Okay, now that I got you to look, I’ll admit right off the top that my “daydreams” had to flow from my brain and onto the computer screen in order for me to get paid, but that’s essentially all it was. I started writing my Christmas Key series simply because I liked the concept and enjoyed the way I got lost in my own stories, but when I finally self-published the first book in March 2016, I definitely had visions of making money from my writing.

In the two years since then, I’ve published four full-length novels in the series and two novellas, and I’ve paid for countless advertisements. But–like most other indie authors–I was holding out for the Big One…for the advertising opportunity that we all dream about because of its massive return on investment: I was hoping for a Bookbub. And on Halloween, I finally got one.

Bookbub ads are notoriously hard to land, and there’s a lot of information floating around out there about how to score one. Some people claim it’s pure luck, but I feel like the key for me was taking my books out of Kindle Unlimited and making them available on every site possible. When I finally got a Bookbub in October, I’d already applied for a Featured Deal six different times. But it wasn’t until this last submission when my books were already available everywhere that it finally happened.

And that’s where the $6,635.12 comes in. I set the first book in my series to “free” on all channels (There’s Always a Catch: Christmas Key Book One) and watched as the downloads started to roll in. After the first four or five days, I’d successfully given away over 23,000 copies of my first book. Now, not every single person who downloads your book is going to a) read it, b) like it, or c) buy the next books in the series, but when you give away that many free copies, you bank on a good chunk of them hopefully doing all 3 of those things.

I’ve tracked my returns starting November 1, 2017, and I have them through January 31, 2018. So for those three months, based on my initial investment of $149 to give my book away to a portion of the 1.2 million readers who’ve signed up for Bookbub’s Chick Lit deals, I made over six thousand dollars just watching people buy the next books in my series. Of course sales will taper off in the coming months until I put out the next book and find a new way to advertise (hopefully a Bookbub ad again in the near future!), but for the time being, I’m ridiculously happy that my hobby has finally yielded a return that makes me feel like I’m not just writing for an audience of one!