How do I become … an ebook writer? | Work & careers

Most of us have felt that we have a book inside us – the stumbling block was always finding a willing agent or the private funds to get it in front of an audience.

But the internet enables anyone to be an author with access to an audience and increasing numbers of people are discovering that they can earn an income from their own ebooks.

Tracy Bloom commissioned rollercoasters for theme parks until she started a family and gave up her job in 2007. “I’d intended to return to work as a marketing manager at Alton Towers after my maternity leave, but two weeks after my first child was born my husband told me we were moving to Connecticut,” she says.

In need of an occupation and an income, she decided to try her hand at fiction. Her first ebook, No-one Ever has Sex on a Tuesday, became a No 1 bestselling ebook on Amazon and she now makes a living from self-published romances.

“I’d always enjoyed writing in my marketing roles and had dreamed of writing a book. I decided this was my chance,” she says.

Bloom enrolled on an evening course in creative writing and began drafting a romantic comedy. A year later she began seeking likely agents through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She submitted a synopsis of the novel and the first three chapters, and one agent replied asking for the rest of the book. It signed her up and sold the publishing rights to several countries at the Frankfurt book fair, but no British publisher was interested. “It was fantastic that I could hold my book in Polish, but I wanted to have it in English,” she says.

Bloom completed a second novel and changed agents, but still no British publisher would take her on. “The waiting was a horrible experience,” she says. “I hated being so impotent after having a career where I had control over my own destiny.”

It was the success of the comic author Nick Spalding that encouraged her to try self-publishing. Her background in marketing enabled her to research how best to sell herself. Although the internet enables anyone to publish anything, securing a lucrative readership takes the same effort and nous as selling conventionally published books.

“I realised that my best chance lay in ebooks and spent three months analysing the mechanics of how to make a book successful on Amazon,” says Bloom. “It is your shop window so it’s vital how your book looks in the thumbnail photo, how catchy the title is and how it’s categorised, described and priced. The key is to grab attention instantly.”

To help hers stand out, she commissioned a design agency with no background in publishing to create the cover. She then set about wooing influential book bloggers to publicise her novel. “My mantra was to find a target audience, not to scattergun,” she says. “I chose online reviewers with the most Twitter followers who liked my genre of book and I spent ages writing to them individually, offering articles. The reason I’d chosen the title No-one Ever has Sex on a Tuesday is because I knew it would spearhead my marketing campaign – I even commissioned a survey that found Tuesday is the least popular day for sex.”

The ebook was launched in April 2013. Bloom applied for it to be featured in Amazon’s monthly promotion and was accepted. Within three months it had reached No 1 in the ebook romance category and had sold 200,000 copies. She launched her second ebook, Single Woman Seeks Revenge, in July the same year and it was the second Amazon bestseller within a month, selling 150,000 copies.

Since then she has launched two more ebooks and her online success finally attracted the attention of a conventional publisher, Random House, which has published her first three novels.

Writing is now her day job while her children are at school and she has recently begun her sixth novel. Since self-publishers are both author and PR, much of her time is spent networking and keeping an eye on e-publishing developments.

However irresistible the muse, writers cannot assume their talent will speak for itself. “You have to take your writer head off and put a consumer head on,” Bloom says. “I still retain an agent who edits the books and advises on promotions because you’d be a fool to put a book out there without expert opinion. Twitter is useful for developing relationships with influential bloggers and Facebook is a way of engaging with existing readers. Online publishing is still relatively new, so I always keep an eye on what other successful writers are doing.”

A badly judged launch date could scupper the chances of even the most accomplished book, so timing is key, says Bloom. “The temptation is to rush it out as soon as you’ve finished it, before you’ve formed a relationship with bloggers and reviewers.

“You want a review to be up there as soon as you launch and you need to bear in mind that there are peak times for different types of books. Mine are a light summer read so they need to be launched by May, which means I have to be writing them a year previously.”

For an author who can successfully market themselves, the income from ebooks can be greater than from paper copies. A survey by the website AuthorEarnings, published in September 2015, found that nearly 6,000 Kindle authors who had appeared on Amazon’s bestseller lists in the past 18 months were earning more than $10,000 a year from their books.

“You get 70% royalty from each sale, whereas with conventional publishers it’s 25%,” says Bloom. ‘The margins for self-publishing are enormous because the overheads are relatively low. I pay professionals to print promotional material, design my website and design the covers and my agent takes a cut – but I still make a decent profit from the sales.”

The unpredictability and sporadic nature of the income is the downside of a full-time writing career, particularly one in self-publishing. But the opportunity it gives for interaction with readers is one of its greatest rewards.

“When I published on Amazon I got feedback from readers for the first time,” says Bloom. “And that has been perhaps my greatest joy.”