Sadly I toiled for 8 years on a novel (while working a day job). It was a massive effort.
It might be hard for people to understand but I felt I had to write it (i.e. writers curse).
I wish I had spent all that time on studying programming etc. Unfortunately humans are not fully rational. I actually like my novel. But it wasn't worth it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Get-Restart-Jack-Gowan-ebook/dp...
But hey that's life. Shrug.
Writers should just write for the pleasure of writing and expect that the majority won't make it. It's about as likely as winning the lottery
I’m surprised that’s not covered here in this article
As I'm sure you know, marketing really is the worst. After years of work it's hard to be motivated enough to do too. But it's pretty essential.
What you're pointing out is the fundamental tenet our startup is build around.
When writing non-fiction, you start with a very clear promise, and you specify who it's for and who it's not for.
We talk about that in other articles on our site.
What I've learned as well is that most self-published writers have not the fainted clue what publishers do to sell books and/or actively do not want to do what publishers do to sell books. E.g. the traditional sales process for a paperback starts 6 months plus before publishing, and involves calling up distributors and retailers, and sending out review copies for months. It takes an upfront investment and time, and that too will only work if people believe your book will sell for them - if you don't have a big-name publisher behind you who can promise a marketing campaign, you're back to needing to have an audience (or a very compelling story).
Most self-published authors don't even know how to ensure they get reviews. It took me ages too, before I found someone to spend time reaching out to potential reviewers (it's a minefield; so many scammers - I was extremely cautious)
Advertising is a total minefield - most ads, including Amazon ads where the purchasing intent is a lot stronger, take ages of tweaking to get a positive ROI, and even then you need an audience to get decent returns, because getting people to buy based on an ad if they've never heard of you is hard.
After all that, you can still expect it to take years to get traction.
Charlie Stross commented on Twitter recently that it took him at least a decade (it might have been longer; maybe 15 years?) before he surpassed 5k pounds a year from his writing. That was with a publisher. Of course he's writing relatively niche sci fi. If you go for an easier market, like romance or thrillers, you may have a better shot (maybe; the competition is tougher too). But even professional authors who eventually make a good living off their writing often take a long time to get there.
One of the things a publisher gives you, that many who choose to self-publish don't want, though, is an objective third party assessing if you've written something that they think is likely to sell. Of course they can be wrong, and frequently are. But they're investors, effectively, considering whether it would responsible for them to put their resources and time at risk to back a book or an author. They're selective because frankly most authors are not very good, and many one the ones that are good or even amazing are unlikely to sell or unlikely to sell to their audience.
When self-publishing you get to ignore that and pretend you're the best ever. Or you can be more realistic, and expect that you most likely won't sell much, but of the people who buy, some portion will be looking forward to your next book. And so unless you're truly awful, sales will at least slowly grow.
But odds are you won't make all that much. You might write far better than JK Rowling and still not sell very much because you write something that just doesn't catch the imagination of book buyers.
But if you're at least aware that being a self-published author means at least half your time will be sales and marketing rather than writing, you'll likely already do better than most self-published authors.
Now for the next part, which no one like's to hear: the easy part is over. Yep, you heard that right: getting your first work finished and out there was relatively easy compared to the mountain you have set yourself on to climb. Yes, only 10% of people dare climb that mountain, and here you are--among the 10%. Now, as you look forward, I can tell you that at every major step, every major obstacle, and every major setback, only 10% of people keep going.
You might think there's a secret to this writing thing, but there isn't. Just like when we're hiking up a mountain, the only thing that matters is putting one foot in front of the other. That's the only way you climb. So you HAVE to get back in there (mentally) and keep going!
You just started on an amazingly difficult and frustrating and beautiful journey in life. You made it to where only 10% of people get to--and now you want to stop the journey?
My friend, your journey has only just begun.
What I can say is that the time, the sacrifice, and then the crappy marketing ploys (no one tells you about that). It's real hard work. It's really hard when you get nothing for all your efforts.
I know a 2nd book would be easier. But it still would take a lot of time. Probably 3-4 years.
Potentially in... a while... I might write again. I am full of ideas. But honestly I'd rather build IT stuff right now. Programming is my new love.
