How Scott Blade Hit His First $103,000 Royalty Month Without Writing a New Book

We are an Amazon Ads verified partner. In the last 30 days alone, our clients sold over $1 million worth of fiction books. Authors we work with in this space include Scott Blade, Jack Slater, Bill Runner, plus other six- and seven-figure authors.

Here is exactly what happened to our client's catalogue.

• Overall catalogue royalties went from $65k (avg of 2025) to $103k a month.
• Full catalogue profit, after ad spend, went from $45k (avg of 2025) to $76k a month.
  
• Book one revenue went from $3.4k to $12k a month.
  
• New readers went from roughly 1.1k to roughly 4.1k a month. (nearly 4x increase in new readers)
  
• Book one's US rank went from sitting in the 10k to 15k range to a best of 700.
  

If you want to make more profit between launches, read on.

Scott came to us in August 2025. He was making $56,000 a month at the time and he had hit a ceiling.

Instead of starting right away, we suggested we wait for January 2026.

Two reasons.

First, Q4 is bad for scaling.

Readers are expensive and distracted by all the sales and holidays.

Second, he had his yearly launch in December. Timing the scaling with a launch accelerates everything.

A launch already brings a wave of visibility, so we scale on top of that instead of from a cold start. It's the more strategic way in.

Five months after we started, with no new book, he made $76,764 in profit. Not a launch month. He beat every launch he'd ever had, and it was the most profit his books had ever made.

His all-time high came five months after a launch, when sales usually drop.

Then, in July 2026, his catalogue royalties passed $103,000. His first six figure month ever.

His highest month now comes between launches, not on them.

About Scott Blade

Scott Blade writes the Jack Widow series. Action thrillers. 20 long books, all standalone, all in Kindle Unlimited. He has been publishing since 2012. He launches just one new book a year.

Before us, he ran his own Facebook ads and spent $8,000 to $18,000 a month on them. A separate agency ran his Amazon sponsored ads.

He runs the whole business himself. In his own words…

"I'm an artist. I'm writing the books and running the business at the same time."

Where things got stuck

Scott was doing well. But he was capped, and he knew it.

"I've kind of hit a ceiling."

"There's a ceiling for me on my own."

"I see potential left on the table that I'm not aware of, that I can't get to."

"There's like a missing link I feel like that I can't do on my own."

Part of the problem was that he only had two traffic sources, and both were fragile. In June 2025, Facebook removed detailed targeting and his sales dropped. He had no idea why. "I sat there trying to work out why my sales were slumping." He shut his ads off for weeks to work it out. The year before, Facebook locked him out of his account for a full month. "Every year something like that goes wrong."

He also knew he could not learn his way out fast enough. "I will learn it, but it'll take me a while."

His goal was simple. "I want to make $100,000 every month."

What we did

We put Scott on our Lock Screen System.

Imagine Amazon has two different tools for showing ads.

The easy one is the normal Amazon Ads dashboard. Most authors use it. You type in some keywords, set a budget, done. It's a vending machine. Simple, but limited.

Amazon DSP is the powerful one. DSP stands for Demand-Side Platform, but forget the name, it means nothing useful. Two things make it special. Who it shows your book to, and where.

Who.

DSP shows your book to specific groups of real people based on what they actually bought on Amazon. Real buyers.

Here is why that is a big deal. Consider all the authors using Facebook and TikTok ads to drive readers to Amazon. All that traffic pours in, and Amazon writes down who bought a book and who looked and left. DSP lets us use that. We pick the authors whose readers buy the most, and we show your book only to those proven buyers. We skip the browsers. You don't pay a cent to reach people who never buy.

So instead of "show my book to people who searched thriller and hope they're readers," it's "show my book to people who already bought a Lee Child book and paid for it." Amazon knows exactly who those people are because Amazon sees everything everyone buys.

Where.

DSP puts your ad on the lock screen of the devices people actually read on. Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets. It's the screen you see the moment you pick up your device, before you even unlock it. Your book cover is the first thing a reader sees when they grab their Kindle to read. Perfect spot, in front of the exact people about to sit down and read.

So why doesn't everyone do this?

Two reasons.

First, it's a pain to set up.

