You can spend a week changing a blurb and still have no idea whether it helped. Or get cheaper clicks on an ad, then discover you earned less from the readers it brought in.
Those are the questions I work on at The Indie Lab. I test things on my own books and spend my own money. Then I write about what happened, including the attempts I’d rather forget.
What you’ll find here
I write about selling books and making better use of AI in the work around them. A post might follow an ad campaign through to royalties, or explain how I check an AI editing suggestion against the manuscript before accepting it.
The awkward details interest me. A click is easy to count, but what did you earn from it? An AI can produce a confident answer, but where did it get the facts?
Free subscribers get the public posts by email. Paid subscribers get the guides and resources below, plus the paid archive.
Four guides you can download
The Make Your… series covers the work from preparing a novel to keeping in touch with its readers. All four ebooks are included with a paid subscription.
Make Your Book Click
Work on your book’s blurb and Amazon listing, including the keywords you choose. Check what your Amazon Ads spending earns. Includes worksheets and reusable AI prompts you can apply to one title at a time.
Make Your Book Seen
Build Facebook and Instagram ads around what your novel actually offers readers. Work through copy and visuals before choosing a campaign. Use the worksheets and prompts to measure results through royalties.
Make Your Story Work
Use AI to help plan and revise fiction while keeping control of the writing. Build a story bible and plan scenes, then work through continuity checks and four editing passes. The examples help you judge which suggestions to accept.
Make Your Readers Stay
Build an author email list, or return to one you’ve neglected. Choose a reader magnet and write welcome emails, with complete examples you can learn from. There’s advice on newsletter swaps and staying in touch between releases, too.
Tools and other paid resources
Paid subscribers get early access to new tools I build. The Indie Author Toolset is an example of the publishing calculators I’m working on. The current toolset is free to use; the subscription benefit is getting to try new tools and releases early.
You also get a coupon for 20% off recurring subscription payments at Author’s Haven – my beta-reader management platform, where authors share manuscripts and collect chapter-by-chapter feedback.
Other paid resources include The 4-Pass AI Edit and the KDP Dashboard Autopsy Prompt for examining your own sales exports. The five-module Engineering Indie Success mini-course covers the work from market research to editing.
Why Me?
In 2025, I used the exact strategies I share in this Lab to sell 8,000 copies and clock over 2 million Kindle Unlimited page flips. I’ve seen the “black box” of Amazon Ads and the chaos of algorithm shifts from the inside.
My findings – which have been unofficially acknowledged by industry leaders like Kindlepreneur – aren’t based on what I think works. They’re based on what my bank account confirms. I quietly run these experiments using my own tools so that when I give you a guide, I know it hasn’t just been “tested” – it’s been battle-hardened.
I’m not here to sell you a dream. I’m here to show you the math.