Don't get me wrong there is a real beauty in writing. But, well there is a lot to life. And I'd like to explore different things. There's a ton of creativity in IT.
I can always start writing again when I'm 55/60. I actually don't think it's a young man's activity. There's no money in it either.
But yeah, sitting in the sun during my twilight years... writing. Sounds great.
"Hey you, you are beautiful"
"Hey, you are doing a great job this week, I'm proud of you"
The Twitter ones are telling everyone who reads that they did a good job this week. It's a public message. How can it have any sincerity?
I understand the desire to console the GP here, but the Twitter ones make no sense to me.
It's easy to tell someone else to be unhappy and poor isn't it?
> Writers should just write for the pleasure of writing and expect that the majority won't make it. It's about as likely as winning the lottery
Think that's especially true for fiction.
Thanks for sharing your story.
A constructive criticism: your cover doesn't stand out (and I'm being kind). If I had found your book randomly I would ignore it completely. I know this is totally subjective so take it with a grain of salt. Probably my cover will not be better.
> Jurgen has a headache that won't go away.
Ok, I'm intrigued.
> He knows his fellow scientist Simon is watching him, waiting for him to be careless and kill another rat.
Uhhh wut? I'm totally confused, and to be honest "why is he killing rats" is not really a question where I'm on the edge of my seat looking for an answer.
"Jurgen has a headache that won't go away. He knows his fellow scientist Simon is watching him, waiting for him to be careless and kill another rat. Ben knows all about these mistakes, and more. But he's online, always online, talking with others. He's in trouble and doesn't know how to get out of it. Mark fears he knows what actually is going on in the lab and the consequences for all three of them could be fatal. Who is the liar? Who is in danger? Who will die?"
Thank you for your feedback. Writing a back cover does take skill. Others have commented that they like it - but I'm not arrogant to claim it's flawless. It will appeal to some and not to others.
Hmmmm it has got me thinking on how to improve it tbh... It's been such a long time that I've thought about my work.
The line you quote, is supposed to convey paranoia. You're right why care about Jürgen killing a dumb rat? But then there is Ben and Mark etc.
I would love to have your feedback on my book (it sounds like it would be brutal). Personally I can't see that Ive sold you though ^^
Thanks again
If you have money then it would be great fun. But it's a huge burden if not.
Note: you will hear about some novels that take only X weeks and make a ton of money. e.g. twilight. But most writers I ever met the average was around 5-7 years for the first book. If you're taking X weeks, the odds are it will be pretty shit unless it's very autobiographical. I loved dhamma bums by Jack Kerouac for example and I think he smashed that out in about 3 months.
The best way I've found (and I have someone doing it for me) is to contact book bloggers on Twitter and offer free review copies. You need to be careful (Amazon's guidelines allow free copies for books, with caveats, such as not being allowed to require a review, or offer any kind of other incentives -- anyone doing this should read their rules carefully). But even that is time consuming and it takes a long time to start getting results (people are busy; you're not paying them; books take time to read; about a thousand other people are begging them to review their books).
It's important though - sales are highly dependent on reviews, and things like advertising a book very rarely has a positive ROI if you don't get everything lining up (title, cover, enough reviews).
So if you find a reliable reviewer, they're like gold-dust if you write more books.
What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup.
Contrast this to the prospect of running a successful restaurant that is fundamentally limited by geography. No matter how well it serves region A, region B, C, D, etc is still up for grabs. A franchise can try to duplicate its success, but it's much more costly than a successful author making endless free digital copies of their work.
That's nonsense with respect to books. If you self-publish on the most popular distribution channel (Amazon), you keep quite a large percentage of your revenue. The issue isn't the middleman, it's that there's a huge number of other books out there and unless you already have an audience or put the work into creating one somehow, not many people are going to find your work and buy it. If lots of people actually do buy it, you get a pretty good cut. But it's hard to get to that point.
And app developers.
You can always make a usable app or non-fiction book, so you have one extra dimension of objectively measured value of your product. The first one, common to software and art, is the quality of the implementation.
It's oddly worded, but the math roughly works depending on your self publishing costs.
