Read Time: 2 Minutes

In 2009, I got a job at a supermarket.

£7.91 an hour. Stacking shelves and working the checkout. Sunday afternoons and evenings, while everyone else was on the sofa watching TV and preparing for the week ahead. Tuesday evenings too. Fourteen hours a week, for about eighteen months.

I was at university. It helped pay the bills. But I still remember the misery I felt of tying on an apron at 2pm on a Sunday, knowing I had 7 hours of beeping barcodes and restocking chilled meats ahead of me.

When I totalled it up, I'd earned roughly £10,000 for around 1,100 hours of my life.

Not bad for a student job, to be fair.

But This Number Puts It Into Perspective

If you've written a 90,000-word novel, you've probably spent somewhere between 400 and 600 hours on it.

Let's call it 500 hours.

And if your book has earned $500 in royalties since you published it?

That's $1 per hour for your creative work.

An eighth of what I earned scanning barcodes and restocking shelves on a Sunday afternoon.

Doing something that requires a fraction of the skill, patience, and imagination that writing a novel does.

I'm not sharing this to depress you.

I'm sharing it because I've seen this pattern repeat itself with far too many authors – and almost none of them realize it until someone puts the numbers in front of them.

The Book Isn't The Problem

The book is often brilliant.

The gap is everything that comes after it.

The cover that doesn't quite signal the right genre. The blurb that describes the plot instead of selling the feeling. The Amazon product page that does nothing to earn the click. The reviews that haven't been asked for. The email list that was never built.

Each of these on their own is a small leak. Together, they're a flood.

And then – when all of that is already leaking – authors layer ads on top and wonder why nothing works.

Here's something you likely don't want to hear, but probably already know.

Ads don't save a leaky bucket. They just fill it faster.

The Fix Isn't Better Ads

The authors I've watched go from $500 total lifetime earnings to $1,000+/month don't do it by discovering some secret ad trick.

They do it by fixing the order of operations.

Foundation first. Audience second. Advertising third.

In that sequence. No shortcuts.

It's not complicated. But it does require doing things in the right order – and most authors skip straight to the ads because that's the exciting part. The part that feels like momentum.

It rarely is.

When you get the sequence right, though, everything changes. The ads work harder. The royalties compound. The $1/hour calculation starts to look very different, very quickly.

I don't know what your book has earned.

But I'd bet it deserves more than it's getting.

That's all for this week. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt