How One Women's Fiction Author Turned a Stalled Backlist Into $41,300/Month in Royalties Without Touching Her Ads

We're an Amazon Ads verified partner running multiple seven figures a year in spend for authors like Kay Bratt, Alex Smith, Rhys Dylan, Scott Blade and other 6, 7 and multi 7 figure authors.

Here is exactly what we did to our client's catalog.

• Main series royalties: $14,000 to $26,689 / month
• Book one: $973 to $7,045 / month (705 to 5,105 new readers)
• US Book one rank went from ~15,000 to ~1,000
• Full catalog profit after ad spend: $14,000 to $26,000+ / month (All profit numbers are after ad spend.)
• Her time on ads was 0 hours (she wrote instead)

If you're sick of babysitting Facebook and Amazon dashboards, read on.

In March, our client handed us her ads.

Four months later, her back catalog went from $16,800 to $41,300 a month.

Her main series went from $7,000 to $26,689.

It was the highest revenue and highest profit this series ever made. And it reached the peak of $26k four months after release. That's when things usually drop, not when they reach an all time high.

Her time spent on marketing in that period was zero. She wrote.

She writes a women's fiction series. Ten books when she came to us, eleven now, all in Kindle Unlimited. Her books run about 300 pages.

Before us, she ran her own ads. About $3,000 a month across Facebook and Amazon. Facebook was her main channel. On Amazon, she ran only defensive ads, her own name and titles, to protect her books from competitors bidding on them.

She promoted only the first book in each series. She refreshed her creatives about once a month, ten ads at a time. She ran them as dynamic campaigns, because she did not have time to manage each ad by hand.

And she had done her homework. She had learned from respected names like Mark Dawson, Mallory Cooper, Melissa Storm, David Gaughran, and Nicholas Erik. She applied their advice, and it worked well for a good while.

Where things got stuck

She had ads that ran well and made money over the years. Then things started to decline. Meta ads were performing worse and worse. She refreshed creatives more often than ever before. The results did not come back.

She wanted to scale past her spend level. But every course and every expert told her a different way to do it. In her own words:

"You hear all these horror stories about scaling wrong. One person says this, one person says that. It's almost like a secretive thing."

So she stayed at the same daily budget for a long time. Pushing higher felt like it could break the ads that still worked.

And she was not in love with the marketing work itself:

"It feels like a game with no rules, and they change the rules all the time."

"It's busy work that drives me nuts. I'd rather write."

But she was aware that she had to advertise. Her backlist depended on it. She just did not want to be the one running the ads. She wanted someone to take the whole thing off her plate, so she could put out more books.

What we did. The Lock Screen System

We took over all of her marketing. Facebook, Amazon, everything. But the engine behind her growth was one channel most authors have never run, lock screen ads.

What they are.

Lock screen ads show on Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets. When a reader picks up their device, your book is the first thing they see, before they unlock the screen. The person seeing the ad is holding a reading device in their hand at that moment. Amazon itself uses these placements to push readers to its own deal pages and best-seller lists.

Why almost nobody runs them.

Lock screen ads are a premium program. Amazon offers them directly to large advertisers, with a starting commitment of $50,000 in ad spend. The platform is also more advanced than Facebook or Amazon ads, so campaigns are run either by Amazon's own team or by an Amazon Ads verified partner. For most authors, that has kept the channel out of reach.

We are an Amazon Ads verified partner. We spend multiple seven figures a year on lock screen ads across our clients. That volume lets us open campaigns for our authors at any budget, without the individual commitment. She got access through our partnership, she started at a normal budget, with the option to scale or stop at any time.

Why they work.

Targeting. On Facebook, you target interests and let the algorithm guess. With lock screen ads, we target buyers. We can build an audience of everyone who bought or borrowed books from a specific author in the last 365 days, and put her book in front of them. Kay Bratt. Fiona Baker. Debbie Macomber. Nora Roberts. Robyn Carr. Pamela Kelley. Rachel Hannah. Any author in her space. We can also target everyone who bought from a whole category, like women's saga fiction.

Every person who sees the ad is a proven book buyer in her genre, on the device they read with.