> If you ask questions of an industry and they won't tell you the answer, that's always a good sign that someone's getting very wealthy. In publishing, if you ask an author, ask any author, how much did it cost to print the book? What are your COGS? They will not know. Ask any literary agent that question and they'll think you're off your rocker. Ask any publisher to give you that information transparently and they will rip up your contract.
> So call the printers in China, pick your favorite book, find out some print brokers here in the US, and say, "What did the printing of those books cost? Send me a spreadsheet." And when they do and you find out that a $50 retail book cost about $2 to print, and you're going to get 10% of [off?] cover price, they're requiring that you order 5,000 for your own list and they're going to give you a quarter of a million dollar advance, you realize that there's no way they've taken no risk at all.
Interestingly, the person speaking was in the restaurant business… There’s quite a bit of insight in that episode.
[0] https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/20135760/kokonas-know-...
First book addressed a timely topic but ultimately aged out very quickly and I got burnt out trying to keep up with updates. It made roughly $80,000 in lifetime sales, of which I kept 96% (credit card fees + hosting overhead).
Second book addressed a broader niche but fell into several of the traps he describes and only made $3000.
I will likely buy his book and try to apply it on either a revision of book two or something new.
I certaintly don't know a damn thing about selling books. But I am an avid reader of nonfiction and this is exactly the opposite of how I shop for books myself.
Other than the odd "how-to", I'm skeptical of any book promising me anything other than the author's diligent study and incisive distillation of a topic. I've read many books which caused my mind to grow and really excited me about the world but I've never read a book that "solved my problem". Of which, I assure you, I have many.
But I agree with the author that the later kind of books seems much more popular with the general public, being handed solutions appears to be more attractive to many people that being encouraged to think about problems that probably aren't even relevant to them. And in a sense it's perfectly understandable, but I personally prefer the intellectual stimulation from a good essay over what is essentially a marketing speech from a professional hustler.
There just aren't that many people like that.
For the gen. pop. you're better off making a crystal clear promise, being very clear about who should and shouldn't read it, and delivering on that promise so the book proves useful to the reader and gets recommended.
Most people read non-fiction to solve a problem. It seems that what you and I like is learning for learning's sake.
These days, most or a large portion of books that have involve substance and research written by academics, who probably would like the books to make money but are OK with them not making money 'cause they still get fame and possibly academic kudos. Of course, there are professional researchers and writers who make a living publishing but they have their substance, they have their niche and they need only very specific advice as opposed to the (apparently confused) generalities of the article.
And thing the author of this website is he seems to aim to sell a book about getting rich writing books and those books would have to be about getting rich too. It's more a multilevel marketing scheme - which doesn't mean someone won't rich here but the entire enterprise is grim and not something I'd want to read about - well, Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait And Switch is somewhat interesting. But still.
Curious of your unsolved problems.
How to be a kinder person.
How to not take things for granted.
How to contribute more to my community.
How to accept that due to a drift in my world views, I will likely never have as close a relationship with my parents as when I was young.
How to decide if one should withdraw from the world as much as possible or embrace it.
How to view every person as valuable.
How to respect every person even when they are creating problems for you.
How to cope with long term illness in the family.
How to feel about having amassed an amount of money that seems disproportionate to my contribution to society.
How to disagree with people without resenting them (even when you believe the things they believe are hurting people).
How to raise a kid who is curious and interested in things.
How to raise a kid that shuns cruelty.
How guide a kid away from traps you fell into yourself without taking over their life.
How to show people you appreciate them.
I'm not saying no book has helped with any of the above. But I have never read a book that fixed one of these problems or really even ever told me anything very interesting about them. What to do is mostly obvious. How to get oneself to do those things is the hard part. And I think that kind of change doesn't come from reading one book. It comes from many absorbed over a long period of time. It comes from daily devotions (not specifically of the Christian variety, though I have seen those guide people well too).
Maybe I'm wrong but that's the best I've figured out.
Everyone that reads my book is surprised to hear it's not topping the charts or plastered everywhere my audience hangs out. My book beat out all the competition when it came out in terms of reviews.
While the points in this post are valid, I don't believe they get to the bottom of what holds back sales.
