How to Write a Six-Figure Story (Without Selling Your Soul)

Are you a fiction writer stuck between writing what you love and writing what sells? You're not alone. Many authors struggle with finishing manuscripts, keeping up with trends, and second-guessing their every plot twist. But what if the secret to writing a bestselling book isn’t about following trends—but about tapping into something deeper?

Let’s talk about how to write the kind of story that lights you up—and also sells like crazy.

1. Why “Write to Market” Isn’t Enough for Fiction Authors

If you’re a fiction author trying to build a career, you've probably heard the advice: “write to market.” And yes, knowing your genre, your reader expectations, and your tropes is important. But here’s the truth: writing to trend without passion rarely works.

Some authors chase hot genres—like billionaire romance or vampire fantasy—just to make money. Sometimes it pays off. But more often than not, the result is a flat, uninspired book that readers can’t connect with. Why?

Because readers can feel the lack of passion on the page.

📌 Key SEO phrases: writing to market, fiction writing trends, write books that sell, advice for indie authors

2. What Is a Soul Story?

A Soul Story is the novel only you can write. It’s born from your subconscious creativity, not from what you think the market wants. It’s the story that keeps you up at night, that haunts you until you get it on the page.

When you write from this place—where your passion is fully alive—readers feel it. They connect emotionally, become obsessed with your characters, and start recommending your book like it’s their favorite secret.

This is where your power as a storyteller lives.

📌 Key SEO phrases: how to write emotional fiction, finding your writing voice, fiction writing inspiration, how to write from the heart

3. How to Write a Six Figure Story

Let’s define what it really means to write a six figure story. It’s not just about royalty numbers—it’s about building a book that has the potential to sell again and again, to build a loyal fanbase, and to stand the test of time.

Here are the five key elements:

1. It’s a Soul Story. Born from passion, not pressure.

2. It uses Transformational Human Psychology (THP). Your story mirrors the universal emotional process we all go through to change and grow.

3. It’s Right-to-Market. It hits the genre and trope expectations your readers are craving—without losing your voice.

4. It’s infused with epic emotion. Every scene matters. Every page pulses with feeling.

5. It has staying power. It sells beyond the launch, creates superfans, and keeps bringing readers back.

When all five are in place, your novel becomes more than a book—it becomes an experience readers can’t forget.

📌 Key SEO phrases: how to write a bestselling novel, six figure fiction author, story structure that sells, emotional storytelling for writers

4. Writing to Trend vs. Writing What You Love

You don’t have to choose between writing what you love and writing what sells. The most successful fiction authors fuse market awareness with creative passion.

If you’re deeply excited about a trending genre, great—go for it! But if you’re writing something just because it’s “hot” and you’re not emotionally invested, your book will likely fall flat. Because your energy—your emotional commitment—transfers directly to your readers.

📌 Key SEO phrases: writing books that make money, how to write what sells, trending genres in fiction, writing tips for authors

5. Soul + Strategy = Long-Term Author Success

The fiction authors who succeed long-term—the ones who grow their income, their fanbase, and their impact—write with soul and strategy.

They know that great book marketing begins with the story itself. No amount of ads or promos can fix a book that doesn’t hit emotionally. If you want a book that changes your readers and your royalty checks, start by writing the book only you can write.

Then dial in the structure, the tropes, and the emotional beats—and you’ll have a story with six-figure potential.

Your Soul Story is your secret weapon. Write it well, and your readers will follow you anywhere.

📌 Key SEO phrases: how to become a successful fiction writer, emotional writing techniques, fiction author business, how to sell more books

Final Thought

All six-figure stories are soul stories—but not all soul stories are six-figure stories. You need passion, structure, emotion, market alignment, and staying power. If you're ready to write your best book ever, start with your soul. The rest will follow.

Now go write the story that only you can tell. Your readers are waiting—with bated breath.