DSP lock screen ads are the most complex campaigns out there. Long setup, complicated targeting, a lot of moving parts. Authors got into this to write books, not to turn into a data nerd like me.

Second, the cost of entry.

The e-reader ads normally have to be set up by Amazon directly. And Amazon usually won't work with you unless you commit to spending around $50,000. That can be a lot for most authors.

This is where we come in. We spend seven figures a year across all our clients. Because we pull so much spend, there is no minimum spend required for the authors we work with. You get in through Amazon's door without making the bet yourself. We can switch campaigns on and off for a single author whenever we want. You get Amazon's top ad platform. It reaches readers on their devices, in front of proven buyers. Plus, there's no setup hassle and no minimum requirement.

The process, step by step

Here is the process we run whenever we take someone on.

1. Onboarding.

First we get access to your ad accounts and your Publisher Champ. That way we can see your sales and your marketing numbers. Then we ask for your book assets. That means the manuscript and any details about the main character, so we have what we need to build the ads. This is the only work we need from you. You send it once. After that, it is out of your hands.

2. Series economics and scaling KPIs.

First we work out how much a reader is worth. We see this in Publisher Champ. Inside there is a page called Book Series Stats. Pick your series and the number shows up. For this author, a reader is worth $12.

This number tells us if we can scale. It tells us how much we can pay per reader. If a reader is worth $12, we can pay $6 and still make good profit, or pay $3 and keep a strong margin. Below $10 is a bad sign.

At $5 there is no way to scale. We want thousands of new readers per month, and that only happens by paying more. Whoever pays the most to bring in a reader gets the most readers. That is how marketing works. So the series has to sustain it.

Two things can make a reader's worth too low.

One, you don't have enough books in the series.

This is an example with 4 books.

Two, your read-through is weak.

That means fewer of the people who buy book one carry on to book two, three, four, and the rest. So each later book earns you less. This is an example of an extremely long series and poor read-through.

Each colored bar represents a book. This shows how much money each book adds to the royalties per reader.

You want the bars to be as equal as possible. If they shrink, that means fewer readers end up buying the later books in the series.

You want read-through high. When it is high, more readers go all the way to the last book, and every reader is worth more.

This is what great read-through on a 20-book series looks like.

One note. When a series runs with no ads, read-through looks better. Start advertising and it exposes the drop-offs. With no ads, only your most eager fans buy, and that is a small group. Expect slightly worse read-through when heavily advertising.

Scaling KPIs: the three targets we set

Once we know what a reader is worth, we set the goal. Say the client wants $70,000 in profit a month. We work out what that takes in spend.

The worst return we aim for is one to one. Spend $50,000 on ads, make $50,000 in profit back. We don't want to spend $50,000 to make $30,000.

A lower royalty per reader means we spend more to make more. Because each reader is worth less, we need more readers to make more profit.

A higher royalty per reader means we need fewer readers and less spend for the same profit. Because a reader gives you more money.

So we set three targets.

One, the profit you want.

Two, the spend it takes to get there.

Three, the book one revenue that spend needs to bring back to hit the profit.

Here’s an example:

Spend 20k to make 10k in book 1 revenue. That will eventually make $40k in profit.

Book one revenue is really a reader count. It tells us how many new readers came in. So what we are doing is a simulation. How many readers do we need, and at what spend, to hit your profit.

3. Reader audience mapping.

Scott writes action thrillers. This step is where we build a list of other authors whose fans we put your book in front of. From scaling other thriller authors, we already know which authors' fans buy. We add anyone who fits Scott, plus any names he has in mind. One thing we have learned. We put self-published authors first, the ones who built their audience through ads. Their readers became fans from an ad, so they are likely to do the same for Scott.

4. Creative testing. 

We build 10 to 15 lock screen ads for the book. We always lean on past creatives that proved themselves at scale. An ad can win on low spend, then fall apart the moment you spend more. So we only copy ads that spent a lot and brought in a lot of new readers. We keep the top 30%. We launch more than we need, just to be sure we have the best.

All this happens before we start working with the author. It is the prep work, and it takes about two weeks.

Month 1. Audience testing.

We start on Kindle Fire tablets. On Kindle Fire we can get in front of two types of buyers. People who purchase books, and people who borrow them.

