TL Mercer

Readers decide whether to click your book in about two seconds. Two seconds! That’s not enough time to read your blurb. It’s barely enough time to read your title. What they’re actually judging is your cover — a thumbnail the size of a postage stamp, glimpsed while scrolling at speed.

Your cover is a billboard on a highway doing 90. Design accordingly.

The thumbnail test is the only test. Shrink your cover to one inch tall. Can you still read the title? Can you still tell the genre? Can you still feel something? If not, it doesn’t matter how gorgeous the full-size version is — most readers will never see it full-size until after they’ve already clicked.

Genre signaling beats originality. This one hurts, because every author wants their cover to be unique. But a reader scrolling for their next monster-girl harem book is pattern-matching: certain color palettes, certain character placements, certain typography. If your cover doesn’t signal the genre instantly, the right readers scroll past — and the wrong readers click, get confused, and leave bad reviews. Look at my Monster Girl covers: they telegraph exactly what kind of book this is. That’s not an accident.

Typography is doing half the work. Blurry text, weird fonts, title crammed into a corner — these scream “amateur” louder than anything else on the cover. Professional typography is the cheapest credibility money can buy. If your budget is tight, spend it here before anywhere else.

Don’t DIY unless you actually have the skill. I know, I know — budgets are real. But a bad cover doesn’t save you money; it costs you every sale it fails to make. A $300 pre-made or a $500 custom cover that converts will outperform a free DIY cover every single time. This is the highest-ROI money in indie publishing, full stop.

Test like you mean it. Run your cover past readers in your genre before you commit. Not your mom. Not your writing group (unless they read your genre). Actual readers of the thing you wrote. Facebook reader groups will give you brutally honest feedback for free, and it’s worth more than any design course.

Series branding is a force multiplier. Notice how my three Monster Girl books share a visual language — same title treatment, same vibe, different accent colors? That’s deliberate. When book two releases, every reader who liked book one recognizes it instantly. Design the series, not just the book.

You can write the best book in your category and still fail with a bad cover. It isn’t fair. It’s just physics — two seconds, one inch, ninety miles an hour. Build your billboard accordingly.

Judge my billboards for yourself — the full series is on my Books page.

“Write to market” is the most misunderstood advice in indie publishing. Half the authors who hear it start churning out joyless clones of whatever’s topping the charts. The other half reject it entirely and write beautiful books nobody finds. Both groups are missing the point.

Here’s how I think about it, as someone writing monster-girl harem in a LitRPG world:

Writing to market doesn’t mean writing what everyone else writes. It means understanding why readers buy what they buy, then delivering your version of that promise. Readers of harem fantasy want a specific emotional experience — found family, escalating stakes, relationships that actually develop. I can deliver all of that while writing the weirdest, most personal version of it I can imagine. The tropes are the container. The soul is what you pour in.

Know the difference between a trope and a trend. Tropes are load-bearing walls — the things readers show up for every time (the reluctant hero, the rival who becomes an ally, the power progression). Trends are paint colors — this month’s hot subgenre, last year’s cover style. Build on tropes. Be cautious about trends. By the time you’ve written a book chasing a trend, the trend has moved.

Your weird is your edge. This took me years to learn. The things I was tempted to sand down — the humor, the specific kink-adjacent dynamics, the unapologetic horniness of it all — turned out to be the differentiator. In a market with ten thousand LitRPG titles, “competent and generic” is invisible. Specific and honest is memorable.

But respect the reader’s time. Here’s where the “without selling your soul” crowd sometimes goes wrong. Writing whatever you want doesn’t mean ignoring craft. Pacing still matters. Payoffs still matter. Your artistic vision doesn’t exempt you from giving the reader a satisfying experience. The deal is: you get to write your weird book, and in exchange, you make it good.

Study the market like a scientist, write like an artist. I read the top 100 in my categories. I note the cover trends, the blurb structures, the price points. Then I close the spreadsheet and write the book only I could write. Research informs the packaging. It never touches the soul of the story.

The indie authors who last aren’t the ones who chase every wave or the ones who ignore the ocean entirely. They’re the ones who learn to surf — reading the water, picking their wave, and riding it their own way.

