I know someone very well who has tried, and failed, repeatedly, to make money writing on KDP. Why? Because he doesn’t actually want to earn any success, he expects instant and unlimited wealth and if he doesn’t get it, he turns to something else entirely.

It doesn’t work that way. He’s been told that it doesn’t work that way. His entire life, I have been telling him, my wife has been telling him, why he fails, yet he’s too lazy to do anything else.

Let’s consider this a cautionary tale.

Now I’m not trying to say that he’s a terrible person because he’s not. He just has really unrealistic views about the real world, as a lot of amateur authors do. In fact, I’m going to do a post on exactly what I dislike about most amateur writers and why they actually fail.

This starts years ago. He started off on KDP writing porn. Why? Because porn makes money. He hated writing it, but the people who are consuming it, they’re not all that picky. Let’s be honest, the vast majority of erotica online is by virgins, for virgins. If you can dream it up in your head, there’s probably some sweaty idiot willing to pay you for it.

Yet, as I said, he hated doing it. It embarrassed him, as it should have. Then, when Amazon started to crack down on a lot of the… shall we say, legally-questionable things that people were putting up, he tried something else. He never really made the kind of money that he wanted to and, honestly, he never put in all that much effort either. That’s going to be a theme moving forward.

Next, he tried romance. Why? Because there are lots of romance readers and he figured he could syphon some of them off. Except, he hates romance. He has absolutely zero attachment to the genre and he immediately started looking for shortcuts, so he didn’t have to put in any effort. It was also painfully clear to anyone who was a fan of genre romance that he didn’t care, therefore, he didn’t make a lot of money.

Instead, he tried to combine his previous efforts into one with “steamy” romance. You know, porn with a romantic angle. He reasoned that Amazon wouldn’t be so harsh on that, which was wrong and there wasn’t a lot of money in that either. Big surprise.

I’d been telling him all along that he had to stop just throwing out “content” and write what he actually enjoyed. People can see right through a cash-grab, as they had in all of his efforts. Write because you love it and if you make money, great. If not, at least you’re still getting the enjoyment of doing something you love.

He then turned to sci-fi and fantasy, which he enjoys. Finally, I thought, he might get somewhere. Silly me.

Instantly, he starts cranking out these really short stories and instantly complains that nobody is buying. Why? Because the expectations for sci-fi and fantasy readers is for long-form content! He doesn’t want to do that, of course, because he wants to get a lot of books out there fast so he has a back catalog to milk.

This is still not doing anything the right way. Here I am, putting out 400-500 page books and they’re selling great,but his, which clock in, often sub-100 pages, aren’t going anywhere and he can’t get it through his head that his potential readers just don’t want what he’s pushing out.

Let’s step back for a moment because this is hardly the only problem. He doesn’t want to spend any money, at all, on his books. His entire purpose is to make money, after all. That means, early on, his covers were just… awful. I remember one that was just a green cover with white text in Times New Roman. Then, he was grabbing Creative Commons images online and slapping a title on them and expecting them to sell.

As you might imagine, it didn’t go well.

Finally, I told him that he needed a professional cover designer. His covers were killing his work. What did he do? He found someone, I don’t know where they were from, something like Pakistan or something, who would do covers for $50 each. He complained about that, of course. He doesn’t have an editor. He has no one really reading his work. I might not say but he really needs someone to keep him in check. He’s the king of the run-on sentence. I’ve read some of his stuff and there are sentences that literally go on for a page.

Yet he still refuses to invest in anything because he’s only doing it to make money. Obviously, he’s not  going to make any money without being willing to invest in his own potential success, but he doesn’t want to hear it.

Worse, I think, he’s completely screwed up any brand loyalty that he might have. Every time he starts a new venture, he creates a new pen name. I think he’s up to a dozen now. None of them have written more than a handful of books. No wonder nobody sticks with him.

Now, it seems like he’s mostly given up on writing sci-fi and fantasy and he’s making these crappy little Android phone text games. Why? Because he hopes they’ll make money. It’s something that he doesn’t have to invest any time or effort into and I’ve given up trying to fix anything. He’s been like this for decades now. I don’t think he’s ever going to change.

This is not how you make a living writing. This is how you fail and he’s done nothing but fail. At the most, I don’t think he’s ever brought in more than a thousand a month, and that’s sporadic at best. This is all wishful thinking and far too many authors never get beyond that stage. They don’t want to listen to reason. They continue to fail.