****************************

Check out the Legendary Fiction Forge here (Only $17 for first month!): https://6figurestoryteller.com/join-lff-67 

Get my free 10 Universal Plot Points to Craft Any Story mini course here: https://bit.ly/10plotpoints 

****************************

Connect With Me on Social Media: Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theprolificauthor Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/6figurestoryteller Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@6figurestoryteller Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lkhillbooks Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/6FigureStoryteller/

Podcast Transcript:

Hi there! Do you have a great idea for a fiction story? A story you're dying to bring to the world, but you don't know where you're going with it, don't know how to fill out a compelling plot, and have a hard time sitting down to even write words, much less finish your story? Even when you do write, do you worry that it's boring, that it drags, and that readers are going to hate it? So you stay stuck, write and rewrite the same scenes, and eventually give up, ending up with a file of half-written manuscripts and glorious story ideas on your computer. Hi, my name is Liesl, USA Today best-selling author and writer of four genres, and I've been writing fiction for more than 15 years. I teach fiction authors to write highly emotional stories based on elements of psychology and spirituality, with an emphasis on your unique subconscious creativity.

Did you know that human beings cannot be emotionally healthy without stories? That we'd all literally go mad if we couldn't tell ourselves stories and derive meaning from them? It's true, and a scientifically proven fact. So, grab your chocolate of choice and your fuzzy slippers. Let's turn that story snippet knocking around in your brain into a full-length novel that will give your reader that emotionally cathartic experience they long for, make you money, and change the world.

Who's with me? Okay, let me ask you a question. How passionate are you about the story that you're writing? I hope you're super passionate about it. If you're not, that's a problem, and we'll talk about that in just a minute.

But even if you really are super passionate about the story that you're writing, how passionate are you about each and every scene that you write? Do you find yourself taking your story to a certain place or doing certain things in it because you think the audience will like them, even if they don't actually light you up? Now, what about writing to trend? This is something that used to be a really hot topic in the indie author space, and I don't see it being discussed as much anymore as it used to be. But if a genre really pops off, like teen vampire romance, for example, or billionaire romance, or, you know, whatever the genre is, if it suddenly becomes really big and really profitable for the authors writing in that genre, should you hop on that trend and write a genre just so that you can capitalize on it, make some money, even if it's not your favorite thing to write? That used to be debated a lot in the author space. So the question is, what do you think about that? Well, let's talk about a little bit.

Here's the thing that you do need to know before you make a decision. When authors decide to hop on a trend and write a particular genre or tropes that they wouldn't have otherwise written just so that they can try and make some money, the real question is, are they successful or not? And the answer to that is, it depends. Some are wildly successful, others completely flop.

So that right there should tell you that the action of writing to trend or not writing to trend isn't really across the board going to work or not work, right? Because we have both extremes in the outcomes. Trying to figure out if you can have success that way is a lot more nuanced. So the question is, what is that nuance? What dictates whether writing to trend is going to work for an author or not? Well, okay, I want you to try this on for size.

Imagine a scenario where someone is recommending a book to you and maybe it's not your favorite genre to read, though you're open to reading it. And then they tell you about it a little bit, no spoilers or anything, just kind of an elevator pitch what the book's about. And then they say something like, yeah, I really enjoyed reading it.

You should read it. In that scenario, maybe you'll pick up the book and read it if it appeals to you enough, but I doubt you would do it right away unless you're really hard up for something new to read. And let's face it, in today's digital world, that's not really a thing anymore.

There are plenty of things everyone has to read. Everyone has a TBR list that's like 800 books long, right? So even though they gave you a good recommendation and said it was a good book and they liked it, it's not going to necessarily make you run out and purchase that book right away and sit down to read it, right? So let's try the scenario again. A good friend whose opinion in books you trust comes running up to you and says, I just read the best book.

They're so excited they can barely contain themselves. They tell you about the scintillating romance, the high stakes, the crazy plot twists. And then they even tell you about their emotional reaction to the story.

Something like, I couldn't put this down or I stayed up all night to find out what was going to happen. Or, man, this story lives rent-free in my brain. I cannot stop thinking about it.

You have to read this so we can discuss it. How much more likely are you to run out and get the second book than you were to get the first? Quite a bit more likely, right? Well, guess what? I got news for you. The thing that made the difference between your urgency to buy the first book and the second book is the same thing that determines whether writing to trend will work for you or not.

And what is that thing that determines it? What is that thing that makes the difference? It's passion. We humans are energetic beings. We infuse everything we do, especially everything we create, with our energy.

And I've got more news for you. How you feel writing your story is how readers will feel while reading it. So if you aren't exuberantly passionate about your story, your readers won't be either.

Okay, that's really important. If you're bored with what you're writing, your readers are going to be bored too. So do you see how that affects writing to trend? Why some authors are successful at it and others completely flop? I'm not actually against writing to trend.