Frankly, I don't know what the answer is -- I have a vague idea of what it could be but I haven't had a chance to try those things. Perhaps if my book had been in all airport bookstores a few years ago, it might have taken off (no pun intended) like Tim Ferriss' book but who knows.
I assume you mean "Billion Dollar Muslim: Why We Need Spiritually Inspired Entrepreneurs".
It clearly makes mistake #3: "writing broadly about the topic instead of making a clear promise about what the reader will get out of it".
What is "clear promise about what the reader will get out of it" in "Billion Dollar Muslim"?
Frankly, based on the title I don't see why I should read it, even if I'm somewhat interested in entrepreneurship.
"Why We Need Spiritually Inspired Entrepreneurs" never occurred to me as a question worth answering. Not the way "how to increase sales?" is a question I might be interested in knowing the answer to.
BTW: you website has expired SSL certificate so the main source of promoting your book is as good as gone.
Uh, it promises to explain Why We Need Spiritually Inspired Entrepreneurs.
I don't think the book needs to appeal to you to count as a clear promise the reader will get something out of it! You could object in the same way to a book called "How to Draw in Charcoal", how "Frankly, based on the title I don't see why I should read it".
You might have a point about the promise of the book, but that depends on whether your muslim or not. Most muslims who come across it, understand the premise immediately, but still, you might have a point there.
Marketing requires a huge budget in the VC age since you're competing with ever increasing ad prices. I have spent a lot of money on advertising regardless.
One thing that has been a major sticking point for me however, ist hat distribution has been a huge issue. I wouldn't say my target market is that small. Most of the Middle East and Asia is quite ripe for my book but amazon doest operate it's self-publishing arm out there and the alternatives have not been that enticing.
I started reading a blogger who teaches how to make a successful blog, sells courses about it, etc. I soon realized her blog is just about her making money from promising to help you make money from your blog. A frighteningly vacuous operation. It seems a modern cousin to the old ad in magazines promising to reveal the secret to wealth for $20. When you write to the given address you get a letter back saying "Do as I do." It's a pyramid operation.
Writing books about writing books seems similar. Selling the dream of high sales when you write on other topics, when their books are the same "making money from promising to help you make money" from your book seems a bit fishy, has a scammy element. It's more than a lil "Do as I do."
I've just bought an e-book online which is essentially about promoting your content online (so broadly aligned with what you're talking about). The book was relatively expensive but I'd say definitely worth it - contents are really well thought out and comes with a lot of supporting material. It also seems to have been pretty successful for the author.
But the irony is that if this wasn't something that had been promoted successfully online then I'm not sure that the author would have had the credibility to be able to sell a product of this type. Why should I believe you if you're not doing it yourself?
I don't consider that good or bad, it just is. Similar to how some people prefer fish over meat and vice versa.
However, I will push back against the broad stroke generalization that you either teach people for free or charge money and be considered a scam.
Our advice is solid and battle-tested. There's Rob who wrote the Mom Test and Devin who wrote The Workshop Survival guide with Rob. And then there's our community with over a 100 up and coming authors who we're helping increase the probability of success through our process. The early results are already positive and it'll only improve as we keep trying to nail our process even more.
Is YC a scam because it isn't free?
If an author is like Tai Lopez you don't get word of mouth and burn through your lead pool. That means you're constantly trying to attract fresh leads, which is why these scams eventually tend to break.
What we're doing is teaching a process that minimizes some of the common mistakes authors make. Yes, we're charging money for that.
But if you look at our process, or heck, just read this article, you should be able to see that there's value worth paying for.
If you use nothing else but this article with these 4 common pitfalls to avoid, you'll do better vs. not having read it. And this was free.
So, I don't think your argument holds any water.
If there's a magic money fountain and someone is selling info on how to get it, rather than exploiting it for all it's worth, selling the info is the magic money fountain they've found. And the money is supposed to come from you.
When Marques Brownlee tells me what motivated him to buy an iPhone it's always a gymnastic I need to play in my head on if I should even try to relate to a dude who buys/gets handed a couple devices or cars every week.
Personally, I've made a relatively trivial amount of money from the books I've written, but I have little doubt they've been good investments of my time--some of which has been work time.
