SPS 285 7 Figure Fiction: Lessons Learned From A Successful Fiction Author with Steve Higgs

doing a fiction takeover . So in the month of November we're doing a NaNoWriMo fiction takeover of the podcast . We've got a lot of great guests that are going to be coming and talking fiction people who have done it , who have become six and seven figure fiction authors , teaching the process . So we're going to be talking about fiction editing .

We're going to be talking about cover design , fiction cover design . We'll have a fiction round table with a lot of our authors from our Fundamentals of Fiction and Full-Time Fiction program . A lot of things to come . But today we're talking to Steve Higgs , so I'm going to pass the mic here to Rami here in just a second .

If you're on the YouTube channel you can see both of them . But we've got Rami , aka Ari Vance , in the house . He runs the fiction program at Self-Publishing School , has published I can't even keep up 40 , 50 , 60 fiction books I don't even know how many at this point .

I think 80,000 copies sold just last year and has coached hundreds , if not thousands , of our fiction authors on their publishing journey here at selfpublishingcom . So we're in great company .

I'm gonna be the dumb nonfiction guy today and be a fly on the wall , maybe asking , maybe , if you guys get too advanced , I'm gonna ask some of the basic questions our listeners want to hear , but I'll pass it to you , rami , to give an intro of Steve and then we can dive in .

And I will say that , like the day I met you , steve , I was like , if this guy doesn't become full-time , like no one will right . Like you went into that conference and you literally asked every single person a ton of questions , um , me included , and it was just , it was a lot of fun watching me work that room . I gotta be honest , um and um .

So I have an interesting bio . Now I'll say that some of the stuff on this bio I didn't even know . So uh , steve is a former british uh , army captain term best-selling mystery and thriller author . I I'm not . I take no credit for this bio . By the way , this was was the self-publishing school's social media team .

He started his career as a car mechanic before joining the military . He won his first creative writing prize at the age of 10 . And his debut novel , paranormal Nonsense , was written while still serving in the army . I did not know that . I thought you had left .

Currently living in southeast England , picturesque countryside , with two sausage dogs I also didn't know that about your dogs and claims to have ideas for over 100 books waiting to be written . He's a self-described humorist . Oh , there we go , perfect . He's a self-described humorist who folks wanted .

His was a mechanic , past a military service and now he's a full-time author enjoying local beer , castles and vineyard views . So welcome Steve . How are you doing ?

But I came from a , a long-standing military family , um , and multiple generations ahead of me , uh , had had gone that route , and I was the fourth or fifth children , and the elder three were already in the military , and so I think it was preordained pretty much before I was born that that's where I was going .

But that sort of love of the written word stayed with me and I wrote columns for military newspapers and did stuff like that while I was in the army , um , but I was one of those people who kept saying I'm going to write a book , I'm going to write a book and I had , I had all these ideas in my head and swirling around and never really found time for

them because I was doing other things and studying , um , uh , you know , opening university courses and stuff like that , getting ready for the inevitable transition from the literally to civilian life .

And just in the end I got bored saying the same thing but bored listening to myself , and just decided to shut up and do it , which is advice I give to a lot of people is , um , and there's no , there's no better , there's no better way of getting things done than to actually start them .

And so I was in the twilight of my military career , as you've already highlighted , when I started writing Paranormal Nonsense , the first book I published .

How did that tune change when you made it a proper career ?

So there was a complete lack of support from everybody , ridicule , certainly , at times , questioning why I was wasting my time with such a foolish endeavour , even after I published it , and I probably published five or six books before anyone sort of started paying attention because suddenly there was money coming through the door and it was only really at that point

that , uh , that the the tune started to change . So I , I , I from from my experience talking to other authors that that's not unusual . There's a very distinct lack of support for this wild , ridiculous dream that they've got about being being a writer . Um , and my , my story was no different .

I don't want to say that , but yes , okay , so you wrote paranormal nonsense while you were serving as a captain . How did you balance military duties with creative writing ? I didn't bother doing any work .

I was married , but living and working , so my wife was in Kent and I'm in Hampshire and there's a good sort of two-hour drive between the two , so I wouldn't bother coming home every night . It's just too far to come . So I would be in essentially a bedroom with an armchair and a table and I would sit right there .

But I didn't finish the book while I was in the military . I couldn't get it done , so I transitioned out and got put down for quite some time . It actually took me five years to finish that first book and get it published . Which , um , you ?

And then , if you were to go back and maybe we go around the horn on this too for you , rami , is , how would you shortcut that five-year first book and get that book done in a shorter time period ?

