5 ways to squeeze more life out of a book you already spent months writing
Image generated with ChatGPT
Publishing a book is funny.
You spend months writing it, editing it, formatting it, changing the cover twelve times because often the design “doesn’t feel right”… and then the second Amazon says LIVE, your brain goes: Right. Done!!
Apparently the book will now market itself, find readers, get reviews, walk into bookstores and maybe send a few emails while it’s at it.
Mine refused to do so. Surprise, surprise!!
A few days later the sales graph starts looking like the ECG of a dead person, and you find yourself refreshing the KDP dashboard for no reason, just in case something happened since the last time you checked two minutes ago.
Ask me how I know:((
Quick thing before I move on. If you’re an author working in this space, book marketing and the business side of publishing, you can subscribe to my newsletter, The Sustainable Publishers.
For a long time, I thought the options after publishing were basically:
Run ads.
Or write the next book.
Which is a lovely choice between spending more money and spending another six months writing 40,000 words.
But the more I got into book marketing, the more I realized that this is a pretty weird way to treat something you already spent months creating.
A book isn’t only a $4.99 product sitting on Amazon. It’s a giant pile of ideas, stories, research, frameworks, and IP that you already own.
So before I disappear into another manuscript, I’ve been keeping a running list of things I can still do with the books that already exist.
Ready for an annoyingly long list?
No? Okay, I will introduce few of them.
Here are five places I’d start.
1. Turn It Into an Audiobook Without Taking Out a Small Loan
Audiobooks used to sit in my “maybe later when the book is actually making money” folder.
Mostly because human narration is expensive.
ACX works on a per-finished-hour model, and professional production can easily run into the hundreds of dollars per finished hour.
And to be fair, good narrators deserve the money. They’re not just reading your Word document into a microphone. They’re performing, editing, fixing pronunciation, pacing scenes and somehow making Chapter 9 sound exciting even though you’ve read it 50 times and would now happily set it on fire.
But the cheaper end of audiobook production has changed a lot.
Amazon now has Virtual Voice for eligible KDP books. It’s still an invite-only beta, but if you’re eligible you can choose from around 80 voices, preview and edit the narration, set a list price between $3.99 and $14.99, and Amazon currently pays a 40% royalty on sales.
There is one important “please read this before clicking buttons” detail though, which many people skip!
If the ebook is enrolled in KDP Select and you create the Virtual Voice audiobook through KDP, Amazon says that audio edition is also enrolled in KDP Select and must remain exclusive to Audible for the rest of that 90-day term. That applies to any audio edition of the same book.
Spotify has its own Audiobook Creation Tools now too, powered by ElevenLabs. You upload an EPUB, choose a digital voice, review pronunciations and publish the audiobook directly to Spotify. At the moment it’s English-only, US-only and capped at five audiobook projects per account, so this is not exactly “every author on Earth gets free audio now.”
Google Play Books has another auto-narration option. During the beta there’s no program fee, there are more than 50 narrator choices, and eligible publishers can download the finished audio files for wider distribution. It supports several languages too, although country availability still varies.
This obviously doesn’t mean a digital voice is better than a talented human narrator.
If your novel has seventeen characters, three accents, a death scene and somebody whispering “I never stopped loving you” in the rain, maybe don’t ask Robot Steve to carry the emotional weight of the whole thing.
But for nonfiction, backlist titles, shorter books, or anything that was never going to get an audiobook because the economics didn’t make sense?
I’d at least give it a try.
2. Translate the Same Book Instead of Immediately Writing Another One
This is one of those ideas that feels obvious after somebody mentions it.
The book already exists.
All the research is done. The structure is done. The 3 a.m. “this chapter is terrible and I have ruined my life” phase is done.
A Spanish reader doesn’t need you to write Book Two before they can buy from you. They need Book One in Spanish.
Now, before somebody opens ChatGPT, pastes in 60,000 words and declares themselves an international publisher by lunchtime… I would be careful.
AI translation is getting very good at transferring the “meaning”.
Writing like an actual human in another language is a different problem.
Tone gets weird. Jokes die horrible deaths. Idioms go somewhere unexpected. And if you’re writing fiction, one slightly wrong word can change a character from seductive to concerning.
For a rough benchmark, the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada currently recommends $0.25 per word for most literary genres. That’s $15,000 for a 60,000-word book.
So yes, professional translation can absolutely make your wallet cry.
There are other models.
Babelcube, for example, lets authors work with translators without paying the full fee upfront. Instead, the author, translator and Babelcube share the royalties. On the first $2,000 in net royalties, the rights holder gets 30%, the translator gets 50% and Babelcube gets 20%. The author’s share increases as the translation earns more.
You’re basically swapping upfront cost for a smaller piece of future revenue.
Neither option is automatically better. It depends on the book, the market, whether you actually have readers in that language, and whether spending thousands of dollars makes any sense in the first place.
I also wouldn’t translate into six languages just because a dashboard lets me.
I’d probably test one market first.
Very advanced international publishing strategy, I know. Don’t sue me!
But the bigger point is this: a new language can give the same book another life without asking you to write another book from scratch.
3. Stop Locking Every Good Idea Inside the Book
This is the one I find ridiculous now that I notice it.
You spend months collecting your best ideas.
You explain them properly.
You find examples.
You tell stories.
You finally put all of that into a book.
And then the book comes out and you sit down the next morning thinking:
“Right. What should I post today?”
