Let Amazon Do the Marketing: Maria Secoy on Building an Indie Author Business That Can’t Fail

Let Amazon Do the Marketing: Maria Secoy on Building an Indie Author Business That Can’t Fail

by | Jun 12, 2026

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

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.

Let Amazon Do the Marketing: Maria Secoy on Building an Indie Author Business That Can’t Fail

27 Romance Books & the Long Games – Constance Phillips

by | Jun 5, 2026

Romance Author Success Story

27 Books, Female Firefighter Heroes, and the Long Game of a Romance Career: Inside Constance Phillips’ 15-Year Journey

There’s a moment at every big publishing conference where a chance conversation becomes the most valuable thing that happens to you all week. For Alexa, that moment at Author Nation was standing in the drink line next to Constance Phillips — who, it turned out, has quietly published 27 romance novels over the past 15 years.

That’s the kind of writer you say yes to immediately when you have a podcast.

In this episode of Alexa’s Book Marketing & Publishing Chat, Constance pulls back the curtain on what it actually looks like to build a romance writing career one book — and one stolen hour — at a time.

Writing From 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Constance has wanted to be a writer since junior high (the kind who carried notebooks instead of listening to her teachers). When her kids were small, that meant writing from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. — her peak creative hours. She kept at it through the revise-edit-submit cycle until she finally broke through with Press at Moon Press, publishing her fairy series and Resurrecting Harry, a reimagining of a reincarnated Harry Houdini.

Then she pivoted. Not because the paranormal wasn’t working, but because she wanted to stretch. A publisher’s call for a story with a lawyer hero turned into the Sunnydale series — small-town romance set around a therapeutic horse riding facility — which spun off into To Protect and Serve, a firefighter and police series.

That world is still expanding. Six Sunnydale books and counting. A To Protect and Serve series with a deliberately female firefighter heroine in book two and a planned female paramedic for book five.

“I Just Think It’s Important to Bend Those Gender Stereotypes”

This was one of Alexa’s favorite parts of the conversation. Constance didn’t accidentally end up writing female firefighters and female paramedics — she chose it. The same impulse drives her to write characters with physical disabilities into a small-town world that, in lesser hands, could read as monochrome.

“I just try to paint the world wide,” she said.

That choice matters. It’s also one of the reasons her series build the kind of loyal readership where someone finishes book one and immediately downloads book two.

Four Books a Year — Here’s How

For the last three years, Constance has produced four books annually. Her secret isn’t faster typing. It’s overlap.

While she’s editing one book, she’s already two thousand words into the next. Not every day, but most. Some days when the editing is brutal, she gives herself permission to just edit. But she protects the new-words habit because she knows what happens if she lets herself “take a break” between projects: one book a year, maybe two.

“Any word you put on the page is a good word,” she told Alexa. “If you only had time to write a paragraph, well, you’re a paragraph ahead.”

The Financial Truth Most Authors Won’t Say Out Loud

Alexa asked the question other interviewers tend to dance around: are you making a living from this?

Constance’s answer was honest. Not yet — and she said it without flinching. Her husband’s business carries the household. Her sales are growing. The wheels are turning. And every dollar that comes in tends to get reinvested — into advertising, into a new computer when the old one finally gives up, into conferences, into the vendor shows she’s started doing again this year that have visibly grown her fanbase.

That’s the real shape of a building author business. Not the influencer pitch where 27 books equals six figures. The reality where reinvestment is the operating cost of staying in the game long enough to win.

Why Small-Town Romance Is Having a Moment

“When the outside world’s a little dark, we all like to go a little bit warmer.”

Readers want the cozy. The Gilmore Girls town. The familiar diner. The hardware store you’ve visited in four other books. Constance grew up in a small town and writes what she knows — and her readers reward her for it. Series like hers give people permission to escape into a place they already know, where the side characters from book three become the leads in book five.

The Advice That Will Keep You Writing

Constance has a saying she returns to whenever she’s down: most people who quit don’t realize how close they were to making it when they did.

And her favorite gut-check question for any author thinking about walking away: If you couldn’t write for a living anymore, would you really stop writing?

Most of us wouldn’t. The stories still come — in restaurants, in line at the store, in the shower. That’s the answer. That’s the reason to keep showing up.

