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 had fallen into the classic trap every new author falls into. I thought writing the book was the hard part.
Wrong.
What did I get wrong the second time?
The same things, which is the part 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 had 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?
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 are 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 is not consulted.
Every one of my failures was upstream of the writing. I had produced a good book and then presented it in a way that gave nobody a reason to look.
Why do covers matter so much?
Because the cover is doing the job the whole book depends on, 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 is not selling.
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 had made instead of as a signal in a list of forty thumbnails. It looked like a self-published book. That is 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 has got more complicated, which is not the same thing.
The landscape 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.
More options is not obviously better for somebody publishing their first book. It means more ways to make a decision that is difficult to reverse, and several of these choices are difficult to reverse. If you make good choices at the beginning you can make it easier later down the road, and if you do not, you spend years working around something you picked in an afternoon.
What should you do before you click Publish?
Look at your cover next to forty others at thumbnail size. That is the only test that matters and it takes five minutes.
Write the description before the book is finished. If you cannot make it sound compelling, that is 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, not the default. The right answer differs depending on whether you want reach, rights, bookshops or margin.
Assume the writing was the entry requirement. It was necessary and it was not sufficient, and believing otherwise is what produced my two weeks of zero.
The stomach feeling when I clicked Publish was real, and it was about the wrong thing. I thought I had finished. I had 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.
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