Six Figure Author Case Study: Contemporary Romance
As Told In Khardine's Own Words...
My name is Khardine Gray. I am a USA Today Bestselling Author. I write Contemporary Romance, Multicultural and Interracial Romance, and Paranormal Romance. I now have 40 books (5 prepping to be published) and more on the way.
My journey began in November 2016. I had 1 book.
A lot of you know me from various different courses in the author world and list aiming sets because I was in 4 boxed sets (all run by Rebecca's Team, three of which made it to USAT and one that got me priceless friends for life).
Before Rebecca, I was making $20 a Month.
After Rebecca's PMC Course, I made $54,651.41.
That was on $25,000 ad spend, and while that was great (and more than paid for the cost of the course) things got even better when I added Rebecca's Advertising for Authors course.
I'm going to cover my entire journey with you here today.
Where did I come from?
My first book was released in November 2016. I had no ad spend and no idea of what to do. Friends and family purchased and I thought that all I needed to do was write the book and Amazon would do the rest. I didn’t know that you had to market your books to sell them. Or that the book needed to meet genre expectation standards for people to want to read it. I didn’t know how to plot, why anybody would need to write a good blurb. Nothing. I thought that people would be happy to see a new book.
Within a few weeks, I realized nothing was further from the truth. I really wanted to write for the rest of my life, which meant I needed to get myself in gear.
Two Problems... A: I had no money and B: I had no idea what to do if I somehow did find the money.
The first thing I started doing was networking with other authors. That's when a friend told me about Rebecca’s group. Once I joined, I learned that there was all sorts of things I could be doing...but I needed to plan according to what I wanted to achieve.
I began with the book fairs Rebecca offered, and that did quite well. Then I did a Book Boost (now available through ZeroAlchemy.com) and that was great too.
But something was missing, and I suspected it was something I feared for a long time.
My books had good stories. The reviews told me that. But they just weren't selling like I knew they could. I went over my earlier books and saw that there was no structure, the pacing was off, the dialogue was just okay, nothing to move the story along, and random things happening here and there. The characters lacked depth and had no context to them.
I also seemed to look like I wrote steamy/billionaire romance from some of my covers, which was what I was aiming for, but the stories themselves were more on the sweet romance/women’s fiction side. So I was more than likely attracting the audience who liked reading steamy romance, but then not delivering what they wanted. People mentioned just that in their reviews.
This all told me that I needed something that would change things up for me big time and guidance on what to do. How could I take my books to the next level?
What was worse was I wasn’t making any money. That $20 just kept coming back to haunt me.
So here’s what I did.
Up First: The Master Course, Now called Publishing Mastermind Course, or PMC for short.
This for me is the ultimate author guide. Like the dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons or Ask Jeeves, but for authors.
It literally had everything. Back then, it was hosted through a Facebook Group, and I felt so privileged to be a part of it.
But signing up for such an expensive course, even knowing what it could do for my career, was not in my means at the time. Especially since I was only making $20 a Month before this course. So you may be wondering how I got the money to pay for it.
I had nothing, after all, and the thought of paying for a course was a lot to consider with no money.
At the time I got the course, it was on sale, and I just had to find a way to get the money to sign up. So I looked around my house for stuff I could sell.
My husband keeps ferrets, and they’d just had babies. He has one of those special breeds, so we were able to get $1000 for them.
That was how I got the money for the course, and this was my game changer. This first big step also was a leap of faith, not just in Rebecca, but in myself. I knew if I wanted this, I had to be willing to find a way. To make my dreams happen. And that kind of dedication doesn't stop with paying for a course. What you do with that course access matters, too.
Once inside the course, I learned how to harness the power to create a book with the right pacing, plotting to keep readers turning those pages, and basically everything you need to write a good book. The course also covers new release marketing and leveraging your audience and pretty much everything you need to successfully launch your career. There are, I believe, over 400 lessons.
I must have gotten to 10% of the course when I realized that, if I wanted my existing books to sell, I needed to sort them out. I didn’t want to have a situation where my current books were good but then the back list wasn’t up to scratch.
So I spent 6 months following the core teachings of the PMC for plotting a bestseller. I took 8 books, rewrote them by changing everything up without changing the story too much, changing the covers, boxed setting one, and even changing them from third person to first (it’s not necessary to do this, but I find most readers in my genre prefer it, so I did).
Please note that quite often I will sign up to a course even if I know it will be available in the PMC eventually. I do this because of the value of the course to me right now and by the time I’ve done the course I’ve already made my money back.
Using Rebecca’s techniques, I restructured the way my story and plot was laid out and rereleased these books. Here are some things I learned:
- How to analyze the market and see what readers liked for my genre.
- How to write a good story with memorable characters.