We start with purchasers only. We get direct sales from them. This shows us purchases and conversion rates. So, we can tell which audiences are best. With borrowers there is no direct tracking, so it is blind. You run it and watch the page reads. After testing, we keep what is good and cut the bad ones.

Then we spend on all the good audiences, including the borrowers. We have seen that 60 to 70% of the revenue comes from borrowers. That is where most of the readers are. So we test on purchasers first, then double down on borrowers.

Months 2 and 3. Scaling.

Now we scale harder. We ramp up the spend on Kindle Fire and bring the e-reader in as a big part of that. The e-reader lock screen has the widest reach and the most engaged readers.

On a Kindle Fire tablet you can browse other apps like Netflix, and those audiences skew younger. On an e-reader the only thing you can do is read. So you target readers who own the device just to read, which makes them engaged readers. The conversion rates are high. Anytime they pick up the device, they pick it up to read. E-readers are especially efficient for readers older than 50. That covers most of the mystery, thriller, suspense and women's fiction.

We launch the e-reader once we know the right audiences. This one needs more spend. We recommend a minimum of $250 a day. It works best at that level or higher. It has to be dialed in. And it can spend even $1,000 a day profitably.

That is the whole process between month one and month three. Prep the account. Test the creatives, test the audiences, then ramp up the spend across Kindle Fire and e-reader. From there we keep optimizing and scaling. That is what it takes to find out if a series can scale, and this is how we do it.

So let's look at what that looked like for Scott in his most profitable month.

Before us, Scott ran two channels. In August 2025 his spend looked like this:

Meta ads: about 56%
Amazon ads: about 44%
Lock screen ads: 0%

Then we came in and changed the split. Here's how he spent his ad budget during his biggest month, when he earned over $103,000.

Lock screen ads (e-reader and Kindle Fire): 65%
Amazon ads: 25%
Meta ads: 10%

Lock screen went from nothing to most of the budget. It now does the heavy lifting. Meta dropped to a small slice. The channel he leaned on before now plays a support role.

The results

Scott got what he came for. He wanted to crack six figures a month, and he did. His royalties passed $103,000.

His highest revenue and highest profit months did not come on a launch. They came between launches, when sales usually fade.

Book one is the doorway into a 20-book series. Every reader who buys book one enters the series and reads through the rest. So book one revenue is our best read on how many new readers come in each month.

One thing worth being straight about.

Book one revenue is the number a marketer controls. We bring in the new readers. What we cannot control is read-through, how many of those readers carry on to book two, three, and the rest. That is the author's books doing the work. So the number we are judged on, the number we move, is book one revenue.

Book one, side by side:

Before us, in a typical month, book one made $3.4k
On the Lock Screen System, book one got up to $12k in a month.

That revenue is new readers. Side by side:

Before us, about 1.1k new readers entered the series each month.
On the Lock Screen System, we got in 4.1k new readers in a month.

The rank followed. Book one's US rank dropped to as low as 700, from a starting range of 10,000 to 15,000.

For the first three months, things looked similar to last year’s. Revenue was a little above the year before, and profit was the same, because we spent more on ads. But under the surface, two things moved in opposite directions.

The launch book was fading month over month, the way every launch fades.

Book one revenue was climbing every month, because we were feeding new readers in.

For a while the fade and the climb cancelled out, so the top-line looked still. In month three the two lines crossed. The launch faded, the new readership took over, and the account started to grow.

This is the whole point. Launches spike and fade. Book one revenue is the steady climb underneath. Once that climb is bigger than the fade, the account grows every month, launch or not.
Scott writes one series, so his series profit is his full catalogue profit. His average monthly profit now matches his best months from last year, usually launch months, and sometimes beats them.

The takeaway

Scott's books stayed the same. Same series, same covers, same writing. What changed is the number of qualified readers finding book one each month.

That is the whole game.

An author with a long series wins by getting more of the right readers into book one, every month, whether they launch or not.

Want us to look at your numbers?

If you have a series of 8 or more books, and you want more profit between releases, not just on launch day, click the link below and fill in the form. We will look at your numbers and tell you honestly whether we can scale you the same way.