Dale L. Roberts

Dale L. Roberts has pursued self-publishing full-time since 2014, after roughly two decades in healthcare — much of it working with older adults living with dementia, experience he draws on in his fiction. His Goodreads author biography describes him as a self-publishing advocate and award-winning author with over 50 titles and a YouTube audience of over 100,000 subscribers, and as a Video Content Advisor for the Alliance of Independent Authors.

His signature competence is the money mechanics. Across a decade of tutorials he re-teaches the same structures, updated as they change: the ebook royalty tiers and the price band they depend on, the delivery fee most creators skip, the real print royalty after print costs, and what expanded distribution actually pays versus going directly to IngramSpark or Draft2Digital. His comparison point is consistent — other retailers pay flatter, simpler rates, and Amazon’s structure is a pricing cage an author should enter knowingly, not by default.

The doctrine that follows from the math is: never marry a platform. Publish on KDP, but treat it as one channel; test KDP Select for a single term rather than living in it; keep manuscripts, ISBN records, and tax documents backed up off Amazon, because enforcement is final and accounts are the business. On AI, his position is demonstrated on his own work — AI as an assistant for outlines, descriptions, and research, with a human pass as a real production stage — and his one fully AI-drafted novel is presented in his catalog as a cautionary postmortem, not a victory lap.

His funnel matches his message: a large evergreen tutorial catalog, a free bestseller launch checklist and email series, tool recommendations he discloses as affiliate or sponsored, and his own books. Notably, across hundreds of videos he makes almost no personal income claims — the numbers he puts his name on are platform rates and his own author-copy receipts.