ADDED: I'd add that "promoting your book effectively" probably isn't free. Most authors aren't going to get a lot of publisher support so now you're hiring a publicist, paying for review copies, paying to travel (normally) to speak at events where you do book signings and promote your book, etc.
"A 98% drop in sales after the first year, Seventy percent of traditionally published titles fail to pay out a single dollar in royalties, Vanishingly few nonfiction books sell even five hundred copies"
I.e. you can't just slap a book together and think you've got credibility. People see right through that.
This is something Tendayi Viki of Strategyzer talked to us about:
"HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE BOOK AS A PRODUCT? In my line of work, credibility is very important. I can’t cold call companies and be like “Hey, you know that those innovation programs are very important? Well, we have the best one. You can buy it now for three easy payments of 599.” Reputation matters a lot. It’s so much easier if someone comes to you. If they already respect me before we start the conversation.
Now, there are two ways to do that. You can deliberately be the snake oil salesmen. But that’s why those books don’t work because it’s so obvious what the person is trying to do. They write a book so they can say “I wrote a book”.
Or, you can say “I actually have something authentic to share and let me share that.” That’s the approach I’ve taken. I know I need to build a reputation but I don’t want to build it on nothing. If people pull back the curtains, they can see substance."
Notes I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing you of saying that. I'm merely adding to your comment.
Reference https://writeusefulbooks.com/resources/Tendayi-Viki/
It also explicitly is calling out methods that do not require fame, nor does it espouse a goal of fortune (unless you treat a living wage as a fortune).
We pay other people to do things that aren’t fun for us, not the other way around.
'Follow your passion' brings with it the perversity of if you love it, then that should be reward enough. Much in the way that doctors and nurses have been labeled as 'heroes' is used as a smoke screen to not increase pay or alleviate working conditions because you love your work and can you really be a hero if you expect money from it?
One way or another, it seems, human society appears bent on perpetuating the idea that some people should generate value for others without compensation in regards to that value.
Publishers OTOH diversify so can build their empires by backing multiple authors etc, some of whom break out.
I know that amazing feeling the author mentions of getting a "yes", while totally ignoring that at best I was going to make pennies. If I recall it was 10% after all publishing costs were paid for. However, I had a full time job, so this was for-the-love-of-it rather than as a real source of income.
Love works too. :)
Self-help gurus, spiritual charlatans, snake-oil salesmen, get-rich-quick con men, corporate consultants, slick marketing experts; these are the people who are making profit in our scam economy.
Just focus your energy on a fucking scam and you will make money by the boatload. You don't need a long article to tell you that. Just open your eyes and look around.
It's not just writing which is affected; every 'intellectual' industry is affected; art, music, science, politics, technology... All the successful people are scammers. That's why you can't find any good content anywhere these days. The shit always floats to the top. The media is concentrating all our attention on the shit and away from the good stuff.
Also, the rich people who are running the show are morons with no taste and 0 intellect.
Step 0: already be successful at marketing or be well-known.
There are certainly some valid points, but his solution pre-supposes that you already know your marketing.
So the actual steps would be:
* consistently produce good content for several years, build an audience (and an email list, as quaint as it sounds)
* write a book, self-publish it
* promote the out of it
* THEN try to get a publisher on board
You've got the order wrong. He got "famous" because The MOM Test did well. It wasn't "He was famous and then The MOM Test did well."
The danger with your line of reasoning is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If one truly believes the need to be famous, they can't ever succeed.
However, our process is designed to show that's not the case and to help "normal people" succeed.
I can recommend https://newline.co
I wrote a book with them and made enough to pay my rent for over a year with the money I made.
there are many such books where no author ever expects to make money -- they have other incentives due to the way academia is organized.
Those don't classify as the type of non-fiction problem solving books we're talking about.
All models and methods are an approximation of the world (excluding pure mathematics). That error in approximation creates problems when you don't respect the domain of validity of the theory.
Right now, what you claim as over-generalising, I argue is you taking our theory outside its domain of validity.
I agree that it breaks there, but that's only because it wasn't designed for that domain so it's kind of a strawman argument.
