I remember the feeling in my stomach when I clicked Publish on my first book in 2016. Three months of writing. Hundreds of hours of research. A cover I was proud of.
And then nothing. Zero sales for two weeks straight. I’d fallen into the classic trap every new author falls into. I thought writing the book was the hard part. Wrong.
Why does a second self-published book often fail too?
The same things. That took the lesson from embarrassing to useful.
My second book also flopped spectacularly. Same problems, different title. At that point it stopped being possible to blame the subject or the timing or bad luck, because I’d run the experiment twice and got the same result. Two identical failures is data. One is a story you can tell yourself about the market.
What was the breakthrough for Richard Lowe’s first book?
I stopped thinking like a writer and started thinking like a reader.
As a writer, I evaluated my book by its contents: whether the research was sound, whether the argument held, whether the prose was any good. Those are the right questions for the manuscript and they’re entirely irrelevant to whether anybody buys it. A reader never reaches the contents. A reader sees a title, a cover, a category, a description, and a price, and makes a decision in about four seconds. If any of those fail, the quality of chapter nine isn’t consulted. Every one of my failures was upstream of the writing. I’d produced a good book and then presented it in a way that gave nobody a reason to look. I’ve had the other experience too. My book on selling on eBay sold about 5,000 copies, and I don’t believe for a moment its prose was better than my first book’s. I think it sold because the title told a reader exactly what problem it solved, and my first book gave nobody that much.
Why do covers matter so much?
Because the cover is the first thing a buyer sees, and authors treat it as decoration.
Plenty of authors upload covers that look amateur even when the content inside is professional. And then they wonder why their book isn’t selling.
Every one of my failures was upstream of the writing.
I did this. My first cover was one I was proud of, and being proud of it was the problem, because I was judging it as an object I’d made instead of as a signal in a list of forty thumbnails. It looked like a self-published book. That’s all the information a browsing reader needs.
This is the single cheapest thing to fix and the one people defend most.
Has publishing got easier since?
It’s got more complicated, a different thing.
The market has changed dramatically since I published that first book on Kindle in 2016. What was once a simple choice between Amazon and maybe one other platform has exploded into dozens of options, each with its own requirements, benefits and quirks.
I don’t think more options have made life easier for anybody publishing a first book.
They’ve created more ways to make a decision that’s hard to reverse, and the platforms aren’t in any hurry to tell you which ones those are. Make good choices at the beginning and everything later gets easier. Make bad ones and you spend years working around something you picked in an afternoon.
My take
Fix the cover first. It’s the cheapest repair and the one authors defend hardest. I was proud of my first cover. That pride was the problem, because I judged it as something I’d made instead of as a thumbnail in a row of forty. Think like the reader scrolling past. Make the platform decisions carefully at the start, since some of them are hard to reverse.
What should you do before you click Publish?
Look at your cover next to forty others at thumbnail size. That’s the only test that matters and it takes five minutes.
Write the description before the book is finished. If you can’t make it sound gripping, that’s information about the book and not about your copywriting.
Work out how anybody would find it. Not in theory. The specific path a specific person takes to arrive at your page.
Choose the platform for the goal you have. The right answer differs depending on whether you want reach, rights, bookshops or margin, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who gives you the same answer for all four.
Assume the writing was the entry requirement. It was necessary and it wasn’t sufficient, and believing otherwise is what produced my two weeks of zero.
| Check | How to do it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Cover | View it at thumbnail size next to forty others | Whether a browsing reader stops or scrolls past |
| Description | Write it before the book is finished | If it can’t sound gripping, that’s information about the book |
| Discovery path | Trace the specific path a specific person takes to your page | Whether anybody could find it in practice |
| Platform | Match it to your goal: reach, rights, bookshops or margin | Some early choices are hard to reverse |
| Mindset | Treat the writing as the entry requirement | Writing was necessary, not sufficient |
The stomach feeling when I clicked Publish was real, and it was about the wrong thing. I thought I’d finished. I’d qualified.
The book on this: Publish Your Book is 198 pages on every major publishing path, how the platforms really differ, and how to pick the one that fits the goal you have for the book.
Zero sales for two weeks taught me what Publish Your Book covers. It’s my self-publishing guide, written from more than a hundred titles published since that first one in 2016.
