Six-Figure Income on One Book a Year: An Indie Author’s Slow-Release Strategy ft. Helen Scheuerer (EP#557 Classic Replay)
SPA Girls PodcastShow Notes
🔁 CLASSIC REPLAY — This episode was originally recorded in 2021 and the strategy is just as relevant today. Helen has since gone on to become an internationally bestselling romantasy author with multiple series, proving the long-game approach works.
What if you could earn six figures a year writing just ONE book? We sit down with International Bestselling Fantasy author Helen Scheuerer to unpack how she built a six-figure self-publishing career on a single annual release — the opposite of the “rapid release” model most indie authors are told to follow.
Helen took her traditional publishing education (Bachelor of Creative Writing, Masters of Publishing) and applied it to her indie career with stunning results. If you’re a slow writer, a perfectionist, or a deep-world fantasy author who can’t churn out four books a year, this episode is for you. We dig into Helen’s launch strategy, her decision to leave traditional publishing behind, and the marketing approach that lets one book a year perform spectacularly.
Watch On You Tube
📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED:
The Oremere Chronicles trilogy: https://helenscheuerer.com/the-oremere-chronicles/
About Helen
Helen Scheuerer is the Sunday Times bestselling author best known for her romantasy series, The Legends of Thezmarr and The Ashes of Thezmarr. Her work has been highly praised for its strong, flawed female characters and its action-packed plots. She also publishes advice for authors with her nonfiction series, Books For Career Authors.
Helen’s love of writing and books led her to pursue a creative writing degree and a Masters of Publishing. She has been a full-time author since 2018 and now lives amidst the mountains in New Zealand where she is constantly dreaming up new stories.
Find her at: https://helenscheuerer.com/
🔗 CONNECT WITH THE SPA GIRLS:
🌐 Website & free self-publishing resources: http://www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
🎧 Subscribe to our weekly episodes on your favourite podcast app — search “SPA Girls Podcast”
💗 This podcast is supported by our amazing Patreon community! ⭐ Join at the $10 tier for access to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group where we discuss marketing, writing, and answer your burning questions: http://www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
More from SPA Girls Podcast
You don’t need a million readers. You need 1,000 who buy everything you write. Cheryl, Shar and Wendy take Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans model — 1,000 people spending $100 a year — and work out what it actually looks like for an indie novelist right now.
🔁 CLASSIC REPLAY — This episode was originally recorded in 2023 and the writing craft advice is just as relevant today.
This is a concrete, numbers-heavy conversation about what diversification actually means for a working author. Million-selling author Craig Martelle has published over 200 books since 2015, across 28 series, and has around 25 different sources of income. Craig’s definition of Author Diversification is multiple revenue streams, and he counts formats, distributors, languages, genres and co-authors as part of it. He walks through where to start when you’ve only got five books out, why paperback belongs in your Amazon ads, what a SAG-AFTRA narrator really costs and why he pays it anyway, and how he translated nine books into German for almost nothing using three AIs checking each other.
USA Today bestselling author Lana Love writes short romance: 15,000-word books with curvy heroines and protective heroes. She publishes one a month and has more than 60 out. Her income doubled when one book in her Mountain Men series took off and lifted her whole backlist, and she did it with very little advertising. In this episode of the SPA Girls Podcast (EP571), she walks us through exactly how.
Four authors, more than a decade of self-publishing, over 300 books published combined, and four very different takes on the successful author mindset. Cheryl, Shar, Wendy and Trudi share what keeps them writing through industry shake-ups, sales dips and busy family life.