make self-publishing sustainable with my lifestyle. A big part of this was deep-diving into my strengths and weaknesses to understand what I enjoy, what I'm good at, and what might be profitable. Getting my ADHD diagnosis in January solidified what I already knew instinctively - right now, I write best with shorter work.
I figured that meant I could kiss my dreams of 'profit' goodbye. But then JL Peridot mentioned there were authors making money from short romance, and I started to research.
'Instalove' is a short romance of any word length up to about 15,000 words. The books are high heat, instant attraction, low drama. They sell well in the USA kindle store short-reads categories, which don't exist in Australia. You also can't self-select a short-reads category - your books will be placed in one depending on your word length. My latest book 'Mated to the office orc' is an 8,000 word story and is in the 90-minute LGBTQI short reads category. I won't go into Kindle categories too much but basically if you rank well in a category, you'll sell more books.
Some authors like Hope Ford and Sadie King have done very well with short-reads, building an audience and generating a full-time income by quick-releasing books in series, generally 1-2 weeks apart. Books are usually high-heat, contemporary, and small town. Some financially successful authors using this strategy forgo professional cover artists and editors - this cuts cost, but sometimes sacrifices quality for speed.
The longevity of this strategy is questionable, and hard to test because there are no long term results yet. Some authors have already found the grind of continually producing new work quickly means they've pivoted to longer work or slowed their release strategy down. Short reads by their nature are also quickly consumed, more easily forgettable, and have less time to get a reader attached to a character or cast. Successful instalove authors seem to be very Amazon-centric, which isn't ideal for authors who prefer to be wide, and it's unclear if hard-copies would work, even for collections.
On the other hand, instalove authors generate a large back-catalogue quickly, and back-catalogue is really how authors make money. An author who handles this well is Cassie Mint, who produces good quality short work, releases quickly, and promotes her back-catalogue to her mailing list. She has no shared characters or a shared world between books. Instead she creates series based on tropes, and cross-promotes books the same way. Ie she might have a mafia series and a mountain men series, and there might be an 'enemies to lovers' book in each, which she'll cross-promote.
Ultimately, this research confirmed to me that short work fits my third criteria for an approach to writing - it can be profitable. The caveat to that is it will only be profitable if I can write fast enough to satisfy the market, and I have no idea if I can do that yet. That's what I'm doing this year, but I'm hopefully doing it in a way that will protect my first criteria - I still have to enjoy it.
Look out for my 12-book quick-release instalove monster romance series based on the zodiac, out from mid July. I'll let you know how it goes!
L.A.'s latest release is:
Sometimes destiny has other plans…
Erica is a driven career woman finally settling down... as soon as she finds the right man. But when she meets Olivia, she’s gripped by an uncontrollable attraction that was not in her plans.
Olivia has made peace with her lot in life - as a sapphic orc princess, she’s destined to be on the sidelines of history. When she discovers Erica is part orc, she knows her duty - to find Erica a suitable mate, and breed the next generation of orcs. But maybe destiny has a different idea.
This high-heat sapphic romance is a short read set in the world of Seasonal Spice, after 50 Shades of Orc and Tangle with the Mages. It includes characters from Taming the Office Orc.
L.A. Monteiro
She’s an Eurasian second-generation Australian and an expert at living between worlds. Her stories tend to feature a diverse cast of characters that reflect her lived experience.
For ten years she used her communications degree to write for other people. Then (to prove she could) she started writing fiction. Now she works part-time to allow time for the stories in her head.
In 2020 she won the KSP Writers’ Centre ‘Spooky stories’ competition and was a finalist in Writing WA’s ‘Flashing the cover’ competition. She was selected for the Peter Cowan Writing Centre’s emerging writers program in 2021 and came first in the Romance Writers Australia Spicy Bites short story competition in 2023.
She writes contemporary romance, urban fantasy, paranormal and monster romance.
You can find L.A. at her website: authorlamonteiro.com.
Looking forward to reading your shorts!
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