You've got nobody in your team , no one's supporting you and saying , no , actually , yeah , I think you can do this , um , so you , you've . You've got that . You're lacking that . I think most people are lacking that , and certainly I was , so the .

The advice I I I give to people I get invited to go to conferences and talk on this subject of productivity is to is to carve out time in your life , and I tell people to stop sleeping on a regular basis . That that's my advice . Get up at five o'clock in the morning . I use myself as an example .

So you know , prior to , prior to quitting my job , prior actually to the point when Rami met me , um , in the , in the almost 12 months leading up to , uh , july of 2019 , those glorious days in Edinburgh where , uh , where Rami and I first met , um , I , uh , I would , I would go to bed , um , having having written for several hours .

So you know , I'm married , I've got a child , um , my child would go to bed . My wife would go to bed . I would then stay up for several hours . So you know , I'm married , I've got a child . My child would go to bed . My wife would go to bed .

I would then stay up for several hours writing , crawl into bed after midnight , get up at five o'clock and write again . I would then cycle 10 miles to work , work , my morning take my lunch break and go outside and write for another hour and you know an hour is 500 words or it's 1,000 words , depending on how it's like and then I would write again of

an evening and I would continue with that process pretty much to the point of collapse , and then find some sleep and then start again . I managed to crank out 17 books in nine months while in full-time employment as director of an engineering company , doing about 70 hours' work a week .

Yeah , that's full-time employment as director of an engineering company doing about 70 hours work a week . Yeah , that , that , that's full-time commitment . Now , that's a pretty extreme version and I don't I'm not encouraging anyone to go down that route . Point is you've got to find time in your life and you need it to be regular .

I think if you , if you , if you write 500 words and don't look at that manuscript again for six months , it's , it's going to be impossible to pick up you left off . If you're writing every day or on a regular basis , so two or three times a week , it's so much easier to keep your head in the story and keep it moving forward .

You've got to believe in the end product and believe that the story you've got in your head through just through the , just through effort , will find its way onto the page , you'll get to the end .

So if you're going to write an 80 000 word book and you and you don't have anything to do , uh , that's going to take up your time , let's say you're on holiday . Let's say you've got time off from work . Most people can write a thousand words in an hour , so an 80 000 word book is 80 hours .

If you get up on monday morning and start writing by thursday , the book's finished . Yeah , again , that's a pretty extreme version , but it really is . It's that simple . It's divisible by hours . You need 80 hours to write that book or something like that , or 60 hours if it's a shorter book , or 40 hours or whatever it is .

You've just got to find those hours . So how quickly can you find them ? Make a Thursday night date with yourself in a back bedroom and all you do is write . Don't take your phone with you , don't connect to the internet . Have no distractions . Have that thing right in your lunch breaks , right in the morning .

Get up on a Sunday and write until it's time to go to church or whatever your habits are . Find that time . So that's my how people should tackle that , because most people trying to get into this will have something that takes up the majority of their time .

This is that , uh , in vegas , by the way , steve , which I know , you and I've been to , so I weaseled my way into a dinner for seven , like basically everyone . There was high six figures of those seven figures , like they were all there , and I noticed that , with the exception of two people , all there were 10 people .

Well , there were more than 10 people , but I was kind of taking note of , like , the 10 top performers . All eight out of the 10 either had a military background or were a high performer in martial art or what do you call it . Had a very good technical background , like the ability to read large swaths of data .

Right , like those were the three qualities that eight out of 10 people had . And so discipline right , it's that it's just the ability to override your willpower . So I didn't have that discipline . I'm overweight . If I get into a fight , push comes to shove . I'm in the fetal position , right , like it's like I'm overweight . If I get into a fight .

Push comes to shove . I'm in the fetal position , right Like it's like I'm not that guy . But when I saw that I was like , how do I become that guy ? And my way was my wife was pregnant and I just went all right , I'm going to die and I want my kids to be proud of me . How do I do that ?

There's plenty of people in other walks of life that are very successful . You take a cross-section of the author , the successful author community , and there's people there from all walks of life . So people out there listening to this shouldn't think that they're going to struggle because they're not military and they don't have that background discipline . They can .

They can teach themselves that . Um , they , they , if they want , if and his , if you , if they want to be an author , they'll find a way . If they don't find a way , then they don't really want it .

and then they're like , well , what do I write next ? I want to be a little bit more thoughtful as to what's going to work . So how do you decide what to write next ? And I might ask a second question is how did you decide to move from urban fantasy to cozy ?

