How We Took a Paranormal Romance Author From $11K to $41K Monthly Profit in 8 Months

If your revenue is declining despite regular releases, or you just want to grow it further, this case study will show you exactly how.

Our client had everything that's supposed to work: a popular genre, consistent releases every 3 months, and an advertising strategy. Yet her monthly profit dropped from $20K+ to $11K over two years.

The worst part? She was doing everything the "right way." And it was still failing.

In this case study, you'll discover:

* Why consistent releases don't always stop revenue decline
* The one metric most authors completely underestimate and how it killed her profits.
* The exact strategy we used to 4X her profit in 8 months, and why it works even in declining markets.

Our client writes paranormal romance across multiple series. She was releasing a new book every three months like clockwork.

When she came to us, we were honestly reluctant to take her on.

Why? Because we thought this was a market problem, not a marketing problem.

Paranormal romance demand has been declining for years. Fantasy romance exploded in popularity and pulled readers away. The theory was that her readers were leaving the genre entirely.

This seemed like the obvious explanation for her shrinking revenue.

But when we dug into the data, something didn't add up.

There was still a significant search volume for paranormal romance books on amazon.

So what was really happening?

The biggest cause of declining revenue for most authors is inactive series.

When you stop releasing in your most profitable series, even if you're releasing in other series, that series dies. That causes the overall revenue to drop dramatically.

But our client was releasing regularly. Every three months across multiple series.

So what was her problem?

She wasn't getting her books in front of enough new readers.

She was advertising. She had campaigns running. But the volume was too low.

She had just enough exposure to keep the business alive, but not enough to grow it.

Her business was in slow-motion starvation.

The solution was simple:

Increase the number of new readers coming in each month.

But here's the critical part most authors miss. You can't scale everything. Trying to advertise every series is how you waste money and stay stuck.

Step 1: Identify What Can Actually Be Scaled

Not all series should be advertised. Advertise the right series, and you'll multiply your profit. Advertise the wrong ones, and you'll just burn money faster.

We needed to find which of her series had true scaling potential.

There are two non-negotiable requirements:

Requirement 1: At Least 8-10 Books in the Series

Longer series create the margin you need to advertise aggressively and stay profitable.

With a long series, you can acquire more readers without worrying about bad returns. You can pay higher prices to acquire each reader and still be left with good margins because you make it back across multiple books.

Shorter series don't have enough margin. You need to be conservative and not overspend, which means you can't scale aggressively.

What happens instead? You spend more on advertising and end up making less profit. You're stuck fighting for scraps.

Requirement 2: Strong Readthrough

Readthrough is the percentage of readers who move from one book to the next.

Low readthrough kills your margins. High readthrough makes everything work.

How do we measure it?

The simplest way is to track revenue movement from book to book.

Some authors prefer to look at sales and page reads. That works too.

What's a healthy readthrough?

A healthy series follows this pattern: 60% → 80% → 90% → 90%

* 60% of Book 1 revenue moves to Book 2
* 80% of Book 2 revenue moves to Book 3
* 90%+ continues through the rest of the series

The biggest drop always happens between Book 1 and Book 2. That's the danger zone. Once readers stay past that point, they usually finish the series.

Lower readthrough makes aggressive advertising unprofitable. You need readers who consume most of the books.

The Strategy: Advertise Book 1. Get new readers in. Make profit from series consumption.

So we analyzed her catalog against these two requirements.

What We Found

We identified two series with scaling potential:

1. One series with 11 books
2. A 4-book series with a 4-book spinoff

For the second one, we had the author merge the main series and spinoff into a single 8-book series.

Why Merge Them?

Because it dramatically increases readthrough from the main series into the spinoff.

When books are in the same series on Amazon, readers naturally continue reading. They see the next book and buy it. Amazon also pushes them through with automated email notifications.

When the spinoff is separate? Readthrough drops significantly. Now you need to rely on marketing to sell the spinoff too.

Ideally we wanted to acquire a reader once, and they read everything without relying on marketing to get them to read more. That's why we merged the two series.

We completely ignored any series or books that didn't fit the scaling criteria. We only focused on what had the highest likelihood of generating profitable growth.

Now we knew what to scale. The next question was, where do we advertise?

Not all platforms work for every genre. We needed to choose channels where her readers actually were, and where we could reach them efficiently.

The Advertising Channels That Actually Mattered

This is paranormal romance. Romance books in general tend to do well on Facebook. So Meta ads were an obvious choice. We knew readers were there.

The second platform was Amazon DSP lockscreen ads.

What DSP Lockscreen Ads Are

DSP lockscreen ads are full-screen ads that appear the moment someone unlocks their e-reader or Kindle Fire tablets.

One ad. Right in front of the reader. Before they do anything else.

It's a single image with a short text overlay. That's it. Simple, but powerful.

Why They're So Efficient

The efficiency comes down to who you're reaching and when. The targeting is unlike anything else available to authors.

You can target:
* People who bought specific books
* Readers who read specific books through Kindle Unlimited
* Fans of specific authors similar to you
* Readers who bought some of your books but not others

You're not targeting people who "might like reading." You're showing ads to verified purchasers and actual Kindle Unlimited readers.

If you know who your potential readers are, these are extremely efficient.

Not Everyone Has Access to DSP Ads

DSP lockscreen ads aren't available through the regular Amazon ad console. They used to be, but with limited targeting. And without the targeting option that actually works best, targeting verified readers.

So you don't run these campaigns yourself. You work with Amazon's team. Or an Amazon ads verified partner, like our agency, that has the access to set them up.

These campaigns are super technical heavy to set up and run through a different ad console than the regular one authors have access to.

