Is Being A Bestseller Really This Easy?

a written interview with L.A. Dobbs

There was a brief period where I doubted my beautiful book covers. Doubt is a common side effect of floundering failure. During that period, I followed the advice of Steve, my advertising mentor, and searched Amazon for the bestselling authors in my genre. (Remember this for later…)

A few of the authors in the top ten made sense. I recognized the names, and you might too: J.A. Jance, Sue Grafton, David Archer…

But then there was one author whose books clogged the top 10 worse than a thanksgiving…well…you get the point. And you might not know the author’s name. She’s L.A. Dobbs. Her books sat in the numbers 7, 6, 5, 4, 2, and 1 position.

Telling Lies, the number-one book in Hard-boiled Mysteries is number-294 in the kindle store over all.

Using Dave Chesson’s (i.e. the Kindlepreneur) Kindle calculator, we can project that Dobbs’s novel is selling roughly 343 books per…wait for it…wait for it…wait a little longer…PER DAY!!! 343 BOOKS PER DAY.

Okay, but before you get jealous, don’t forget, Dobbs also has 5 more books in the top ten of my genre. That’s good for number 642 in the overall store as well as 838, and 958. In other words, L.A. Dobbs has four books in the top 1,000 overall.

But it gets better. Dobbs’s bestselling bestseller came out in

yep…

brace for it…

uh-huh…

you know it…

2017.

Book Are Assets

Using Goodreads, we can determine that Dobbs last paid for an updated cover on TELLING LIES (2017) was 2020, and there’s only two editions of the book cover. So we can make a safe guess that her total outlay on this novel was $5,000 or less (includes covers, edits, proofreads, formatting, and design).

I spend that much on each of my rental houses each year, and stay with me on this analogy for a moment.

I have a note on each of my rentals and pay between $1,290 and $1,450 per month. My tenants pay between $1,500 and $1,700. No one argues that houses are assets. But who treats books like assets? Let’s set this down and return to it in a bit.

L.A. Dobbs Replies To My Interview Questions

Hi!

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. The answers are below - I wish they were more interesting but its really just lots of work and advertising. lol.

I got lucky with the AMMO¹ system and pretty much all of my pages have gotten some profit. But some of them haven't been profitable enough to keep running.  I'm still very much playing with it to see what is best. I think being able to sell to the people who have bought from you already is pretty huge though.  

OK, here are the questions and answers:

1. You are among the folks to use Steve Pieper’s AMMO program, and it’s obvious the strategy works. How long did it take for you to figure out your sales page and turn your first profit?

I worked on the system full-time for about 3 weeks before I started getting a small profit. Then after that another several weeks of tweaking and changing to get it to double my money².

2. What is you pricing strategy for Amazon? And how did you come to the cost per title you settled on?

I try to price in line with the other people in my genre(s). Sometimes though if the book is short (like some of my cozy mysteries) I go with a lower price³.

3. Do you prefer direct-fulfillment or using Amazon, B&N and other avenues for sales?

I only sell ebooks in my store so the ordering and fulfillment process is automated. I wouldn’t want to ship out paperbacks or anything like that. I’m all about automation! I would say I prefer direct sales because you get the customer information and you make more if the books are priced the same as Amazon and others because no one is taking a percentage off the top.

4. You’re #1 in three categories on Amazon as of April 24, 2023 for a book you published in 2017 yet you avoid podcasts and other media appearances. How is that possible, and do you view your path to sales success replicable?

That series was really not selling well until I started to spend a lot on advertising. (The series is not in the AMMO system because it is in KU).  It has good covers and a decent blurb. The stories are decent so people read through and onto another series under that name. So honestly the key is just massive advertising to a good product.

5. Are you earning a full-time living solely off your published books?

Yes and I have been for the last 10 years. I’m very grateful for that.

Thanks and good luck with your AMMO adventures!  

LEE

Some Comments Upon Reflection

Okay, so there’s a lot to unpack here, folks. Let me tackle my response in order of importance, as I see it. The entire series that L.A. Dobbs has KU exclusive in not in AMMO, and those are the four books we looked at in the top 1,000.

Her next most popular book outside of the Sam Mason Mysteries is ONE LIE TOO MANY (book one of the Rockford Security Mysteries). It sits at number 4,311 in the whole Kindle Store as of 29 April 2023. That’s good for roughly 46 books per day.

Now remember, the Rockford Security Mysteries are sold wide, meaning this is one of the sets of titles Dobbs is advertising for using AMMO.

I could follow-up with Dobbs to ask if she puts money into this series on Amazon as well as through her AMMO Facebook funnel, but regardless of the answer, the other factors would too quickly muddy any reliable statistical analysis we could make, because (a) at her level of success, Amazon gives her tons of free promotion via the readers also bought recommendations, (b) readers returning for other series organic traffic will continue to boost her downstream sales, and (c) we don’t know what other programs she may be using, but (d) it doesn’t matter because we can still extrapolate the only data that really matters⁴.