The process, step by step

Step 1. Map her ideal readers.

We researched the biggest authors in her niche. We looked for series like hers, long, in Kindle Unlimited, with a high review count on book one. A high review count on book one means the author has already sold to a large audience. That audience is proven, and it is reachable.

We gave extra weight to indie authors who built their audiences through ads. Those readers found their favorite author through an ad once. They will click an ad again. Kay Bratt is a good example, she is also a client of ours, and we built a large part of her audience, so we know exactly what it responds to.

Step 2. Write copy that converts.

Nothing in our ad copy is there because we liked the sound of it. Every word earned its place through testing across hundreds of thousands of Facebook, Amazon, and lock screen ads.

Our copies convert at around 20% because they lean on five principles.

And yes you've read that right, 20% conversion rate. This does not include KU borrows, only ebook sales.

Each one is a lever that makes a reader stop and buy. Here's what they are, in plain terms.

1. Emotional Promise, sell the feeling, not the book.

When readers want to discover a new author, they search for the best books and the current year. Putting the year in the ad matches the exact search they're already making. It also makes the book feel fresh and current, so they feel like they'd be missing out if they don't grab it now.

Here's a screenshot that shows the most searched keywords when I type "best books" into Amazon.

The most searched keywords have the year 2026 in them. They want the best books THIS YEAR. Apparently that's very important for them.

Example. "2026's must-read women's fiction is here."

2. Emotional Promise, sell the feeling, not the book.

Readers don't buy books, they buy feelings. So instead of describing the plot, we tell them what they'll feel, they won't be able to put it down, they'll lose sleep, it'll stay with them. We use the readers' own words. In reader groups they ask for a book that's "impossible to put down," so those are the words in the ad.

Example. "Emotional. Gripping. Impossible to put down."

3. Genre, name the genre.

Readers identify by genre. A reader will tell you "I read women's fiction sagas, I love them." Naming the genre tells her instantly, this book is for me. It's the fastest way to grab the right reader and skip the wrong ones.

Example. "..must-read women's fiction is here…"

4. Author Comp, borrow a bigger author's trust.

When a reader sees the name of an author she already loves, she stops scrolling. We name a big, well-known author her audience reads, and that book borrows that trust.

Example. "For fans of Robyn Carr and Pamela Kelley."

5. Content Tease, hint at the story.

This goes one level deeper than genre. Genre says "small-town romance." Content Tease shows her the actual hook of the story, the characters, the setup, the trope, so she can picture it and wants more.

Example. "He's a retired firefighter who swore off love. She bakes pies and rescues dogs."

The real trick is to stack them.

Any one of these works on its own. But our best copies don't rely on just one, they stack all five into a single ad. Year plus feeling plus genre plus a big author name plus a story tease, all in one short copy. That stacking is what pushes conversion around 20%. The more principles you layer into one ad, the harder it works.

Step 3. Creative Tests.

We built a first batch of 10 to 15 different ads for her. Different images, different copy, all based on winning ads from this genre. We ran all of them, measured which ones people clicked and bought from, kept the top 30% performers, and cut the rest.

Here are some examples of what these creatives look like.

Step 4. Scale the winners.

Once we had creatives that were converting well and resonating with readers, we knew we could take them and get them in front of as many readers as possible.

The most engaged readers, the biggest fans, read on two kinds of devices.

E-readers and Kindle Fire devices.

Each one needs its own campaign. We call them e-reader campaigns and Kindle Fire campaigns. They are completely different.

What we generally see is that the e-reader campaigns work best. A Kindle Fire is a color device. You can browse Netflix on it. You can browse YouTube. So it is a tablet that does a bunch of things.

An e-reader is different. People who own e-readers can only read books on them. So these are the biggest pool of most qualified readers. These readers will read anything, buy all the books, have very high read-through, and stick with an author for a long time.

So scaling comes down to one thing. You double down on the ad platforms that have the most qualified readers. That is what we did. Once we had proven winners, we took them, increased the budgets, and rolled with it.