Okay , um , because I have so many ideas and just above my laptop screen , as I'm looking at your , your faces , is a whiteboard littered , littered with ideas , um , that that I , you know , and there's a chunk of them I'll never get to , but I , I think , I think I'm right in saying that I'm currently writing eight different series , right , um , flitting from one

book to the next , to the next , to the next , um , four or five of them are completely intertwined . So , um , I'm writing a series about a wedding planner , who , who keeps finding his own . This is cozy mystery . So I mean , this is , this is mainstream cozy mystery stuff .

She's a wedding planner , she's got a cat and a dog whose voices she can hear and she , uh , she's completely clueless when it comes to solving crimes and she keeps , um , she's a high-end wedding planner for celebrities and rich and that sort of thing . And she in the final book in the series is , uh , is managing .

She's been , she's been hired to manage the fictitious , the royal wedding of the fictitious king's third son , um , and that's going to go completely sideways .

Um , but I'm bringing in three , three other series into that story that I'm writing and intertwining that because you know I find a reader and they wind up reading 100 plus books because they can't escape in three other series into that story that I'm writing and intertwining that Because I find a reader and they wind up reading a hundred plus books because they

can't escape them , because all the stories are intertwined .

But I have to write this one first , and the one that I'm writing next has got a deadline in January , so I've got to get on with it before I feel that fire underneath my toes too much . Back in January , I took my son to uh , the natural history museum .

We stayed , we stayed overnight , which is the thing you can do and , uh , I had him my , my eight-year-old at the time running around in the uh the dinosaur exhibition with his flashlight , having time of his life , um , and while we were there , he came up with a , a story which about eight weeks later was a book . Right , and it's that .

You know he , he was being creative and whimsy . I went with , the wind blew me , he wanted to write a book , and so now we've got a trilogy of dinosaur stories . How , how did I wind up going from urban fantasy to cozy mystery is I'm stupid .

Um and I don't know what I'm doing , and and everyone laughs when I say that because like no , steve , you make huge amounts of money and , um , and your books are all bestsellers , like , no , I don't , I don't have the faintest clue what I'm doing . Uh , I wrote , I wrote , um , the coziness became about .

So I was still , I was still employed , um , and uh , the lovely receptionist , uh , as I'm , as I'm going out , I think I'm off to a meeting or something but she , uh , she , she wanted to ask me how I come up with my characters , because she was reading one of my books I guess it was known that I was publishing at the time uh , and she asked me about

how I come up with them .

And so , just to show off as much as anything else , I stood in the doorway and devised a character , put her into a situation , gave her a name , gave her um , I gave her like a compounding factor that was going to force her into into a specific uh route in her life , and and came up with a story and that then skewed in my head for six months and I

hadn't , I hadn't intended to , but I , I just went . No , I'm gonna have to write this because it's interesting to me and I I'd never heard the term cozy mystery . I didn't know what it was until after I published that book , which was ? It was , um , it was kind of intended to be murder .

She wrote style agatha christie kind of mystery stuff , but then was described by everyone apart from the fact that it's cozy mysteries generally being described as diehard , with Angela Lansbury in the lead role and there's an awful lot of people getting shot and getting chased and she's running away with a Dachshund under one arm and a gin and tonic in the other .

She's trying to slurp one or spilling , yeah , so . So my book are I don't want to say my books are all the same , because they're not all the same , but they're all kind of the same flavour . They're very fast-paced action , humour , fast-paced action , humour , books set in various scenarios . So I write urban fantasy .

You can see just behind my head that's Anastasia with the sword in her hand and the magic spilling off the other one , um , that , uh , that that's that's . I mean , that's pure urban fantasy stuff , um , but again , it's fast action and there's a lot of comedy thrown in which I didn't realize at the time that I started writing it .

But this comes down to brand and authors . Authors should try and understand what their brand is and my stuff is very much all the same . There's no , there's no bad language in my books . There's no sex in my books . There's no . There's no um visceral violence . We don't . We don't do exploding brains like karen sorter would um .

So so hopefully that answered that question . I have a habit of going off on a tangent no , that was great .

But like , where does the humor come from and how do you get the most out of that funny scene ?

People ask me about that thing I was talking about in 2019 , where all I'm doing is writing , writing , writing , writing . And I'll say what was your wife doing at the time ? She's like I don't know .

Whatever's wrong with my brain allows me to write stuff in a humorous manner , so I can take a very serious subject and , without insulting anyone or offending anyone , I can make it funny , make their situations funny , make the fact that someone's just been shot dead funny .

That's almost a recipe to fail . And uh , yeah , that's a yeah , great answer . So , okay .

