Case study · Romance · 2024
ASIN B0DXCN2VP6
A pen-name romance author with four self-published books in a small-town contemporary series. We edit on a 14-day cadence, designed the cover system that holds across all four titles, and run Amazon Ads sustain. Year-one royalty across the series crossed $180,000 net of ad spend.
Inside the project
Working shots from this engagement — interview sessions, manuscript pages, cover concepts, launch day.
Aria is a productive indie author. She writes 220,000 words a year and her readers expect a book every four to five months. She does not need ghostwriting, developmental editing, or hand-holding. She needs the parts she is bad at (or doesn’t want to do) handled on a cadence she can plan around.
The standing arrangement: a copy-edit slot is held for her every quarter. She delivers a manuscript on the first of a quarter; the edit lands by day 14. The cover system Marcus designed in 2024 means new covers take a fraction of the time of a one-off because the design rules are already in place. Clara’s team runs Amazon Ads at a $1,200/month retainer with weekly bid management.
This is the model that works for productive indie series authors. About 8% of our roster looks like this. Different problem, different price, same studio.
Aria’s first two books, done by different freelancers, had not read as a series on Amazon. Different fonts. Different palette. Different visual register. Readers buying book 1 did not automatically see book 2 as part of the same world; the conversion rate from book 1 to book 2 sat at 41%.
Marcus rebuilt all four covers in a single design pass. Shared display typography. Recurring visual element (a single object that anchors each cover — small enough not to clutter, big enough to register as a series cue). Consistent palette mapping where each book gets one signature color drawn from the same family.
Book 1 → book 2 read-through climbed from 41% to 71% in the eight weeks after the relaunch. Books 3 and 4 launched into the new system and never saw the lower number.
Audiobook conversion for books 2–4 is the next phase. Book 1 audiobook converted 18% incremental series sales; doing books 2 and 3 in late 2026 should compound that. Book 7 is sketched out; we expect to see it in 2027.
“I needed an editor who could ship in 14 days, a designer who could lock a series visual identity, and ads run by someone who didn't try to teach me about ACOS for 45 minutes. I got all three under one roof.”
Cover rounds
The shortlist we presented to the author before round-one revisions. The selected concept is the second in the strip.
Project facts
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