We did the same too (opposite direction). Spent a very long time writing an epic for a niche market and piled up a lot of rejections in the process. Rather than take the money we had saved up to print-distribute we decided to crowdfund the thing using all the print-distribution money for marketing instead. All that accomplished was to find out that publicists' words should be taken with a grain of salt and that advertisers as a whole give deliberately innacurate numbers and CTRs so they can get your money. We also found out that the niche market we had written the book for was very negative towards it. We got turned for almost every interview and news article that we attempted, in a niche that doesn't have a whole lot of news or anything going for it. Needless to say the entire process was a massive failure, especially financially. After that we stopped writing books completely. We decided to switch to comics instead because images tend to be shared on social media far more than text. So far we've found comics to be easier to grow a following for, but still, writing for Seeking Alpha is far more lucrative than anything else we've ever done in writing/comics.
When the 30 Day Writing Challenge thing came out we got some confidence back to write another book, but the results of that reminded us to stick with comics. Comics don't get the same level of writing scrutiny that books get.