Mate. You have a book.
One nonfiction chapter could become a Medium article. One section could become three or four Substack Notes. A story could become an email. A framework could become a carousel. A checklist could become a Pinterest pin. The same chapter could become the talking points for a podcast episode or a workshop.
If you write fiction, the raw material is different but it’s still there. Character backstories. Deleted scenes. Quotes. World-building details. Research you did for the story. A short prequel. A scene that works on its own.
And no, I don’t mean dump Chapter 7 into ChatGPT and ask it to turn the thing into 43 LinkedIn posts.
Please don’t do that to us.
The useful part of repurposing is taking the same core idea and rebuilding it for the place you’re publishing it.
A Medium reader needs context.
A Substack Note needs to make sense while somebody is half-awake on the train.
Same idea. Different packaging.
You can talk about the ideas, write fresh articles around them, use stories and examples, and create content inspired by the book.
Honestly, most of us don’t have an idea problem.
We have a “we used the idea once and immediately abandoned it” problem.
4. Use the Book to Build an Audience, Not Just Make One Sale
This is probably the biggest shift for me.
A book sale is nice.
A reader who actually likes your work and stays in your world is a lot more useful.
Because that person might buy the audiobook. Or Book Two. Or Book Three. Or your workbook. Or show up to a workshop. Or tell a friend.
This is where reader magnets start making a lot more sense.
For nonfiction, you can turn part of the book into a checklist, workbook, template, cheat sheet, companion guide or mini-course.
For fiction, it could be a prequel, bonus scene, deleted chapter, character story or short novella from the same world.
You don’t need to create a 74-page “free ebook” either.
Please don’t respond to the problem of having too much work by giving yourself another book to write.
The magnet just needs to be useful enough that the right reader wants it.
Tools like StoryOrigin can handle reader-magnet delivery, group promotions and newsletter swaps. BookFunnel is another popular option for delivering ebook files without you personally becoming tech support for somebody’s Kindle at 11:43 p.m.
There is one Amazon rule worth knowing here too.
Kindle books can link to genuinely useful ancillary material, like checklists or printable resources, but Amazon’s hyperlink guidelines prohibit links to web forms that request customer information such as an email address.
So if your entire plan is “I’ll put a JOIN MY NEWSLETTER form directly behind a link in the Kindle book,” please check the current rules before doing that.
You can still use the book everywhere else as the front end of your audience. Your website, social posts, podcast appearances, bonus resources, reader promos, author events… all of those can point people toward something free that keeps the relationship going.
The goal isn’t to trap somebody into your funnel because they made the terrible mistake of enjoying Chapter 3.
It’s just to give the people who genuinely want more a place to go next.
5. Stop Treating Launch Week Like the Book’s Funeral
I think this is where a lot of books quietly die.
We market them for two weeks.
Maybe four if we’re disciplined.
Then apparently the book is old, everybody who could possibly want it has made their decision, and we’re not allowed to mention it again without becoming “that author.”
Meanwhile, most people still have absolutely no idea the book exists.
WordsRated reports that 90% of self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies in their lifetime.
Cheery little statistic.
But it also makes the problem pretty obvious. Publishing makes a book available. It does not magically make it discoverable.
You can still pitch podcasts months after launch.
Actually, now that I host a podcast myself, I find it funny how authors seem to think a book has to be brand new before they’re “allowed” to talk about it.
It doesn’t.
If the topic is useful to the show’s audience, I genuinely do not care whether the book came out last night or eight months ago. The podcast police are not coming for you.
You can still approach local bookstores. Show up at book fairs. Do author events. Offer copies to relevant reviewers. Join genre-specific promotions. Arrange newsletter swaps with other authors. Pitch articles around ideas from the book. Give away a few author copies to the right people instead of waiting for the algorithm to develop a personal interest in your career.
Amazon explicitly allows authors to give readers free or discounted copies. The line is that you cannot ask for a review in exchange or try to influence what the review says.
So:
“Here’s a copy if you’d like to read it.”
Fine.
“Here’s a free copy, please leave five stars and I’ll send you a $10 Starbucks card.”
Nope, not fine.
You can also revisit the package itself. Cover. Description. Categories. Keywords. The opening pages. The thing you launched six months ago does not have to remain frozen in amber because Past You made every decision perfectly.
Past You was probably exhausted and just wanted the book published.
I know the feeling.
The Book Is Published. I’m Trying Not to Abandon It.
I’m not saying I’m going to do all five of these things tomorrow.
I have a full-time job, a podcast, newsletters and a remarkable ability to invent new projects before finishing the old ones. We have to work with reality here.
The point isn’t to turn one book into an audiobook, six translations, a course, a 90-day content calendar and an international speaking career by Friday.
It’s just to stop treating “published” as “used up.”
Maybe you take one chapter and turn it into an article.
Maybe you finally create the audiobook.
Maybe you pitch three podcasts.
Maybe you test one translation.
Maybe you create one genuinely useful bonus resource.
Pick one and see what happens.
You already did the expensive part in time, energy and mild emotional damage: you wrote the damn book!
Might as well make it work a little harder before you disappear for another six months to write the next one.
And, this is why I started the newsletter, The Sustainable Publishers. I’m interested in the bit after “congratulations, your book is live” — what actually gets it discovered, what makes the numbers work, what I tried that was a waste of money, and what I’m still figuring out. Do subscribe to it:)