Look Back, Not Just Forward

Both Alexa and Constance landed on the same closing insight: writers are brutally hard on themselves because the target keeps moving. More books. More royalties. More readers. The goalpost shifts the moment you reach it.

The antidote? Look back at where you started.

Alexa recently got a new bookshelf and put all of her books on it specifically so she’d be forced to remember what she’s already done. Constance encouraged listeners to take those reflective moments seriously. You’ve come further than you think.

Where to Find Constance

Keep Building Your Author Business With Us

If this conversation lit a fire under your “next book” project, you’re exactly who we built WIP Society for. It’s the year-round home for women authors and publishing pros — virtual conferences, monthly Q&A sessions, bootcamps, networking, writing sprints, and the kind of community that keeps you writing when the slow seasons hit. We have a Marketing Bootcamp in June and our Business Bootcamp is coming up in August 2026 and are included with Society membership.

Learn more and join us at mywipsociety.com.

Or grab your ticket to the Marketing Bootcamp here!

Q: How many books has Constance Phillips published? A: As of this episode, Constance Phillips has published 27 romance titles — a mix of novellas and full-length category romances — across paranormal and contemporary subgenres since 2010.

Q: What romance series does Constance Phillips write? A: Her two flagship contemporary series are the Sunnydale series, set around a therapeutic horse riding facility in a small town, and the To Protect and Serve spinoff series featuring firefighter and police heroes and heroines. She also writes paranormal romance, including a fairy series and Resurrecting Harry, a reimagining of a reincarnated Harry Houdini.

Q: How does Constance Phillips write four books a year? A: She overlaps her writing with her editing. While revising one manuscript, she’s already drafting one to two thousand words a day on the next book. She credits this discipline with keeping her output at four titles a year for the last three years.

Q: What is Constance Phillips’ best advice for struggling romance authors? A: Keep going. Most people who quit don’t realize how close they were to making it when they did. She also recommends asking yourself the litmus-test question: if you couldn’t write for a living, would you actually stop writing? If the answer is no, that’s your sign to stay in it.

Q: Where can I find Constance Phillips online? A: Her most active platform is Instagram at @constancephillipsauthor. You can also visit her website at ConstancePhillips.com, where direct buy links will be available soon as she rebuilds on Shopify.

Alexa Bigwarfe

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.

How Cher Terais Built an Author Travel Business From Her Romance Novels

How Cher Terais Built an Author Travel Business From Her Romance Novels

by | May 27, 2026

Want to start an Author Travel Business?

Romance, Retreats & Wholesale Airfare: How Cher Terais Turned Her Novels Into a Travel Brand

Romance author Cher Terais built a travel business from her novels by treating her books, travel membership (The Booked Club), and Wanderlust Retreats as one connected brand under “As Written by Cher Terais.” She validated the concept through a single Meta-ad webinar, then scaled with virtual and in-person experiences tied to her novels’ settings.

Most authors are told to pick a lane. Write the book. Build the platform. Promote relentlessly. Then, maybe, build a business around it.

Cher Terais did the opposite—and accidentally built something absolutely incredible. Especially for those of us who also LOVE to travel and get paid money to do so!

This week on the podcast, romance author and founder of As Written by Cher Terais and The Booked Club (aff link) joins us to talk about what happens when you stop treating your books and your other passions as competing priorities and start treating them as one ecosystem.

It started with a virtual book launch

Cher’s third novel, set in Tulum, launched in November 2024 through a virtual event her team called “Cher in Wonderland” — part book launch, part QVC, part travel show. Halfway through, readers started asking the question that changed everything: “Are you going to Tulum? Can I come?”

By January 26, 2025, The Booked Club was born — a travel membership platform that gives members wholesale rates on flights, hotels, and experiences across every major airline. Members are paying 10–70% less than retail. And it grew almost entirely from one Meta ad funnel and a willingness to test the idea publicly.

One brand, three businesses, zero confusion

One of Cher’s smartest moves: she put everything under her own name. Her novels, her travel club, her retreats — all of it lives under As Written by Cher Terais. That decision saved her from the trap most multi-passionate creators fall into: managing five accounts, five websites, and five mailing lists for what is essentially one story.

