This children’s book author makes $7k a month from book sales and teaching others how to publish

Meet Ren Lowe, a 38-year-old author and self-publishing coach in Atlanta who teaches aspiring authors how to bring their book ideas to life.

Before writing children’s books, Ren spent a few years as a stay-at-home mom and wanted a flexible career where she could make a good income while pursuing her childhood dream – to author children’s books.

In 2015, she landed a job in the wireless telecommunications industry with T-Mobile, and actively began writing children’s books while on maternity leave years later in 2021. Ren wrote seven books while on maternity leave with her daughter, Kameryn, marking the beginning of her self-publishing business, Business Insider reported. 

Through her hard work and resilience, she now makes about $7,000 a month from her book sales, and from teaching others how to achieve the same success.

Ren says she was able to focus on writing books and pursuing her dream because she could not return to T-Mobile after the end of her maternity leave due to postpartum anxiety, and was eventually let go from the company in 2021, the same year she launched her books.

“The ‘My Magical Brown Unicorn series and my savings saved me,” she said. “My books began to generate a passive stream of income from Amazon, Walmart, Barnes Noble, online and indie bookstores, schools, and museums, but it wasn’t quite enough to help me reach my goal of earning six figures.”

She leveraged social media to market her books and eventually observed that a percentage of her followers were interested in becoming self-publishers, this inspired her to start a second gig – teaching people how to self-publish.

“I mainly use TikTok, but I also use Instagram. I’ve learned from my followers that people are interested in the ”how” of self-publishing and are willing to pay someone with experience and expertise to teach them. I created my signature self-publishing group-coaching course and one-on-one coaching services in October,” she said.

Ren offers book publishing tutorials from $1,500, coaching services from $1,000, and ghostwriting services from $1,600. “While I do the ghostwriting and book publishing, my coaching services are designed to teach my clients the step-by-step self-publishing process to perform on their own,” she added.

She made a little more than $30,000 from her publishing services alone from November 2021 through to August 2022. “It was nothing to gloss over,” she said, despite not hitting her six-figure goal. At a point, the author considered returning to a 9-to-5 job to meet that goal. However, expanding her services helped her to earn an average of $7,000 a month. Ren has coached 20 students to date.