So then , let's , in terms of your character development , I know I've looked at a bunch of your books I haven't read them all because I just don't have enough time but , um , that's a female , yeah , yeah , uh , but I wanted to ask , right , so , like you've obviously worked in practical , hands-on jobs and now the creative pursuit is kind of the opposite , and how

does that feed into character development ? Not necessarily character choice , but character growth , right ?

are you asking there ? How does what I've done in the past come through in my characters ? Yeah , a lot of my characters are based on people I've met , and you meet a lot of people in the army , and then I was in the corporate world for quite a few years , and so they're kind of based on that .

And one one thing readers comment on almost constantly is how believable my characters are . But so so , and it's that understanding that everyone's motivated by something when they're doing something , that they're doing it for a reason , whether that's for themselves or whether it's altruistic the bad guy doesn't realize he's the bad guy . The murderer is generally not .

You know , they , they , they don't wear a cloak and they don't laugh maniacally while they're sharpening their knives . Um , they , they are killing someone because it needs to happen generally . Uh , that that's so , it's . It's what is motivating that person to try to understand what's going on inside their heads and giving them real-world examples .

When I wrote Paranormal Nonsense , when I wrote that first series of blooming books which I'm still writing seven years more than seven years on , I'm still producing new titles for that series wanted to give , I wanted to give the , the characters , some some realism and I I kind of based him on myself or an alternate reality version of myself who left the army in

his 30s , um , and I give him a couple of accents because it gives him sort of this real life grounding .

I gave him a mother who's a pain in the backside and things like that , just because most people can relate to that , and I write my characters thinking what is it about this person that's going to be relatable to the , the audience , because everyone knows somebody like that if you base it on a real person yeah , yeah , lee child said that .

So , anyway , when I quit , I set myself the challenge of writing 30 books in 12 months , based on you know it was an arbitrary number . It was , I know the speed at which I write . I think the route to success here is just having more product , more series , more books . To success here is just having more product , more series , more books .

Um , will will get me where I need to be income wise and um , uh , I never , I never expected to make the kind of money that I , that I have made . Uh , there was never in my head , but I , I didn't reach 30 books . I've got to 29 uh in in 12 months , uh , and one of them was like you know , yeah , but I have slowed down , I am taking it easier .

I'm not as driven as I am , I'm not as hungry as I am , but ultimately , I love writing . I wake up every morning , especially when I'm in the middle of the story and I'm so , so keen to find out what happens next , because I don't know .

It's very much the train laying the track in front of it as it goes along and I've got a vague idea where the story's going . But uh , it's very character driven the the stuff I write . I I write murder mystery and I don't know who the killer is . I tend to figure that out as I go along .

So I I'm very , I'm very motivated , just just on a personal level , because I love the writing . I want to write the next book , I want to explore where the characters are going , and it's fun , it's real good fun because I'm writing comedy , possibly , but it's a lot of fun to do .

You know , and you know , we all have partners who we love and , at the same time , occasionally want to murder . Right , like that's just the relationship of true love . Right , like there's good and there's bad , right , and everything . Right .

So , yeah , by the way , if my wife ever is murdered , it was not me and I do not want to be a character in your book . Steve , just saying that , okay , just putting that , okay , all right , no shit , no shit , all right , no , I'm kidding , no , I'm kidding , okay , okay .

So my second question , or the second part to this question , is and I suspect I know the answer what was your routine in 2000 , you know , late 2019 ? And what is your routine today ?

The big driver wasn't , wasn't money , I mean , it was the desire to escape the corporate life and to be my own boss and to um , uh and to and to manage my own life , uh , I needed to earn enough money to make that work . But the big driver was , um , was , was lifestyle . I wanted to be at home for my kids .

I wanted to be able to drop my kid off at school , um , and pick him up from school and be there to do things with him , and that that wasn't the lifestyle that I had , having left the army and gone into corporate life . So that was , that was the big driver and that's still very much there .

So so you know , sometimes , sometimes I'm up early , I don't get up at five o'clock anymore . That that's , that's a change , because that was , that was , that was pretty much almost . There was probably five , fiveplus days a week , most of the time back when I was first trying to make it as a full-time author .

I'm more relaxed about it all now , I think , because you know the books sell . There's a lot of them , there's more coming out , I've got a solid fan base . I don't need to write the next book . I think is the't . I don't need to write the next book , I think is the point , but I want to write the next book . So I'm .

I'm there five days a week , um , and sometimes a little bit of stuff on the weekends , um , if I don't have other things I need to do , um , writing and marketing and liaising with all of us and doing you know this being part of that community , because it's very insulated .

I go days without seeing people other than on the school run , which isn't really social communication of any kind , so it's very insulated . So it's nice to have the author community there to reach out to and have an occasional chat with someone about what they're doing .

We make friends with other authors as we go along and I've got an extensive number of them I can reach out to .

