The Book That Sold Fast, Aged, and Got Written Again

My best-selling book went out of date, so I wrote it again. Both halves of that sentence make sense once you see what a book like that is for, and what it’s not for.

Focus on LinkedIn was a method I’d already used on 100+ executive and founder profiles. I didn’t research the topic. I did the work every week, and the method proved itself on real people before I wrote a word. The book was a photograph of something I was doing at the moment I was doing it, and a photograph does two things at once. It goes out of date the instant the shutter closes, and it lasts forever.

Why did a book about profiles sell so fast?

It sold 15,000 copies in three days, and the reason is that nobody had to be persuaded. The people who bought it had seen the method work, on their own profile or on someone’s they knew. The book put the method in one place, and they were buying a thing they already trusted. That’s a different purchase from a book about a topic the author read up on, and it’s the only kind of purchase that happens in volume without a launch machine behind it.

I can’t take credit for timing. I wrote it when I wrote it because that was when I was doing the work. But the reason it sold is the reason any method book sells: proof preceded it.

What happened to the book after it aged?

LinkedIn changed how it works. The feed moved to an interest graph, showing people more of what they already engage with instead of what their connections post, and a set of tactics built on the old distribution stopped working. Tactics that were right in the first edition became wrong, and a reader following them today would be following a platform that no longer exists. So I wrote a new edition for the platform as it is now.

A book about a platform has a shelf life, and it’s shorter than the author would like. Know what kind of book you’re writing, and expect to write it again. None of that is a reason to skip the first edition.

The experts who sit on a method for years waiting for the platform to settle down end up with no book at all, and the platform changes underneath them anyway. That kind of waiting drives me crazy, because the proof was fresh and they let it go stale.

What part of an out-of-date book didn’t age?

The record. The sales, the registries, the catalogs, the reviews, my name on the cover, and now two editions under it.

None of that expires. Nobody looks at a photograph from twenty years ago and complains about the clothes. They look at it because it proves something happened. The book proves I was the person doing that work at that moment, and proof of that kind gains value as the moment recedes.

That’s the half of a method book most authors never think about. They imagine the advice is the asset. The advice is the perishable part. The authorship is the durable part, and the authorship is what strangers, and engines, still check years later.

When is the right time to write a business book?

While you’re the person doing the work it describes. If I’d waited for the definitive version of the method, I’d still be waiting, because platforms change and the definitive version never arrives. Write it when the proof is fresh, when the people who know you for the work are paying attention, and accept that some of it’ll date.

Then know which kind of book is on the desk. A book about a method on a platform dates. A book about how you think, how you decide, or what a career taught you dates slowly or not at all. Both are worth writing. They’re different objects with different shelf lives, and confusing them is how authors end up disappointed by a book that did exactly what its kind does. The guide to ghostwriting covers that choice.

Which book should an executive write first?

Probably not the career summary planned for retirement.

I think that retirement book is mostly an excuse executives use to put off writing anything, and by the time they get to it, the people who watched them do the work have moved on. The method people know you for this year, written down while those people are paying attention, sells on day one because proof preceded it and stays in the record because publication is permanent. Even after the method ages, the author of the book that captured it doesn’t.

Executives postpone that book in favor of the big one. Write the small one now. The big one will be better for having a published author writing it, and the small one will still be in the catalog when the big one comes out.

Why write a second edition instead of a new book?

Because the reason someone opens a profile didn’t change.

The platform changed the distribution. It didn’t change what a reader wants from your profile: confirmation that you’re the person they were told about. The chapters about that question were still right, because that question belongs to no platform, and they carried over. The tactical chapters were rebuilt for the interest graph.

A second edition is a new photograph. It’ll age the same way the first one did, and when it does, the move is the same: keep doing the work, and write it again. Each edition adds to the record instead of replacing it, and two editions under one name prove more than one ever could.

The mechanics trip people up more than the writing does. A book that changed substantially gets a new ISBN. To Amazon it is a new product with its own page. Upload the new edition and proof it before you unpublish anything, so there’s never a gap with nothing for sale.

Amazon has a hard line for this. KDP’s own help pages say a manuscript update that changes the page count by more than 10 percent needs a new edition, and so does a change to the title, author name, trim size or ISBN. Typo fixes don’t. A new edition starts over with no sales history, and readers who bought the first one won’t get a warning before they buy it twice, so say what changed in the blurb and on the copyright page.

Be careful with the swap itself.

I followed Amazon’s own unpublish and republish steps to change one subtitle, and KDP terminated my account the next morning for having two versions of the same book.

Unpublishing doesn’t make a paperback vanish. Amazon keeps the old print listing up and shows it as out of stock, and the search engines take weeks to catch up with what happened.

Get KDP support’s instructions in writing before you retire an edition. I followed their steps to change a paperback subtitle, unpublished the old edition, put up the new one, and KDP terminated my account for having two versions of the same book. The whole story is in Amazon KDP Sucks. Some authors skip the risk entirely: they leave the original live and sell the longer book as an expanded edition next to it.

Find the thing people know you for right now and write that book, before the platform changes or the moment passes. The Book Discovery Intensive is one engagement built to find it and shape the book around it. The case studies show what other authors captured while it was still true. Connect with me on LinkedIn and bring the question you can’t answer yet. Part of The Publishing and Marketing Hub.

An author who leaves a dated method book in the catalog, still teaching tactics the platform killed years ago, is failing the readers who trusted it. Write the book while the work is fresh, and when the platform moves, put out the new edition before a reader follows your old advice straight into a wall.

From the author

Focus on LinkedIn
Focus on LinkedIn is the rewritten playbook. The first edition sold fifteen thousand copies in three days and hit number 43 in all of Kindle, and this version covers the platform as it works now.

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