI to create the work being offered, has over $118K in their KickStarter campaign. Readers do not care where the entertainment comes from, so far as it is cheap or free to them.

Another prime example of shady tactics being used by authors and readers not caring is the case of one author who shall not be named who has published 49 titles to date, with most of those being enrolled in KU. The kicker? Some of these books have racked up hundreds of reviews, however, less than 3% of those reviews are from verified purchases. In one instance, out of 727 reviews, only 24 of them are from actual purchases. These verified reviews seem to be evenly split with half of them giving 1 or 2 stars and the other half being 3 stars or above with mostly positive vibes about the book in question. Anyone who knows anything about book reviews would immediately think something is not right with this sheer volume of reviews. Add in the fact that these seem to be the same 2 or 3 books written verbatim with only a few minor changes such as character names, and not only are those books in direct violation of KU’s Terms of Service, but it leaves a terrible taste in the mouth of every author out there who have busted their asses writing quality books while being ghosted by no less than 2/3’s of their beta group. Again, it seems very clear that readers just simply do not care about quality any more, so long as they have access to a never-ending stream of free and/or cheap disposable entertainment.

And let’s not forget the highly successful male author who recently sent out mass solicitation emails (some going to authors and allegedly, to minors as well) asking BookTok “influencers” to make partly nude videos to promote his latest up-and-coming romance release. One of the suggested prompts encouraged BookTok influencers to post a video which panned up and down the nude body with only the book covering up the naughty bits. Of course, the only ones getting up-in-arms about any of this were other authors and creatives. Readers have, non surprisingly, been completely silent on the manner.

Perhaps even more distressing is the fact that there is not an unlimited pool of readers to pull from. It is the law of supply and demand working against us – there is far too much supply and not nearly enough demand for high-quality, well-written novels. This has driven down prices and is making it next to impossible for anyone without a very large marketing budget at their disposal to be seen.

I know a lot of authors are reading this thinking to themselves, “But I’ve worked HARD to get to where I am right now. I deserve to be successful.” If only hard work was the deciding factor in this industry.

If someone were to give me $100K to invest in the marketing of any of my books, even if it was one that had been published over a decade ago, I can guarantee you three things will happen. 1 – that book will become a bestseller on Amazon, possibly even on one of the larger lists. 2 – my previous 30 years of busting my butt in this industry would have absolutely NOTHING to do with the success of that book. Let’s face it, when you shove that much money into marketing, hard work has zero to do with your success. If that was the case, the book would have been a bestseller all on its own without putting any money into marketing. And 3 – I will work a hell of a lot LESS with that $100K marketing budget than I ever would have with a $100 marketing budget. And I would be the first one to tell you that my success all hinged on the amount of money I spent in marketing. Unlike other authors, I’m not afraid to admit it. I’ll tell you exactly how much it cost me to achieve that level of success, no ten-thousand dollar mastermind course required.

You can’t very well claim hard work is what made you successful in the same breath that you claim to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on your author career. In this instance, those two things are mutually exclusive, no matter how much authors want to pretend otherwise. That’s not to say that you can’t work hard while spending ungodly amounts of money on marketing. But to claim that your “hard work” is what got you there while completely ignoring the financial investment portion of the equation is, quite frankly, insulting to the rest of us.

Now, more than ever, the only thing that decides success in this industry, outside of the rare instance of sheer, dumb luck, is the almighty dollar. This is why authors like myself are constantly begging readers to do just two simple, free things for us. 1 – please leave a review. And 2 – please, please, tell others about the book. While we would love to stay your gatekept secret, the truth is, if we are not making sales, then we have zero motivation to keep writing. Which means pretty soon, even those readers who actually do love a well-crafted and well-written book will be left with nothing but the bottom-of-the-barrel wannabe books that are being snapped up by the masses.