A Comparative Analysis

Now, let’s return to my real estate investing. Novelists aren’t often math-lovers, so I’ll do the equations for you. If I charge $1,700 per month on a rental house that has a monthly note of $1,450 I’m left with $250 monthly profit.

If I’m a smart real estate investor, I set aside 90% of my profits for expenses ranging from capital expenses to minor repairs such as a clogged toilet—Thanksgiving, remember—and taxes both property and income at the Federal and State level.

Many people rightfully praise real estate for its tax protections because I can take losses on depreciation, so it’s a tremendous asset that almost anyone can afford to invest in⁵.

But consider this. If I buy housing traditionally (read “ethically”), I will need a 20% downpayment on the property. I will also need another several thousand dollars for cleaning, repair and safety for unexpected problems.

In the best markets in the country, that means I’ll shell out roughly $33,000 per property I acquire.

If your eyes are glazing over right now, please, please, please, stay with me for just a bit longer. I promise, the payoff is massive.

Now let’s look at a book. We’ll get nitty gritty with expenses and I welcome you to comment below on costs I overlooked.

You need a laptop and let’s say you paid $869 for a good one. You’ll need MS Office ($179), though I think Open Office is better, and it’s free. Writing the book costs time, but so does watching Netflix ($0). When you finish a sharable draft you’ll need professional edits ($1,500). If you think you can get by without professional edits, consider what would happen if I tried moving tenants into one of my rentals without paying for repairs and cleaning.

Spoiler alert! It’s not going to happen.

You’ll want a professional cover design ($200). Finally, you’ll need formatting and layout, and since I can get that with Vellum for a lifetime purchase of $249 on any Apple Device, I recommend Apple products. Call me biased. But, if you refuse to use Apple, add $500 for formatting per book⁶.

At the outset, to buy an investment property, you’ve paid $33,000. By comparison, for a book you’ve paid $3,497⁷.

Now, you begin the hunt for tenants. This essay would balloon into a book-length affair pretty fast if I evaluated each component of the analogy between rental property and books, but let’s get a fair framework of what we’re comparing.

In the beginning of a rental properties ownership journey, roughly 90% of the payment goes to interest so with a note of $1,450, $1305 goes to the bank. You capture $145. We’ll pretend you rent the home in the first month you own it (which is rare, by the way, meaning you carried the cost of the first payment).

You take in $1,700, use $1,450 for the mortgage, and you have a leftover sum of $395. Stock away 90% of that for future expenses and you have $40 to live on. That recurs monthly for the foreseeable future giving you an annual profit of $474 per rental property you acquire⁸.

If you treated a book the same way, what results might you expect?

We’ll have to use me as an example, and respect the industry best-practices, just like we did with real estate. I’m paying $30 daily to run a testing ad on Facebook. Since I’ve never hit a prolonged stretch of profitability, I’ve never scaled my investment. More on scaling in a moment, though.

My ad budget is $900. My cost per acquisition as of this writing on 29 April 2023 is $38.25 across all ads ever⁹. My acquisition price is $14.99. That means, at my current rate, I'm earning back $353 a month.

At the moment I’m bleeding money, and this side of the equation is going to get worse before it gets better, but if I try to prettify it, what good will that do?

With just ads versus revenue, I’m spending $547 a month on my books. Suppose that held still over the first year. I’d have spent $6,564 to acquire 300 readers (with contact information.

Now add to that the cost of the AMMO Program at $97 a month, the cost of Mouseflow¹⁰ at $30 a month, the cost of unbounce each month at $129, and the cost of Shopify each month at $39 a month. Eventually I'll have bulk emailing costs, but for now with such a small list and no backlist of books to market, that charge is $0.

If you’re cringing reading the cost, I’m cringing writing it so we’re in this together. At the current cost, add another $3,540 to my debts. All in, on year-one, I’m on pace to be down $10,104 on advertising and $3,497 to publish the book for a grand total of $13,601.

Meanwhile for your investment property at the end of year-one, you have taken a loss of $32,526 for a difference of $18,925.

When Comparing Apples and Oranges

Inevitably, you’re going to run into friction when you compare asset classes. There are international cash-cow podcasts like BiggerPockets that focus on just this subject. Even within similar asset classes like multifamily housing (i.e. apartment complexes) versus single-family homes, you’ll see a variety of incompatible nuances.

And I’m not going to, here at least, try to factor in all the tax code advantages and disadvantages of real estate versus books, but you would do well to study this on your own. Google will be your friend, and the rabbit hole will consume you fully if you let it.

For the purposes of this essay, let’s stick to outlines we know.

1. Every time you want to buy a new rental house, you’re going to need roughly $33,000 cash.

2. Every time you want to publish a new book, you’re going to need roughly $2,000.¹¹

3. Real estate investments tend to profit immediately following acquisition.

4. Business investments tend to take losses immediately following acquisition.

5. Both real estate and business investments have profit trajectories that tend to increase over time.

The questions we have to ask then are which asset does better than the other over time, and does that even matter? If you are a novelist, wouldn’t you prefer to write novels and earn a living on them? And why can’t you have both? The latter question is the right answer, because I live in a world with right answers, and you do too, even if you refuse to acknowledge it.