When the retreat can’t happen, bring the retreat home

Her upcoming Paint, Pour, & Passport: A Night in Morocco event is a masterclass in adaptive thinking. When safety and pricing made the live Morocco retreat unworkable for this fall, she built a virtual immersive version. Attendees get a tea set and ingredients for a Moroccan tea ceremony shipped to their door, painting supplies for a guided art session, a Moroccan chef walking them through the culture, and proceeds going to a scholarship to send one woman on the real retreat in April 2027.

It’s $120. Use code WIP20 for $20 off. Only 14 spots remain at recording. Must get your ticket before June 1st to ensure your box arrives on time!

The Instagram strategy you haven’t seen yet

Then there’s the marketing experiment that’s been quietly taking off: Cher acts out her own characters in short dramatic scenes on Instagram. Instead of paying for an audiobook narrator, she became the narrator — playing Bali Blue’s protagonist Rheon Carson talking to her sister on the phone, complete with caught-cheating drama that isn’t even in the book. It’s backstory. It’s bait. It’s working.

Her advice for authors thinking about something similar: copy gets views, but authenticity gets engagement. Pick something only you can make.

The bigger lesson

Cher’s whole philosophy comes down to a single idea: the world is more accessible than authors give themselves permission to imagine. You can write the book and run the business. You can build the retreat and lead it. You can be the main character of your own story—not just on the page.

Listen to the full episode for the full conversation, including how veteran resources like the EBV and Victor and Valor shaped Cher’s business strategy, why she’s not in a rush to release her next novel, and the crossover romance Alexa and Cher might just have to co-write.

Join us at Marketing Bootcamp where Cher will be teaching how to do this!

Alexa Bigwarfe

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.

Author-Forward Marketing Lessons from 8 Authors

Author-Forward Marketing Lessons from 8 Authors

by | May 21, 2026

You Are the Platform: What Five Indie Authors and a University Press Panel Taught Me About Author-Forward Marketing

I moderated at the Piedmont Publishing Symposium and our topic was: author-forward marketing. The panel featured three nonfiction authors traditionally published through university presses—a cookbook author, a writer tackling race and religion inside the American church, and an environmental scholar—and every one of them had crossed 5,000+ print sales. Not ebooks. That’s a number most publishers would celebrate.

And here’s the thing: they took charge of their marketing. (Apparently part of the requirements of being published through a university press is providing your aggressive marketing plan. Seems smart!)

This is the part the “I’ll just go traditional so someone else can market me” crowd doesn’t want to hear. The author is the platform. Always. Whether you’re with one of the Big Five, a university press, or fully indie, the relationships, the expertise, the stage presence, and the willingness to show up year after year are what move books. Period.

The Lessons That Translated to Every Genre

What floored me as I sat between these three nonfiction authors was how exactly their tactics mirrored what I’ve spent years teaching indie fiction authors. One of them spent twenty years writing articles and speaking at churches before his book even existed — by launch day, those same churches were inviting him back to host events and buy copies. The cookbook author shows up at food and wine events, gets featured in Southern Living and on the Food Network, because she knows precisely where her readers already are. The environmental author negotiated his deal so royalties went to a humanitarian clinic, freeing him to stand in front of college students and pitch his book without flinching.

Different worlds. Same playbook.

  • Know your who.
  • Build relationships long before you need them.
  • Use every stage you’re given.
  • Anchor your marketing in something real, or it will always feel gross.

That last one is the bottom of the iceberg. The reason so many authors hate marketing isn’t because marketing is gross — it’s because they’re marketing a book they haven’t fully connected to themselves. The question to sit with is not “how do I sell this,” it’s “why am I writing this in the first place?” When you can answer that honestly, the audience becomes obvious and the selling stops feeling like selling.

Five Indie Authors Saying Exactly the Same Thing

The symposium panel sent me back to a conversation I had a year ago with five women from the Book Launch in a Box community — historical romance, YA dystopian, contemporary romance, post-apocalyptic thrillers, and historical fiction. Five wildly different genres. The exact same principles underneath. So I’m replaying that episode this week, because the message bears repeating and the new wave of authors in our community deserves to hear it.

