SFFMP 216: Reaching $100K+ in Income from Writing Science Fiction with Gerald M. Kilby

January 15, 2019 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

This week, we chatted writing, publishing, and marketing hard science fiction with Gerald M. Kilby. He’s not the fastest writer, putting out around two novels a year these days, but he manages to keep his books selling well between releases, and he earned more than $100K last year. We asked him all about that, Amazon and Facebook advertising, and what he’s doing for newsletters, social media, and the like.

Here are some of the specifics that we covered:

How the ever-shrinking science fiction section in the physical bookstores helped Gerald decide to start writing his own stories.
Bypassing traditional publishing, since agents weren’t looking for hard sci-fi, and going straight to self-publishing.
Whether or not hard sci-fi readers are more nitpicky in insisting that the science be right.
Some of the mistakes he made with his first novel, a techno-thriller.
How the science fiction genre appeared to have much more potential to him.
How the popularity of The Martian seemed to help with Mars-related fiction when Gerald was starting out.
What he’s done to keep the ball rolling.
Realizing he couldn’t rely on Amazon’s algorithms to keep his books selling, especially when he had many months between releases.
Getting involved in Facebook and Amazon ads and which he likes better for what.
Having luck with letting Amazon choose automatic keywords in their ad system, instead of going in and picking them all by hand.
The challenges of maintaining a positive return-on-investment with Facebook and Amazon ads when you don’t have a huge series and can’t afford to spend as much to get a sale of a Book 1.
Changes to the Amazon advertising system of late and what authors need to watch out for with the higher suggested bids.
How he uses his mailing list and what a book launch looks for him these days.