My first month of indie publishing was November 2018 and I made $1007.45 (after expenses because there were none, I did my own cover and editing) when I published my first romance novella around the middle of the month. The next month, December 2018, I made $5,530 after publishing the next novella in the series right before Christmas. In 2019, I made about $70,000 after expenses off of four more novellas (about 35k words each) and three full-length novels.
I am very much a statistical anomaly.
And what I did wouldn't be reproducible now, even by me. I happened to stumble on a very hungry niche with an avid readership and struck while the iron was hot. I didn't pay for advertising, but I had a platform in the form of a reader group on FB devoted to this niche that was absolutely clamoring for content at the time. New authors have entered this space since I did and it is thoroughly saturated now. But I'd also spent the previous ten years fruitlessly writing and querying literary agents. And even when I landed what I thought was my dream agent, she couldn't sell the manuscript that got me signed with her. The novellas were adapted from a trunk novel I'd abandoned years before.
All of that is just to say that the first books you write probably aren't going to make you a living.
And am I reading your schedule right? You're planning to publish three full-length books in one month?
That's a terrible idea. You're not giving yourself any time to promote or build buzz between books. There are a lot of romance novels on Amazon (some might say too many) and just having a bunch drop at once, especially in a category as gigantic as romantic suspense, isn't going to be enough to gain you any visibility. Romance readers find books primarily through word of mouth and every successful author I know of in romance puts a lot of effort into building buzz in the weeks or months leading up to launch, paid and otherwise.
If you're writing on-market Romantic Suspense or Paranormal Romance (which is what Christine Feehan writes), then I would absolutely expect six books to net you $18000 in a year ($1500 x 12 months). Honestly, if you didn't make that, my assumption would be that something went wrong either with the packaging or the books themselves.
Except (and this is a very important point) most new authors make book-killing mistakes when they're first starting out. Indie publishing as a whole is way too saturated for books with flaws to make it onto people's radar.
And that's the problem. If you've held and then rapid released the books, then you've lost any opportunity to learn and course correct. You've blown your load, so to speak. Publish one flop and you can learn from it for the next. Publish three in a month and you've wasted a lot of writing time. Enough that it might just make you so frustrated that you quit altogether.
In general, I'm on the fence about rapid release. It can be very useful as a launch strategy if you know what you're doing and want to target a specific kind of readership. However, if your books are off market or poorly written then publishing them fast isn't going to do anything for you. Rapid release won't sell books that wouldn't have sold anyway. And the problem with recommending rapid release to a newbie (or an unsuccessful "vet") is that you have no idea if your books are marketable or not. Instead of writing and publishing one book, then tweaking the next based on market response and what you've learned in the process, you're writing and holding several books that might all be duds. And you won't figure out they're duds until after months or years of effort, which I assume is pretty soul-crushing.
Rapid release is generally only a viable strategy for authors who already know what they're doing. A lucky few stumble onto a winning formula by accident, but this is not the norm. Most newbies just don't know enough yet, about themselves or the industry. It takes experience to understand the nuances of this industry.
The other big problem with rapid release is that you're targeting a very specific kind of readership. Whale readers who care more about having another book to read than where that book is coming from. People will viable longterm careers build a brand from the very beginning. If you are not a book/month author then attracting that readership initially will make you some money but they won't stick with you as soon as the schedule normalizes to your normal production levels. Longterm success comes with laying a foundation for what you want to achieve at the beginning. Readers don't know how long you held onto books before publishing. If you start off with a book every month, they're probably going to expect that schedule to continue and will be annoyed when it doesn't.
And I might be misunderstanding you, but six books are not going to make steady money forever. Every book, no matter how popular the author, has an earnings tail that starts at a launch high and eventually peters out. You can lengthen that tail with advertising and sales, but you need frontlist to sell your backlist.
So to answer your question: an author who nails it might see $1500 in their first month from a marketable book (especially in romance), with scaling from there if they publish regularly. But most people who have never published before have not written a marketable book and they don't have enough experience to see where they've missed the mark. No one can tell you how much your books will make, even with knowing the genre and publishing schedule. But statistically speaking, your first books aren't going to be worth more than beer money. The few people who do well right out of the gate have spent a lot of time and effort learning the ropes and most of them also got lucky.