I've just finished a book and I'm completely emotionally drained and everything I want to do is lay in the corner and drink neat spirits or whatever that that scape is . I and surprised me how , just how draining some of the books could be . And you get to the end of a series where you've written .

You've written 10 books and the first time I experienced this was with cozy mystery and I wrote , I wrote a 10 book series and it was the the , the last few chapters where I serve the thing up and deliver everything that I know the reader wants . And it left me , you know , 25 years in the military left .

I'm sat there writing cozy mystery with tears streaming down my cheeks because it's so joyous .

That's incredible .

You talk numbers and it just becomes vulgar because let's just be real and I think you're a humble guy , you're killing it . I mean incredible . I mean seven figure fiction author , and when I just scroll on , I'll screen share for people who are watching this on youtube .

I mean , when I scroll amazon , it is just series after 5 000 reviews , 2 000 reviews , 3 100 reviews , 7 200 reviews on this . I mean it is just series after series , book after book . I don't even know how many tens of thousands of reviews and I can only imagine how many copies sold . It's pretty incredible .

, there's so much you need to figure out , there's so much unknowns , there's so much you need to figure out , there's so much doubt , there's no support network . You're you're trying to climb up . You're trying to climb a mountain because at the mountain is all this wonderful , fresh , pure air and and money rains from the sky .

But getting there it's really difficult and you've got to accept that grind because there's all this work that pays off before you get there . If you speak to almost any of the successful authors in the community , go to the conferences .

This is my advice Go to the conferences and speak to the authors out there who are making it , who are doing well , who are doing good . Six figures or seven figures , and you know , maybe the seven-figure aiming point is too high . I don't think anybody that is making seven figures . And you know , maybe the seven figure aim aiming point is too high .

I don't think . I don't think anybody that that is making seven figures aimed for it . That's just . That's just a byproduct of of doing those stages and being successful and keeping at it . The the the route to success is not an easy one , um , and there will be disappointments along the way . You've got to expect to get a bloody nose every now and then .

You can't get through life without it . So you know , expect a few brazes and scrapes , expect one star reviews , um , the successful authors all go through this period where that nothing much is happening , they're not making any money , they're grinding away .

I've listened to author panels where there'll be five or six , seven figure authors on there and everyone will say , no , there were 10 books in , there were 12 books in , there were 15 books in before they saw any real money . That was exactly my story .

I had 15 books out before I , before I first made over a thousand , over a thousand pounds of profit in a month , um , and you know that that was . That was . That was two , two and a bit years into my career , when , when , suddenly things started to swing and tell upwards . So it's , and it's different for everyone .

Some people are almost overnight successes , but actually the overnight success is not something to look for , because most of those overnight successes don't last . They , they flame hard and then they burn out .

You've got to build a very , very strong foundation and you've got to write good books and you've got to figure out what you don't know , which goes back to what Rami said about me in edinburgh you've got to figure out what you don't know and then go and close those holes . Learn to feed yourself .

It's the marketing thing , um , the old statement about teach a man to fish . So a marketer would say if I teach a man to fish , he'll have no further use for me . It's that simple . You need to learn marketing as much as as much as writing books . If you can market them , that's where the money is . That's where you're fishing .

Writing that you've got to write a good book , yes , but if you can't market it , you're never going to sell the damn thing . So you've got to learn all those other bits and pieces , but you . The good news is there's lots and lots of online advice out there . There's youtube channels like this one , um , there's places where you can go to find this knowledge .

There's books that you can buy from amazon . You can find time . You know , I , I used to . I used to write all day and then and then collapse into the bath at night and watch a youtube tutorial on something , because there was all this knowledge that I needed to gain . So that's that's my .

That's my thoughts on that subject , except how , how hard it's going to be you're not going to be an overrun success .

But they had that series or that one book that , just like you know , six figure a year , but that was kind of like a glitch .

When I first launched , it got a one-star review on amazoncom and died , andi didn't sell any copies for quite a while . In 2022 , it was the number one vampire thriller on amazoncom . For almost the entire year they didn't't change anything . It was just about marketing . Don't worry about your book not selling to start with , you'll get there .

They're doing just really well . Bunch of great books . Actually , I'll ask you this as we close , steve Is there one that you would recommend people buy first ?

he's got a nose for trouble and he wanders into a town hiding a deadly secret and things spiral downwards from there . I tell you what he's like Jack Reacher at 80 with a dog .

We're going to be murder boarding some books which , if you don't know what that is , show up to the upcoming episode . And if you want to find out more about our fiction programs , go to selfpublishingcom . Forward slash fiction . Steve , you're the man . Thank you so much .