- How to write a series of unputdownable books so even with my series that have cliff hangers my read-through rate is around 80%
And I started making money. Actual money. Best of all? Now I now had the money to do one-on-one mentoring with Rebecca. She'd delivered with her Mastermind Course and I was ready to see what her Mentorship Program could do.
Those were my two big game changers: PMC and Mentoring. For me, the two worked hand in hand. One was a massive handbook, laid out step by step. The other one gave me personal guidance and deep-level feedback and personalized care to make sure I was utilizing everything I had learned to my full potential.
Here are some other "Rebecca Courses" I have taken:
- Plotting on a time crunch
- Releasing books at full price
- Sky rocket your sales
- Self editing
- How to increase sell through on full priced books
- Release books on a budget
- Blurb writing
- Advertising for authors (this is what helped me decrease my spend to create a higher profit margin)
- Advanced social media for authors
- How to Write a Novella in 14 days + Plotting on a Time Crunch - these principles allow me to write a 70k novel in 7 days, all while I’m still at work full time .
Facebook Ads
I suffered a lot with Facebook Ads and it was not fun to learn in many hard ways. I have been on many courses. Many of you will see me on them. This platform is one where I will invest time and money because it’s the one that works best for me. AMS is great but I have never received the results that I’ve had with Facebook.
So it’s my bread and butter.
Rebecca’s course is the only one that has been able to get me the best results with Facebook Ads and the lowest CPC.
I love her technique, and most of all, it allows you to echo the same voice as your book. So the reader sees the ad, goes to the sales page looks at the blurb which feels the same, and then they may use the look inside feature and want to devour your book. That’s my personal opinion.
I've used Rebecca's services, now available through ZeroAlchemy, with success also.
Newsletter: I did a newsletter package two years ago, and to this day, many of those subscribers are still with me and they love my books.
ARC Team: I did this as a white glove service and got some amazing readers who always leave reviews.
Book Boost and New Release Package: These give me HUGE sales boosts.
Book Rebel: I book one every other month. If I had a only a small budget and I wanted to do a promo, I would just use this. This was the result of a promo I did recently. I just used Book Rebel and this was what happened. (#198 Paid in Store):
This is what I worked on after my mentorship, using everything I've learned from Rebecca:
These two books were published just after I started my mentorship.
When you do the mentoring, your mind is instantly transformed to put you on par with what you should be doing. In 2018, these were my best sellers that made people go on to buy my other books.
One of the biggest things I learned last year was you can spend all kinds of money marketing and doing ads but it your book isn’t good either people will return it, stop reading it, or leave bad reviews. These two put me on the map.
This year, I am prepping to become a full-time author. It has been made possible by the books that I did in my mentoring with Rebecca.
I also have a spin off to this series...
This is going to probably be a 10 part series.
AD SPEND
Last Year:
This year so far:
(From the above, deduct around $1600 as this was used for box sets ad spend, not my personal titles.)
The rest is mine so a total of $6,268.56 in ads...versus the $25,000 I spent last year.
AMS
Rebecca is about to do this in her course and I can’t wait for it! This is me so far as I wanted to give you a true reflection of what I have spent this year. I am not that great with these ads yet so I have been testing out various things but this doesn’t look all that bad.
A lot of what Rebecca teaches can be applied to many areas of your career, which gave me a leg up starting on my AMS before she's released that content.
Note on AMS: It may seem like the easier platform, but please take your time to understand what works. I am still learning here, but from what I see, it’s definitely the platform that I’ve had to be more patient with. Seriously patient.
How much I’ve made in total from November 2016 to now. (Remember, before Rebecca I was only making $20 a month, so most of this is Post-Rebecca)
Here are the numbers just for last year (12 Months), when I spent $25,000 on Ads:
Here are the numbers for this year so far (6 Months), when I spent $9,000 on Ads:
This puts me on track to make $55,000 this year for $18,000 in Ad Spend instead of $25,000 in ad spend, making my potential profit this year $37,000 instead of $30,000.
And I only expect things to keep growing as I continue to use these methods!
What's Next for Me?
Current Ad Spend:
- Monthly Facebook Ads: $300 - $1400
- Monthly AMS Ads: $100-$300
New Planned Ad Spend (Scaling Up Using Rebecca's Methods):
This is what I will be spending as of this month...
- Monthly Facebook Ads: $1800
- Monthly AMS Ads: $700
I have 16 more books planned to release this year. That may seem like a lot, but Rebecca's methods for writing better and faster have made this possible!
I'll be sure to add onto this with a 2020 Update if anyone would be interested to see if Rebecca can get me to Six Figures! She's certainly placed me on the fast track to get there.
Khardine's Top Course Recommendations
"PMC, Mentoring, and Ads for Authors. Those were my game changers."
Mid-2020 Update!