Linda Needham sold 11 historical romances to HarperCollins back when her publisher told her not to market. Now she’s reissuing her backlist as an indie and just released her first nonfiction book — and the most useful thing she learned wasn’t a tactic, it was Pam Shepard’s positioning module, which finally helped her answer: what is this book actually about, and why would someone want it?

C.C. Robinson thought 50 reviews would be easy because she had 50 friends. She had to ask 150 people. She’ll be the first to tell you the first 20 to 30 reviews are the hardest part of any launch — and that an ARC team is not optional, it’s foundational.

Zariah L. Banks writes under a pen name, which means no Google history, no built-in trust, no easy proof of who she is. Her solution: a relentlessly maintained marketing profile that lives as a single source of truth for every bio, synopsis, link, and pitch — plus a virtual book tour on release day to widen the splash.

Tracy Myhre came to fiction from screenwriting during COVID. She’s done Book Launch in a Box three times because the industry keeps changing and her questions keep evolving. Her hardest-won lesson: launching is not the end. It’s the beginning.

Pat Black-Gould wrote The Crystal Beads with Purple Butterfly Press, then self-published a historical novel in a completely different genre. Her tip is one I rarely hear: think about marketing while you’re still writing. Your afterword, your back matter, your bonus content — those become the spine of every future panel, blog post, and presentation.

The Common Thread

Across both the symposium panel and the indie author roundtable, the same core ideas surface:

  1. Start with audience, not aesthetics. Who is this for? Where do they already gather?
  2. The second book multiplies the first. Social proof compounds. Series sell series.
  3. Read in your genre. You can’t write competitively in a category you don’t actually consume.
  4. Community is the unfair advantage. Whether it’s an academic department, a church network, or a Book Launch in a Box Facebook group, the people around you are your distribution.
  5. Marketing is not the part that comes after. It’s the thing you’re doing every time you show up, write an article, speak on a panel, or send a newsletter — long before there’s a book to sell.

Listen to this episode here:

 

Alexa Bigwarfe

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.

The Shocking Truth About Book Promotions: WIP Webinar Series

The Shocking Truth About Book Promotions: WIP Webinar Series

by | Dec 11, 2025

Presented by Women in Publishing Summit Premium sponsor, Abundantly Social

Are you tired of pouring your heart and soul into writing a fantastic book, only to have it disappear into the void of the modern marketplace? The conventional wisdom about book marketing is often outdated, ineffective, or simply wrong.

Join us for “The Shocking Truth About Book Promotions and Discoverability,” where we pull back the curtain on the publishing industry’s best-kept secrets. This high-impact session challenges common myths and reveals the data-driven strategies you need to cut through the noise and get your book into the hands of eager readers. We’ll expose why tactics that worked five years ago are failing today and equip you with a modern, actionable framework for achieving genuine discoverability and sustainable sales growth.

If you are ready to stop guessing and start selling, this is the essential webinar you won’t want to miss.

Key Takeaways

Attendees will leave this webinar with concrete strategies and insights, including:

  • Why “Build It and They Will Come” is a Myth: Understand the fatal flaw in relying solely on organic reach and discover the proactive marketing channels that actually drive measurable traffic and sales in today’s crowded market.
  • The Algorithm Advantage: Learn how to optimize your book’s metadata, keywords, and advertising campaigns to work with retailer algorithms (like Amazon and Apple) rather than against them, making your book easier for the right readers to find.
  • The New ROI of Author Time: Discover which high-impact promotional activities yield the greatest return on your limited time and marketing budget, allowing you to prioritize efforts that move the needle from “invisible” to “bestseller.”

 

Aimee Ravichandran is a dynamic entrepreneur and the founder of Abundantly Social, an award-winning social media marketing agency. Her company specializes in helping authors and small businesses with book promotion, digital marketing, and creating Amazon Best Sellers. Aimee’s expertise has led to the success of over 100 Amazon Best-Selling authors. Aimee has also been recognized as one of the Top 10 Innovative Women Changing the Face of Business in 2022 and was featured in CIO Today as one of the 10 Most Promising Female CEOs to Watch Out For in 2022. Additionally, she was awarded the Influential Businesswoman Award in 2022 for her outstanding contributions to social media marketing.