Here is where the money went in her highest month, the month she gained 5,105 new readers:

Spend per channel:

• DSP e-reader campaigns: $9,000 (70%)
• Kindle Fire campaigns: $3,600 (28%)
• Amazon ads: $98 (under 1%)
• Meta ads: $73 (under 1%)

We've actually moved the budget away from Amazon ads and Meta ads.

The results

Book one is the entry point of a series.

A reader who starts book one and likes it reads book two, then book three, then all eleven.

So the number that impacts everything is book one revenue.

Book one revenue is a direct count of new readers entering the series each month.

Before us, in a typical month her book one made $973. Under the Lock Screen System, book one made $7,045 in a month.

That is more than a 7x increase in new readers.

The rank for the first book in the series dropped to as low as 669.

Main series profit went from $6k to $14k per month.

Full catalog profit went from $14k to $26k per month, after ad spend.

When we work with an author, our full attention goes into bringing new readers into the series. That usually means advertising the series most likely to convert new readers. Usually that is the series with the most reviews.

A reader who never heard of an author will most likely start with the series that has the most reviews. It is the safest bet they have. So we put most of our spend behind one series.

The reality is that there is always a big drop between series. That is why authors usually advertise multiple series instead of one. In an ideal world you would advertise one series and readers would go on to read everything you have. But that is not the reality. So sometimes you have to advertise the other series too. And that usually makes sense, because a series that does not get advertised does not make money.

This is where the Lock Screen System does something most authors cannot do.

Once we have acquired a reader, we want that reader to read everything else she has written. So we build campaigns that only retarget her readers. We start with the readers who bought the main series we were advertising. Once they are done with that series, we push them into the next one.

That way we take the big flow of new readers coming into the main series and direct it toward her other long series, the ones we know readers will keep reading once they are in. This maximizes how much we earn per reader, well beyond a single series. It gives her more revenue, and it makes her fans more engaged with her as an author.

So with her we have dialed in how many new readers she gets each month. The main job now is making sure that once those readers are in, they go on to read all of her other books too.

The takeaway

Her books did not change. Same series, same covers, same writing. What changed is the number of qualified readers finding book one each month. From a few hundred to thousands.

Her catalog was capable of earning $41,300 a month the whole time. It needed more readers walking in the front door, and a way to reach them that she could not access on her own.

The numbers that make this work

Before we advertise any book, before we even take on a client, we run the numbers. We need to know if the series can scale.

One number matters most. We call it the Series LTV. That stands for series lifetime value. Simply put, how much the series earns when one reader enters book 1.

A lot of authors get confused here, so here is the plain version. You need two numbers.

1. How many unique readers entered book one. We look at the last 90 days and count three things.

• Ebook units sold
• Paperback and hardcover units sold
• Estimated borrows. To get this, take the total page reads for the period and divide by the book's page count.

Add the three together. That is your estimated number of unique readers who entered the series.

2. What one reader is worth. Take the total revenue the series made in the same period. Divide it by the number of unique readers. That is your Series LTV, how much one reader is worth to your series.

Now the rule. Your Series LTV needs to be at least double what you pay to acquire a reader at scale.

"At scale" means thousands of readers a month, not hundreds. This matters, because price changes with volume. An author spending $20 or $30 a day pays less per reader. An author buying thousands of readers a month pays more. Across every genre we run, women's fiction, mystery, thriller, suspense, action thrillers, British crime, authors pay between $3 and $5 per reader at volume.

So take the worst case, you pay $5 per reader. Your LTV needs to be at $10. That is a profitable scenario. If your series LTV is $6 and readers at volume cost $4, you do not qualify. The series cannot scale aggressively.

The only authors we see scale aggressively, and make more profit between launches than on a launch, are the ones with a Series LTV of $10 or more.

For reference, a good series with 8 to 10 books generally has an LTV around $10. If yours sits at $5, you are not close yet. There are two ways to raise it. Write more books in the series, and write longer books. More pages means a reader reads more pages per book, which means each book pays you more.

Her series LTV was $11. That meant we could pay $3, $4, even $5 per reader and still make a good profit. So that is what we did. She went from about 705 new readers a month at $1.20 per reader, to 5,105 new readers a month at $2.50 per reader.

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.