In 2013 I quit my job as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s, packed up, and moved to Florida.
I had decided I was going to make it as a professional writer. I had no idea what I was doing.
My first book was on cybersecurity. I published it, told a few people, and waited. It sold maybe a dozen copies.
What did I think was going to happen?
Honestly, I had not thought about it, which is the whole problem in one sentence.
There was an implicit model in my head and it went: write a good book, publish it, and people who need it will find it. Every part of that is reasonable except the last clause, which contains all the work and which I had allocated no time or thought to whatsoever.
Telling a few people is not a launch. Waiting is not a strategy. I did both, with complete confidence, because the book was good and I assumed good was the operative variable.
What is wrong with the standard advice?
That the indie publishing space is drowning in bad advice, and the worst of it sounds like encouragement.
Authors are told to just write more books, as if that is a marketing strategy. It is not. It is a production strategy, and it addresses a completely different problem. Five books nobody can find are not more findable than one book nobody can find. They are five instances of the same unsolved problem.
That advice persists because it is comforting. It tells a writer that the solution is more of the thing they enjoy, instead of the thing they are avoiding.
Who should you take marketing advice from?
Not from gurus, and I am careful to say that about myself too.
I am not a marketing guru. I am an author who figured out how to market books by doing it badly until I got better at it.
That distinction matters when you are deciding whose advice to follow. Somebody selling a system has an incentive to present it as repeatable and complete. Somebody describing what happened to them has an incentive to be accurate, because the specifics are the only thing they have.
I have tried a great deal of things and learned from most of them, including the ones that did not work, which are frequently more informative.
What changed things?
Understanding that discovery is a chain and that only one link is usually broken.
Somebody has to encounter the book. Then be interested enough to look properly. Then be convinced enough to buy. Three separate steps, each with its own failure mode, and effort spent on a step that was already working produces nothing.
My twelve-copy book failed at the first link. Nobody encountered it. Everything I could have done to the description or the price or the cover would have been wasted, because there was no traffic to convert. I did not know that at the time and I would have spent a month on the description.
Diagnosing which link is broken is unglamorous and it is most of the job.
Was quitting the job a mistake?
No, and it was considerably riskier than I understood.
I left a director’s role at a sixteen billion dollar company to do something I had no working knowledge of, on the strength of a conviction that I could write. The conviction turned out to be correct and it was not sufficient, and there is a version of that story that ends badly and is told by nobody because those people go quiet.
What made it survivable was being willing to find out I was wrong about how this worked, repeatedly, for years.
The book on this: Sell Your Books is the marketing book I needed then, written by somebody who learned it by doing it badly until he got better at it.
What would I tell somebody publishing now?
Find out which link is broken before you fix anything. Most marketing effort goes to the wrong step.
Writing more books is not marketing. It is production, and it solves a problem you may not have.
Distrust anybody selling a complete system. The people who know this best describe what happened to them, with numbers.
Do something before publication. Publishing into silence and hoping is what produced my twelve copies.
Expect to be bad at it first. I learned this by doing it badly until I got better, and I have not found anybody who skipped that part.
Twelve copies. I still use that number when somebody tells me their launch went badly, because it is genuinely difficult to do worse and I got from there to here by finding out what I had misunderstood.
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