Thanks for specifying that you made "new car money" rather than "new house money"!
'New car money' doesn't mean buy a new car and nothing else - it just means I'm not living in a penthouse apartment! I've been fortunate enough to earn enough to quit my 'real' job and make games full time, which is the ideal outcome as far as I'm concerned! I'm not rich, but I'm doing what I love, so I'd count that as a resounding success. :)
Could you give a bit more information on:
- how you recruited someone to do the graphics for you, was it odesk or similar? how did you choose someone? did you pay for graphics even though you didn't use them?
- marketing. This appears to be the most critical different thing you did compared to other people with similar stories. Could you give examples of the emails you sent out? How did you decide which sites to target? How effective do you think sending out emails was compared to social media?
[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Simply+Apped
For the graphics I began by simple searching for 'video game 2d artist', and just browsed through portfolios. Eventually I realised that I was getting a lot of the same style of artwork, which wasn't what I was looking for, so I changed tack and started looking at 'classical' illustrator portfolios which resulted in a much more diverse set of artwork. After that I simply stumbled upon Eva Galesloot's portfolio (http://cargocollective.com/skwirrol) and knew it was an awesome fit.
For my latest game I'm working in 3D so I looked at lots of portfolios on Polycount (http://www.polycount.com/forum/).
Marketing wise, I honestly did terribly at getting any coverage on video game websites. I think my success came from targeting a very specific niche, i.e. BMXers, which led to me getting good coverage on those websites. For my next game I'll be trying again to get some traditional games coverage, but I'll be spending more effort on cycling journalists than video games journalists.
By the way - I'm in the UK too. If you fancy someone to do the Android version I've plenty of Android, LibGDX and Java experience :). Email is in my profile.