I haven't done it myself in my own career because I'm just, I know very well what I like to write and what I want to write and I don't really care that much about trends, but I'm not against writers doing it so long as what they are writing, whatever that trend is, so long as they're passionate about it. Okay, if you sit down to write a trending genre or tropes or whatever it is and you are already absolutely in love with it or maybe you fall in love with it while you're, you know, figuring it out, crafting your story, then chances are you're going to be really successful in that genre. Your passion will bring your readers a high quality story, make them feel things, and that's exactly what we're looking for in a novel, right? If on the other hand, you're writing a trending genre just to make some money but you aren't completely lit up about what you're writing, your book is probably going to flop because the excitement with which you write it will dictate your reader's excitement also and that is going to affect your sales.

And if it flops, you've just wasted a lot of time and a lot of brain cells on a story that you don't even really like, so please don't do that, okay? So I want to define a couple of terms for you here. I teach my students the difference between soul stories and six-figure stories. If you've listened to my podcast for any length of time, you may be familiar with these terms, but let's go over them for any newbies out there.

A soul story is written from your subconscious creativity. It's the story that lives in you, not the one you think the market wants or the one you're trying to force into a mold, okay? I teach my students how to journal, how to free write, how to tap into their unique subconscious creativity. This is very different than trying to force your story into or out of templates, okay? So it's born from that unique subconscious creativity.

It's something that you're very passionate about, very lit up about, okay? It feels absolutely inevitable. It's the story that's not going to go away until you actually get it written down and thinking about it is something that you almost obsess about, right? It keeps you up late at night in the best way, and because you care so deeply, the energy of that story is going to bleed through onto the page and the reader will feel it, okay? Now what about a six-figure story? If you have a great idea for a story premise, but you don't know where you're going with it, if you're having a really hard time filling in plot events or finishing your current WIP, or if you're constantly worried that your story is boring or dragging or that your readers won't like it, then I encourage you to join the Legendary Fiction Forge, my monthly membership for fiction authors. Inside, I will give you the complete A to Z blueprint for how to write highly emotional stories that your readers will absolutely fall in love with, no matter what your genre or tropes are.

Want to become a widely read, highly paid master storyteller? Then join us in the Legendary Fiction Forge and finally get that epic story that's been knocking around in your brain forever out to the world. I'm going to tell you right now that how I define a six-figure story has nothing to do with income, okay? It's not, I'm not promising the story will make you six figures in royalties, obviously no one can guarantee income, but rather I define a six-figure story as one that has all the right pieces in mind, so that it has the potential to become one. So not just to sell once, but to keep selling over time, to create megafans, to create a cult following, and you, it's the difference between having a great launch and then having your sales drop off and having a book that sustains sales over time.

So what are those criteria that would make any story you write into a six-figure story? Number one, it has to be a soul story. So I defined what a soul story was for you before, one written from your passion, your unique subconscious creativity, because if that passion isn't there, it doesn't matter how well you write to market, your story is still going to flop or at least be pretty mediocre in sales, the passion and the emotion has to be there. So writing to market alone, don't get me wrong, writing to market has a lot of value, but it's not enough, okay? You have to have the passion for your story.

So the first criteria is that you have to write a soul story. The second one is that it uses transformational human psychology or THP. Transformational human psychology is the template that all human beings undergo when they are changing or achieving something.

Generally this change comes as a way to alleviate suffering. So basically something is causing us to suffer, either physically, emotionally, psychologically, whatever it is, and we want to fix that, so we have to change in some way in order to fix that. And the THP framework, it's not only true to life, it's a process that we all go through thousands of times in our lives, but it is the true nature and foundation of story.

And by using that as a framework and making sure you're including all the elements of that, you will always write an emotional story, you will always write a story that is a page turner, you will always be able to hook readers with it, okay? So that's the second ingredient in writing a six-figure story is you must use THP. Number three is that it does employ right-to-market practices. Now I said before that writing to market alone is not enough, you need the passion, and that's true, but if you want to make it commercially sellable, right, you do want to make sure that you have your genre and tropes dialed in and that you know who your audience is.

So it's also true that if you just write your soul story and it has no story structure and no genre and no tropes, that's also going to be a problem. So there tends to be this misconception that we either can write a soul story, we can either write something for ourselves, or we can write to market. I'm telling you, you need to fuse those together.

