How Dakota Krout turned his side gig as a fantasy author into a multi-million dollar self-publishing Amazon business

The Business of Business: I would love to hear about where you’re at now. Walk me through how you made it in self-publishing, and now with your own publishing house.

Dakota Krout: Sure, absolutely. And once again, thank you for the invitation to do this. So when we initially started Mountaindale Press, I had been writing for about two years. So back in 2016, I put out my first book, so I was going to college at the time, I had just gotten out of the army. I had large chunks of time that I didn’t know what to do with, throughout my life, and it was always filled with work, with other things to do. It was almost like a mini retirement, it was very strange. So while I was at university, I started writing in those gaps of time. 

I just really got into what I was doing. I’ve always been a huge fan of Piers Anthony. He was a huge author that I would read when I was a lot younger, just the puns and the things that make you groan, it always resonated with me. And I really think that has impacted my own writing really heavily. But I started writing, and I had so much experience with reading that it really just translated well into putting down exactly the words that I wanted to put out there. Which is nice, because when I’m editing, usually, it’s a very quick pass. I usually get down almost exactly what I’m going to say on the first go round.

The Stephen King approach.

Kind of. I’ve seen people that say, “You want to throw out your first million words.” And I don’t agree with that. I’d say, right, but you want to write and just make sure you want to write it. And if you do that, keep it, put it out there, make it better, whatever it is.

“If you are writing and you’re trying to make it a career, then you are a business.”

Turning that into a career took quite a while. I say that, but it took a lot of work, for sure. The first book went out, and it started being picked up and well received in the genre that I had been writing for, which was really nice. And when I saw how well it was being received, I looked at various tactics for gaining readership. And doing better just as an author, and I’ve started writing faster, like more words. Faster is kind of my motto now. And more quality words faster, I should say. 

So, over the next two months, to three months, from October of 2016 to November and December, I wrote two more books. So I wrote a book in November, wrote a book in December. I had all of those out by January of 2017. So my first book took months, I would say, probably four or five, six months. The second book took one month, the third book took one month, and it was just power writing fast. Lots of coffee, very little sleep.

Were you already gaining some recognition by them?

I had gained a little bit of recognition. And like I said, that first book had been so well received. I have a degree in computer science. So in building and creating, figuring out how algorithms work, computer programming is the thing. And so when I looked at Amazon, I said, “Okay, well, a lot of what they do in terms of rank, in terms of all this other stuff, is entirely algorithm-based.” And the best favor is to have quality content that people want, right? So if you are making money, that means Amazon is making money, right? And so what they’ll do is they’ll push your books. If you are the best seller, the top rated, you’ll see that stuff first, because that has the greatest chance of selling.

One of the one of the things that we assumed is that if you have more content, and people go from book one, love it, read it, they’ll go to book two. Love it, read it, well, usually they’ll go to book three, right? With the algorithms, what we were trying to do was get a book out, but it was getting book one, book two, book three, all within 30-ish days for what in the other communities is known as the 30 day cliff. That’s the idea that after 30 days, if you have shown that you’re prolific, if you’ve shown that you’re well received with reviews, and all this other stuff, usually you maintain high positions on the search charts. 

So the books were out within 30 days of each other, which was not super easy. Just just to get those out there and get those reviews in our favor, get those algorithms working in our favor. After I had those three books out, I looked back at all the comments, all the reviews, all the things that were negative, and I said, “Okay, well, what are people saying about this that I can use to make what I do better?” From that point, I got an editor. I hadn’t had one before that. So my words were only my words and not rushed into prettiness. I had gone with hand drawn black and white covers for my covers. So I started working on turning those into what they are now, which is much nicer, prettier covers.

I saw that. Yeah, there’s definitely a difference there.

Exactly. And that’s really what we were going for, we had our niche audience that we had reached. If we wanted to expand further into the more general reading population, we had to be able to market to them. And that’s where those covers came from. 

We started with that, I saw what we could do better. I actually started a new series at that point after getting three books out. Because I always have two going at a time because that way, it’s not done. “So the series is over, Dakota is writing no longer, it’s done. Okay, well, he has nothing else out there, I guess that’s it,” then they go and then they move on to someone else. I always have at least one series, they know that I’m constantly working on the next thing. And they’ll check back for updates. So while I have complete series, and we’ll have more complete series as we go forward, people know that there’s more coming soon. 

That was the start of how we built up our marketing campaigns. It was with relational marketing — we go out there, and we try to get people involved. And we try to talk to people and really, truly become friends with them, and do nice things and be good people. That resonated super well with our community. Two years after I first started writing, we took all of that experience, all the courses that we took, all the research we did, and we looked at how much we actually spent on this, how much we like the current writing speed.

The idea behind that was not a huge amount, like we can’t use the same marketing data a year from the first time we learned about it, because by then it’s oversaturated, the market has moved on, there’s better ways to do things. And so I said, “If we want to really use the effort that we’re putting into learning this, we need to be putting out more books.” Since I can’t write 100% of the time, if I want to have a business — if I want to be able to know what we need to do, what we should do is start putting out other people’s books.

We took on authors right away, and we worked with them to mimic what I had done with my stuff. It’s obviously their content, it’s their IP, but using the methodology, the workflow, the ideas behind what we had researched for my own work, we were able to boost them high really, really fast. With those three people as the social proof that what I do doesn’t work just for me, we were able to start pushing into our community as the premier LitRPG and game publisher in our genre, so it’s really nice.

For those who don’t know, what is LitRPG?

So LitRPG is a progression fantasy or science fiction that is bound by the rules of a video game. It uses a hard magic system that allows you to get those rules and ensures consistency and allows for the mitigation of power creep.

I’ve got a little bit of experience with Dungeons and Dragons. How does that compare? Because that’s the closest thing that I can think of.

I use dice. But I am writing my books, so I really like to keep everything where the system matters more than the story. I can’t break the rules as the author just to progress a scene. Because otherwise that’s where power creep comes in. That’s, “Oh, I’m the son of the game developer, and therefore, I have this special ability that allows me to walk through the biggest monsters to get the best—” no, that doesn’t happen. It’s supposed to be very realistic. If you play by the rules, and you push the bounds of them as much as you can just like, really trying to be the best character that you can be min-maxing whatever it is. 

If they were writing in the same world, they should be able to follow those same rules and get the same result. It’s the scientific method with writing. I definitely started out as a dungeon master. I was big into D&D. When I was younger in college, I actually started writing after everyone else graduated and moved away. I joined University at 21, after four years being pretty active in the army, and then I had four years in the reserves after that, where I had a lot more free time than I was used to.

Then came this hobby, which definitely takes up a lot of time now.

Definitely turned into a full blown career.