TikTok Made Me a 6-Figure Author!
So I’ve made it!
I’m officially a six figure author from KDP plus my direct paperback sales! Not per year quite yet, but still!
My first year, I published a bunch of books across three series (like 10 books I believe) and they did really well, but then things stagnated. And by stagnated, I mean TANKED. I went from $50k in 2020 to $12k in 2021, and then $6k in 2022.
At the end of 2022, I started to experiment with TikTok for myself and my friends. And then a few more people in 2023. With two weeks in 2022, I made $1500 from some light posting on my books. January of 2023, $3500.
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Things that work for me:
Waiting through down times. There are times when TikTok is constantly updating, and this makes views harder to come by. They always come back, though, and I’ve updated my hashtags to help out with that!
Posting emotion-driven content. If I can get potential readers angry on behalf of my characters, I’m going to get a ton of sales.
Avoiding steam. TikTok has been heavily cracking down on this, so since late February, I’ve been telling people to avoid spicy content. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that TikTok is under fire for exposing minors to inappropriate content, so they’ve been cracking down on it. (If you haven’t been affected yet, that’s awesome, but I can only see it getting harder and stricter in 2024)
TikTok shop. I’ve been putting a tiny bit of effort into this, and I made over $1,000 in revenue from TikTok shop in December with signed books. I’ve sold out of several of my paperbacks this way, and I’m still waiting on a restock.
Cycling accounts. I own a bunch of “shadow accounts” where I just post scenes from my books, and I generally post on 3-4 of them a day. If one starts getting low views, I log out of that and into a different one. Follower count doesn’t really matter on whether an account will go viral, so I only care about views and the corresponding royalties.
Back when I initially did super ridiculously well, Facebook groups and organic traffic on Facebook were still working really well, but I haven’t been able to get that to work for me since 2020.
I also don’t think there’s one specific “style” you have to use on TikTok to succeed, and I DO think it’s getting harder in 2024, but I look forward to defeating it and making six figures for the year! (That’s right, TikTok is not my friend, it is an enemy I must defeat by succeeding).
