How To Diversify Your Income ft. Craig Martelle (EP#572)

This is a concrete, numbers-heavy conversation about what diversification actually means for a working author. Million-selling author Craig Martelle has published over 200 books since 2015, across 28 series, and has around 25 different sources of income.

Craig’s definition of Author Diversification is multiple revenue streams, and he counts formats, distributors, languages, genres and co-authors as part of it. He walks through where to start when you’ve only got five books out, why paperback belongs in your Amazon ads, what a SAG-AFTRA narrator really costs and why he pays it anyway, and how he translated nine books into German for almost nothing using three AIs checking each other.

Craig is also very open about his pace pace of publishing. In 2019 he published 30 books in 30 weeks, quadrupled his costs, halved his revenue and ended up having heart surgery the following January. He publishes 12 to 20 books a year now, reads every word of every collaboration, and takes the dog out for two hours a day. The three medical thrillers he co-writes with a surgeon are his current bestsellers, and every dollar they earn goes into an investment account for his grandchildren.

And the golden nugget is the best argument against perfectionism we’ve had on the show: if you rewrite one book ten times you still have one book, but if you write ten books you have ten books’ worth of experience.

In this episode:

From Marine Corps intelligence and Russian linguist work to law school to full-time author in October 2015

Over 200 books, 28 series, and roughly 25 separate sources of income

Buying his first series back from its traditional publisher — and earning the buyout fee back in one month on free YouTube audio

Audiobooks on 40 distributors, plus 70 to 80 titles in libraries while staying in Kindle Unlimited

Why genre counts as diversification: readership ceilings and burnout in a single niche

“Write with the reader in mind” — the Venn diagram of what you know and what people actually read

The first step with five books out: one genre, one series, and learning read-through