Karla Marie Aims High: Fiction Profits Academy’s Mission to Empower 10,000 Women

Karla Marie, founder of Fiction Profits Academy, plans to motivate women to dominate the ebook world in 2024. She’s already begun, with more than 8,000 successful student graduates of her program that focuses on utizing ghostwriting.

Marie sees herself and her academy as a force for equality. Part of her mission is to create some justice in the world where a woman doesn’t have to work twice as hard as a man, where a woman can have the free time and the quality of life that men traditionally have had a larger portion of. And besides sexism, she’s taking on ageism.

“What I noticed too, is that there’s this idea, this message societally, that women lose value as they get older,” Marie says. “Okay, we are past the age where we’re going to be having kids? We don’t have much value anymore.”

But she hastens to add that with her program at the academy, no one has to be proficient in technology or know anything about writing to be successful.  Marie and her coaches keep a strong focus on the students they work with to instill self-assurance in them.

“One of the main skills that I’ve always focused on is the importance of mindset,” Marie says. “The importance of always believing and grounding in myself that I’m a successful person and that I have the power to change my life. I can shape my life into what I know is best for me and what’s in alignment with my potential.”

Students at Fiction Profits Academy get group coaching calls every week. These one-on-one calls with personal coaches help and support the students along the whole way.

Marie says she’s never found or even heard of another course that teaches the way FPA does. But she says that the biggest hurdle the students face is their lack of confidence in themselves. If they don’t even think they can do it, they won’t sign up and find out they can.

“You can create something. You have the ability, you can do this. You know, look at the objections people come in with. They say, ‘I don’t know how’ or  ‘I’m too old’,” Marie says. “We squash those objections. This kind of business doesn’t discriminate. You can be any age, from any background. We have lots of students who are women, lots of students who come in with English as a second language.”

Of course, men are welcome at FPA, but they haven’t needed the help as much as women. When she began selling ebooks online, Marie started out with nonfiction books, but her success was limited. She researched what people really wanted to read and found that romance fiction was the biggest market, so she switched to that. She had taken small online courses and built up some skills, so she started coaching other ebook producers.

“When I started out, there were not many women in the online space, as there are now,” Marie says. “It was still more of a man’s world. And so most of my coaching clients, when I started out, were men publishing books, under female pen names. Now it’s really shifted, and I’d say probably 90-plus percent of our students are women. So it’s been really great to see these women having success.”

And many of these online book producers are having significant successes. Marie says some of the thousands of students she’s worked with are going on to have six-figure businesses. Of course, that’s not something that can be guaranteed in a business like this, but a full-time income is a possibility if someone takes a lot of action.

Fiction Profits Academy is looking to teach 10,000 women next year. Marie says that people in the ebook production business don’t even have to write the books themselves. They can hire ghostwriters to do that. Right now, FPA uses AI for book covers, summaries and promotional materials, but Marie doesn’t believe that’s the end of it.

“I’ve noticed how everything is changing so fast with AI, and I’m getting more and more excited about it,” she says. “We’ve seen it on the back end of our business, what AI is doing for us, and now we’re able to bring it to our clients to have them use it and get over that fear and feel empowered.”

Marie says that her academy uses a proprietary suite of AI tools, made in conjunction with some of the world’s top software engineers. And she says that artificial intelligence programs are beginning to look like an eventual possibility for doing the actual writing and editing of the books.

“People are scared, especially ones like my parents who are a little older,” Marie says. “They’re terrified of AI. There’s some fear-mongering around that. And I want to show people that AI doesn’t need to be that way, that this is an amazing tool that you can use to shift and transform your life. It can help people improve their experiences financially, too.”

Ebook popularity continues to grow, and there appear to be few limits ahead for someone with the know-how and tenacity to push the boundaries. Karla Marie is undoubtedly one of them, and she wants to help thousands of women join her on this journey.