In 2013 I quit my job as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, packed up, and moved to Florida.
I’d 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 do new authors expect to happen after publishing?
I hadn’t thought about it. That’s the 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’ll find it. Every part of that is reasonable except the last clause. That contains all the work and which I’d allocated no time or thought to whatsoever. Telling a few people isn’t a launch. Waiting isn’t 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’s a marketing strategy. It’s a production strategy, and it addresses a completely different problem. Five books nobody can find are five instances of the same unsolved problem.
That advice persists because it’s comforting. It tells a writer the solution is more of the thing they enjoy, instead of the thing they’re avoiding. I think the people repeating it do real harm, because a writer can follow it faithfully for years and never once find out why nobody’s buying.
Who should you take marketing advice from?
Authors are told to just write more books, as if that’s a marketing strategy.
Not from gurus, and I’m careful to say that about myself too. I’m not a marketing guru. I’m an author who figured out how to market books by doing it badly until I got better at it. 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’ve tried a great deal of things and learned from most of them, including the ones that didn’t work. They’re frequently more informative.
What makes a book start selling?
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. Authors who rewrite a perfectly good description for the fifth time when nobody’s seeing the page at all are fixing the wrong link.
Discovery is a chain of three links, and effort spent on a link that already works 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 didn’t know that at the time and I would have spent a month on the description.
Diagnosing which link is broken is unglamorous and it’s 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 multibillion 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. It wasn’t sufficient. There’s a version of that story that ends badly, and nobody tells it, 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.
I was 53 when I left. At that age a new job was probably not going to be easy to find, so the question became what kind of freelancer I’d be. I became a writer, and then a ghostwriter. That turned out really, really well, though it was a long process and none of it happened overnight.
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.
My take
Find the broken link before you fix anything. My twelve-copy book failed because nobody ever saw it, so rewriting the description or changing the price would have been wasted. Traffic comes first, then conversion. Take marketing advice from people who did it badly and kept at it until they got better. Diagnosis is unglamorous and it’s most of the job.
How do you find what is broken in your book marketing?
Find out which link is broken before you fix anything. Most marketing effort goes to the wrong step.
Writing more books is production, and it solves a problem you may not have. I’d stop anybody from starting another book until they know why the ones already out aren’t moving.
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 haven’t found anybody who skipped that part.
Twelve copies. I still use that number when somebody tells me their launch went badly, because it’s difficult to do worse and I got from there to here by finding out what I’d misunderstood.
| Lesson | Why |
|---|---|
| Find the broken link first | Discovery is a chain: encounter, interest, purchase. Most effort goes to the wrong step. |
| Writing more books is production | It solves a problem you may not have; five books nobody can find are the same problem. |
| Distrust anyone 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 produced my twelve copies. |
| Expect to be bad at it first | I learned by doing it badly until I got better; I haven’t found anybody who skipped that. |
I wrote Sell Your Books as an author who learned marketing by doing it badly first. It covers what moves a book once it is out, minus the guru hype.