L.A. Dobbs Ad Projections

Let’s return to what L.A. Dobbs wrote in her reply to my interview questions to explore the economics of her books.

Consider, her top selling book is currently earning her $1,198¹² daily. I don’t know what she’s spending in ads, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a huge chunk of cash.

Dobbs has openly said her books sell so well because of hard work and money spent advertising. It’s that easy to have a bestseller. She’s putting in enough money that readers are seeing her book when searching for Hard-boiled detective fiction.

What’s her return on ad spend? We don’t know, so we’ll have to use industry averages and project forward.

Amazon reports that the average click-through-rate is a mere 0.45% with a conversion rate at 9.79%. That means that for every 1000 impressions served forty-five people will click the ad, and of the forty-five people four will buy. The average cost per click is $0.91.

Do a little fancy math and you’ll see that if L.A. Dobbs is running average campaigns (something tells me she’s well above average), she’s spending $31.85 to earn $13.97 (4 sales at $4.99 each with 70% royalty).

And I don’t know about you, but with numbers like that, I couldn’t afford to be a full-time author. So what is going on that Dobbs (and many other authors) can earn a full-time living on their books and consider advertising a good expense?

To explore the most likely answer, we’ll need to bulk our numbers. Earlier, we saw that Dobb’s top selling book is averaging 343 copies sold per day to be at the 294th position overall in the Kindle Store. If Dobbs is spending about thirty-two bucks per four sales on ads, according to the math, she’s spending $2,731 on ads daily.

Remember, we already determined she’s earning $1,198 for those books, but we know she’s not taking a daily loss and that’s likely due to many factors, but sell-through of her series is the biggest reason.

The average sell-through on a series is 50% from book-one to book-two¹³, and increasing to around 80% from books-two through the series end. That means 5 in 10 readers enjoy TELLING LIES enough to read book-two in the Sam Mason series.

Dobbs may be spending marketing dollars on book-two, but if that were the case, we’d expect to see higher sell-through on that book, and in fact it’s at 50.4%, so directly in line with industry standards, meaning she’s likely only advertising TELLING LIES.

343 readers buy TELLING LIES. About half of them love it and buy KEEPING SECRETS. A little over three-quarters of those people buy EXPOSING TRUTH and so on through book-six. I’ll do the math for you. Dobbs is most likely selling 919 copies of the Sam Mason series daily. At $4.99 and 70% royalties, she’s earning $3,210 on the series per day, for a total net profit of $479.

If the Sam Mason series were her only books, she’d gross $174,859.45 per year. The truth is, Dobbs has a pen name and numerous other series she’s written.

Let’s now wrap this thing up. If we average out her earnings per year per book, each book brings in $29,143. Compare that to a single-family real estate investment property. Even at the halfway point of a mortgage, when 50% of the payment is equity, and if we factor in 4% inflation and 50% rise in property values, which would be historic, but has happened, you’d earn $18,252 per year per house.

So my question for you is, can you afford not to advertise your books¹⁴?

1. Yes, I withheld this detail from you on purpose, but now the cat’s out of the bag. L.A. Dobbs uses the same AMMO program I’m in, but I didn’t know it until I reached out to her to be a guest on my podcast, at which time she replied that she didn’t much care for guesting on podcasts, and so I asked if she’d give me a written interview.

2. These results are uncommon, and my outcomes are more typical. I’m at 4 months and have hit profitability twice for short stretches.

3. Dobbs is generally pricing around $4.99 per ebook.

4. See Dobbs’s answer to Q. number 5.

5. email me, and I will share with you how to buy and manage rental properties as a way to build wealth, but this isn’t that essay.

6. Kinda makes an Apple laptop seem like a decent investment, eh?

7. Notice that the majority of your expenses to buy a book can be reused at no additional cost. Each subsequent book is cheaper to create.

8. Now, the magic of property is such that you can refinance, bank on appreciation, inflation, buy in the path of progress, ad infinitum. Property is all-around a brilliant investment, so just understand, I’m not dogging on real estate, but I am tired of people doing shitty math (I can curse in the footnotes, right?) and claiming they can’t afford to advertise their books. Stop putting money in retirement. I’m serious!

9. Prior to last week, when I inexplicable sold zero books, I was at an all-time cost-per-acquisition of $32 and change.

10. Mouseflow records website visitors behaviors so I can adapt my page where people seem to get confused, or run into fiction.

11. Remember, the tools were one-time costs that last many years.

12. You can run the math yourself. She told us that book was part of an Amazon exclusive series, and she has it priced at $4.99 within the Amazon 70% royalties window.

13. This holds up if you look at the number of reviews between books one and two for the Sam Mason Series.

14. Not discussed but worth mentioning, the math requires sell-through to work, and if Dobbs’s series was just 5 books, she’d lose money, so if you’ve written fewer than 6 books, the best expense of time and money is writing more.