Our Meta Ads Process

We don't just launch campaigns and hope they work. We start with a creative test first.

The goal is simple: maximize the chances that when our main campaigns go live, they actually work.

Instead of just launching campaigns and hoping for the best, we test different images, headlines, and copies first. Only the best ones make it into our main campaigns.

The creative test solves two problems:

First, it identifies the most efficient ads. The ones that cost less to get readers to your Amazon page. Better efficiency means more readers for the same spend.

Second, it builds a library of winning creatives. When we scale spending, we need more ad variations. The test ensures we have proven creatives ready to deploy.

Step 1: Creative Test

We generally test 30-50 different images, 30-50 copies and 30-50 headline variations. We run them all and see which ones perform best.

We judge them based on low cost per click (CPC) and high clickthrough rate (CTR).

The winners move forward. Everything else gets cut.

Step 2: Launch Main Campaigns

Once we know which creatives work, we launch the main campaigns.

We take the best creatives from the test and launch a new campaign. If that scales revenue, we add another campaign with new creatives. If that works, we stack another one on top.

That's how we scale: layer by layer, campaign by campaign. Each one built on what's already working.

But we also need the right targeting strategy.

The Targeting Strategy

For Meta campaigns, we use interest targeting. We target paranormal romance authors, fantasy romance authors and the paranormal romance genre interest. Basically the biggest interests available that would also contain the client's readers. And yes, interest targeting still works in 2026.

Then we use the ads themselves to filter readers.

We call out the genre in the copy and headlines. That way, only the people interested in that specific genre click on the ad and end up on Amazon. The targeting gets them in the ballpark. The ad copy filters them down to the right readers.

Once Meta campaigns are stable and profitable, we don't stop there.

Layering Channels

We add Amazon DSP lockscreen ads on top.

We don't launch both at the same time. If we did, and something didn't work, we wouldn't know which channel caused the problem.

Instead, we go step by step. Launch one channel. Make sure it works. Then layer the next one on top.

That way, we always know what's working and what's not. If something doesn't perform, we cut it and try again. If it works, we keep scaling.

Our DSP Lockscreen Ads Process

When we launch Amazon lockscreen ads, we follow the same pattern as Meta Ads.

We already have really good images and copy from Meta. So we leverage those and create a new creative test specifically for lockscreen ads.

Even though we've already tested things on Meta, we still create 10 different lockscreen creatives and pick only the best ones for the main campaigns.

The goal is to maximize impact. Drive costs down. Get more readers on the Amazon page.

Targeting on Amazon Lockscreen Ads

For lockscreen ads, we have the advantage of targeting other authors' readers. Anyone who purchased their books or read them through Kindle Unlimited.

Our approach: target readers of the most active self-published authors.

Meaning authors who constantly launch new books and run ads.

These authors contain the most readers who are also open to reading other self-published authors.

We see a massive difference between targeting traditionally published authors versus indie authors. Indie author readers convert better.

Why? Because these readers were acquired through advertising. They're already comfortable discovering new books through ads. They're primed to switch.

To find these authors, we look at Amazon's suggestions. On the client's Amazon page, there's a section of similar authors. On their series page, there's a "customers who bought this also bought" section.

We look for the biggest, most popular series from self-published authors and target those. This means the series that have the most reviews. This is a sign that a lot of readers have read that series.

Once we finish the creative test, we take the best three creatives, put them into main campaigns. We target each author individually and scale from there.

The Result

Our plan was simple.

Increase the number of new readers coming in each month.

That meant investing more in advertising the first books in the series. More Book 1 royalties = more new readers entering the series.

Spend goes up → Book 1 revenue goes up → Series revenue increases → Profit grows.

That's how you scale a series.

This is the 11 book series.

Our goal was to consistently increase Book 1 spend and Book 1 royalties. And that's exactly what happened. Book 1 revenue increased and that led to more profit each month.

Note that in Q4 budgets were lowered due to overall less reader activity.

We took this exact process and applied it to her second series. Creative test on Meta. Scale Meta. Launch DSP lockscreen ads. Scale those.

Same approach. Similar results.

This is the 8 book series. The profits on this series are lower than on the 11 book series. That's because the 11 book series is longer and has better margins.

Still, we managed to increase the profits this series was making each month.

This is how we managed to turn her business around.

Eight months after we took over marketing, she went from making $11K to $41K in monthly overall profits.

*Overall revenue and profits are higher due to audiobooks revenue that is not visible when we look at each individual series.

Conclusions:

Her business was shrinking month over month because she wasn't bringing in enough new readers.

The solution was to advertise the two series with the best potential to scale. Ignore everything else.

We put spend behind series with enough books and strong enough margins to make aggressive advertising profitable.

Then we focused on the most important metrics that would tell us if she was getting new readers.

Book 1 spend and Book 1 revenue.

This metric tells you if more readers are coming into your business. You can measure it daily, weekly, or monthly.

Bringing in new readers through those two series did more than just grow those series.

These readers consumed the advertised books, then moved into her back catalog. We saw small but noticeable revenue increases across books we weren't advertising. Her audiobook sales also went up.

This is how advertising works when you do it right. You bring readers in through your strongest series, and they discover the rest of your catalog on their own.

The Big Lesson

She had a back catalog worth $11,000 in monthly profit and shrinking.

Eight months later, the same back catalog was worth $41,000 in monthly profit.

The only difference? More readers.

Your back catalog is worth whatever you're currently making from it. But if you're not bringing in enough new readers, you're settling for less than it's actually worth.

Even in a declining market like paranormal romance, the right advertising strategy can reverse years of decline.

The question isn't whether your market is shrinking.

The question is, are you getting your books in front of enough new readers?