Most authors finish their first book exhausted — and then discover the real work is just beginning. Formatting. Ads. Social media. Email lists. Reader magnets. It’s a firehose, and it’s exactly why so many talented writers stall out before they ever find their footing.
Maria Secoy has a different prescription, and it starts with a deceptively simple idea: do things in the right order.
A Career Built by Falling Backwards
Maria’s path into authorship was anything but linear. She “accidentally” earned an English degree after abandoning pre-med (“science is hard, math is harder”), spent years teaching middle school English, and turned to freelance writing out of pure financial necessity. Her first paid article? A penny-a-word piece titled Does Dr. Pepper Contain Laxatives?
That unglamorous start taught her something invaluable: the business of writing. How to hit deadlines. How to produce words when you’re exhausted. By the time COVID arrived, she was ghostwriting historical romance from a walk-in closet — a TV tray, a dining chair, and the surrounding clothes her only office — drafting roughly 20 novels in 20 months.
Then came the insight that reshaped everything. Two of those ghostwritten books, both written by Maria, landed very differently: one earned its author six figures, the other barely three. “Writing quality does not determine the success or failure of our books,” she realized. So when she published her own debut, Alongside Lucy, in 2022, she did something analytical: she called both authors, asked what each had done, and made two lists — do this and do not do this.
The Apollo 13 Approach to Launching
Maria likens building an author business to the famous scene in Apollo 13 where engineers must sequence exactly which systems to power on without draining the battery. Order matters. Get it right, and “failure becomes almost impossible. And when failure is no longer possible, then the only question is, how long until I succeed?”
For most new authors, the first system to power on isn’t ads or social media — it’s a rock-solid book production process. Learn what professional formatting looks like. Understand your genre’s reader expectations. Nail your timeline. Everything else is built on that foundation, “and it is much harder to come back and add those later.”
Let Amazon Be Your Marketing Department
Here’s where Maria’s method gets tactical. Instead of stressing over MailerLite, BookFunnel, or a perfectly on-brand reader magnet before you even know your brand, she sends readers to one place: her Amazon Author Central page. The goal isn’t a thousand pre-orders — it’s getting readers to follow.
Why? Amazon is a world-class marketing company. When someone follows you, Amazon emails them about your pre-orders and new releases — with inbox delivery rates most individual authors can only dream of. Better yet, every reader who clicks your book link signals to Amazon’s algorithm that they’re open to being marketed to. Amazon runs with it from there.
And the breakout tip of the episode: share your comp authors’ Amazon pages. When a reader follows Catherine Cowles (one of Maria’s comps), Amazon pops up similar authors to follow — and that’s how you get discovered. As Alexa put it after 12 years in book marketing: “I didn’t think about sending Amazon links of other authors to generate myself as a potential lead.”
Stop Branding. Start Writing.
The conversation’s most resonant turn came when Maria explained that authors shouldn’t try to lock in their brand before they’ve written enough to know it. She started by choosing authors she aspired to be like — Catherine Cowles with a side of Laurie Matthews — and used them as mentor texts and mentor business models. But it wasn’t until several books in that she discovered who she actually was on the page (turns out, not the H.D. Carlton-style dark romance she once attempted — her beta readers said a firm “no”).
“You won’t know who your specific readers are until you’ve got at least three to five books out,” she explains, “because most of us don’t know who we are as authors until we have three to five books out.”
That prompted a real-time breakthrough for Alexa about her own travel-romance writing — a reminder that even seasoned pros benefit from pulling back, writing the books, and then branding the heart out of what emerges.
The Bottom Line
Maria’s whole philosophy rolls up into her Four-Book-Per-Year Method — though, as she’s quick to note, “the number four is the least important part.” It’s about sequencing: let Amazon handle early marketing, build your production process, then layer in a reader magnet, a newsletter, Amazon ads, and — only if your data supports it — Facebook ads. Each step informed by the last.
The result is a business you can run on roughly 10 hours a week and sustain for the long haul. “I can do this forever because I love it,” Maria says of the goal she holds for every author she works with. “It’s comfortable. It fits with my life. I’m earning more than I spend.”
Want to build your author business in the right order — with hands-on training instead of scattered courses? The WIP Society gives you everything in one place for one year: a full ticket to the annual Women in Publishing Summit, three deep-dive virtual Bootcamps, and five monthly Q&A sessions covering self-publishing, social media, tech, marketing, and editing. It’s the structured, sequenced support Maria champions — without the overwhelm. Join the WIP Society →
Q: How can authors use the Amazon algorithm to market their books?
A: Set up a pre-order, claim your Amazon Author Central page, and send readers your book link and ask them to follow you. Every reader who clicks signals to Amazon’s algorithm that they’re open to your book being marketed to them, and Amazon then emails followers about pre-orders and new releases with very high inbox delivery rates.
Q: What is the Four-Book-Per-Year Method?
A: It’s Maria Secoy’s framework for building a sustainable indie author business. Despite the name, it’s less about producing exactly four books and more about understanding how Amazon’s algorithm works and structuring your entire publishing and content schedule to support it.
Q: Should new authors spend money on ads for their first books?
A: Maria advises against it. New authors should let Amazon handle early marketing while they nail their book production process, then layer in a reader magnet, newsletter, and Amazon ads as data accumulates — only moving to Facebook ads if the data supports it.
Q: When should an author define their brand?
A: After writing several books, not before. Most authors don’t truly know who they are as authors — or who their specific readers are — until they have three to five books published. Aspire to a mentor’s business model early, but let your real brand emerge from the work.
Alexa Bigwarfe
Founder & CEO of WritePublishSell & the Women in Publishing Summit
Alexa Bigwarfe is a publishing strategist and creator of Book Launch in a Box, where she helps authors simplify their marketing and build launches that actually work. She specializes in turning books into platforms for visibility, partnerships, and revenue through proven, scalable strategies.
