Why Does the 5th Book Sell and NOT the First?

Can having a backlog of books skyrocket you to fame?

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

I was listening to an old episode of the SPA Girls Podcast on Spotify (which is a self-publishing podcast from New Zealand) where the hostesses interviewed Bella Andre.

Bella Andre is known for her “The Sullivans” series, which follows the romantic lives of the Sullivan family members — and there are a lot of them. In-between giving advice about how to write and market a series, she said something really interesting.

Essentially, her 5th self-published book was ultimately the one that took off, selling tens of thousands of copies when her first four books only sold a few hundred. She said that she suspects there is a science to this, because the same thing happened to her in Germany, where the 5th book of a new series she was writing (at the time) had also been the one to take off, not the first four.

So, why is that? I’d like to speculate a little.

5 Reasons Why the First Few Books Don’t Sell:

Any self-publishing professional who isn’t trying to sell you their course on the subject will tell you the truth: there is no one formula that works. The whole thing is a bit of a crapshoot.