That’s the philosophy behind everything I write. Come see it in action.

In January 2024, I ran a Kickstarter for Coven Desires, my 18+ portal-harem series. It funded. Fully. And I learned more about publishing in those 30 days than in the two years before it.

If you’re an author eyeing crowdfunding, here’s the unfiltered version:

Your audience comes before your campaign. The biggest myth is that Kickstarter finds you readers. It doesn’t. It activates readers you already have. Every dollar I raised traced back to relationships I’d built beforehand — newsletter, social media, reader communities. If you’re starting from zero followers, your first job isn’t the campaign page. It’s the audience.

The page is a sales letter, not a diary. Backers decide in about fifteen seconds. Lead with the hook, show the goods (covers, art, sample chapters), and make the reward tiers dead simple. I watched campaigns with better books than mine fail because their page read like a terms-of-service document.

Budget for the unsexy stuff. Everyone budgets printing and shipping. Nobody budgets the 10% platform fees, the failed pledges, the re-shipments for lost packages, or the three months of your life spent stuffing envelopes. My rule now: take your best cost estimate and add 30%. You’re welcome.

Communication is the product. Here’s the secret nobody tells you: backers aren’t just buying a book. They’re buying participation. Weekly updates, behind-the-scenes peeks, polls on bonus content — that stuff matters as much as the manuscript. The campaigns that go quiet after funding are the ones that get the angry comments.

Fulfillment will humble you. I don’t care how organized you think you are. At some point you’ll be staring at a spreadsheet at 1 AM wondering how you have 47 copies unaccounted for. Build in buffer time. Then double it.

It changes your relationship with readers. This is the part I’d do it all for. Trad publishing puts seventeen layers between you and the people who buy your books. Kickstarter puts you in the same room. My backers weren’t customers — they were co-conspirators. That energy carried into everything I wrote afterward.

Would I run another one? Absolutely. But I’d go in knowing it’s not free money — it’s a second full-time job for two months, and the real work starts the day after it funds.

Curious about the series that started it all? Coven Desires is where the portal-harem madness began.

Nobody in traditional publishing was beating down my door asking for a monster-girl harem series. Shocking, I know.

That’s the short version of why I went indie. The longer version is that indie publishing is the only path where a book like I Was Married to a Monster Girl gets to exist exactly the way I imagined it — no committee sanding off the edges, no marketing department asking me to make it “more broadly appealing,” no eighteen-month wait to find out if anyone even wants it.

Here’s what indie actually gives you, the stuff nobody puts on the brochure:

Speed. I can have an idea in January and a book in readers’ hands by summer. Traditional publishing measures timelines in years. Years! By the time a trad book hits shelves, the market conversation has moved on twice.

Control. My covers, my titles, my blurbs, my prices. When something isn’t working, I change it that afternoon — not after a quarterly review. That cover for The Loyalty Problem? If readers told me tomorrow it wasn’t converting, I’d have a new one up by the weekend.

Royalties. Let’s talk money, because everyone else is afraid to. A trad debut might earn you 8-10% on a paperback. Indie on Kindle pays up to 70%. You do the math on which one lets you actually make a living at midlist sales numbers.

The weird stuff gets to live. This is the big one for me. I write books about a guy navigating marriage to monster girls. I write 18+ portal harem. There is no trad editor championing that in an acquisitions meeting. Indie means the only permission slip I need is my own.

Now the honest part — the trade-offs are real:

You’re the whole company. Author, editor-coordinator, cover art director, marketer, accountant, customer service. Nobody tells you this upfront: writing the book is maybe 40% of the job.

You pay for everything. Editing, covers, formatting, ads — it all comes out of your pocket before you’ve earned a dime. Budget like a business, because that’s what this is.

There’s no gatekeeper, which means there’s no safety net either. No advance. No built-in distribution. If the book flops, that’s entirely on you.

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. Every scar on this path taught me something, and every win belongs to me. If you’re sitting on a weird book that doesn’t fit neatly on a bookstore shelf — congratulations. You might be an indie author and not know it yet.

Want to see what indie looks like in practice? Check out my books — written, published, and marketed by yours truly.