You need both, and having both really is the recipe for a best-selling novel, all right? The fourth criteria that you need to write a six-figure story is that it must be infused with emotion. This is the hill I will die on, okay? Emotion is king when it comes to fiction writing. I promise you the reason people get bored with your story is not because there's not enough action in it.

It's not because there's not enough romance or sex in it. It's not because you don't have enough crazy shocking plot twists. It's because the emotion is not there, and one of the main things that I teach is how to infuse every single part of your story with epic emotion, okay? THP will help you do that to some extent.

So these all work together. The fact that you are passionate about your story, again, that's going to bleed onto the page. That is going to help a lot, okay? But you need to know how to do it at every level.

You need to know how to infuse the character's inner arc with emotion, the plot, obviously, the world building, the themes, and even how to write emotional descriptions, how to write emotional scenes, how to write scenes that are well paced. Again, pacing and even grammar, passive voice, weak sentences, all of those take away from the emotion. So there's a lot of different moving parts.

We all know that to writing a novel, but if every single part of your novel, every single thing you write, every aspect of it is infused with emotion, you're going to be way ahead of the curve, okay? And now let's go to the fifth criteria, and that is simply that it has staying power, okay? It's great to have a fantastic launch and sell a bunch of books, but it's better to have a book that will continue to make sales every single month for the rest of your life. And, of course, that has a lot to do with marketing, but here's what I'm going to tell you. True fiction book marketing starts at the story level, okay? Because you can throw a lot of money at marketing when nobody's read the book yet.

Maybe you have a great cover, a great blurb, you do some newsletter promos, you have some people on your mailing list, and you can sell, you know, at least a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand copies when you launch, but once people start reading the book, and it doesn't have to be terrible, I'm not saying the book would be terribly written, even if it's even a little bit mediocre, your sales are going to drop off, okay? There's so much competition these days, and everything you write has to knock your reader's socks off, and I'm telling you the way to do that is through emotion. So true fiction book marketing starts at the story level, always. It does not matter how good your marketing is if your story is not dialed in.

If it's bland, if it's slow and dragging, if it's missing story elements that the reader subconsciously is looking for that aren't there, that's when the reader starts to say, eh, this was a little bit slow, and the author kind of lost me a little bit. I didn't really like the ending, or I really just couldn't get invested in the characters. All of those things are very fixable, and they're not fixable in the sense that you have to change your character or what's written there.

They're fixable in that you can take what you already have and deepen it, and make it really, really emotional so that the reader just latches onto your character, and that character lives in their heart for the rest of their lives, okay? So we're not talking about changing it in the sense of change your story, change your characters, change what you come up with. Rather, it's about deepening it, taking what you already have, and what you already love about your story and your characters, and communicating them in an extremely emotional way on the page, okay? So you may wonder, okay, but can't any story with the right marketing potentially be a six-figure story, one that sells really well? Honestly, no, unfortunately, because this is why I call these six-figure stories. Again, not because we can guarantee income, that's going to depend on marketing, but because if you don't have all of these criteria, then you really don't have the potential to become a six-figure seller.

All of those need to be there first, and then you can look at whether it can become a six-figure story. So unfortunately, you know, we all like to say, well, you know, you never know. Every story has the potential, but it doesn't, not if these things are not in place.

So let's recap a little bit, okay? All six-figure stories are soul stories, but not all soul stories are six-figure stories, right? In order to be or qualify to be a six-figure story, it has to be a soul story. You have to use transformational human psychology as the foundation and backbone. You want to do right-to-market practices.

It has to be infused with emotion, and you want it to have staying power so that it continues to make you money every month for the rest of your life, right? And that is what I'm here to help you build, a six-figure story. In fact, I want you to take every story that ever pops into your head, every character that's rolling around the inside of your skull, begging to be I want you to turn all of those into six-figure stories so that you can have a long, sustained, and profitable fiction author career that lights you up. All right, thanks so much for being here with me today.

Happy writing, everyone. Go out there and write that story that only you can tell that readers are waiting for. Bye.

Thanks for listening today. If this episode helped or inspired you in any way, would you do me a solid and leave me a review? Reviews help other fiction authors find the podcast. You can also recommend it to a writer friend of yours so they can get the same inspiration you got.

Remember, you have a story inside you that only you can tell, so get out there and write your soul story because your readers are waiting for it with bated breath.