Before you publish your first book, these are the 17 harsh truths that you really should know. And these are things that surprised me even though I had been in the writing world for a while. Let's get started with number one.
Writing a good book doesn't guarantee success. So, I have a friend Garrett Calcetera who wrote a book called Dram Wielder. And I read it.
It was a very good book. I enjoyed it quite a lot, but you know, it sold okay. It wasn't a life-changing quit your job sort of amount, but it wasn't an embarrassing amount either.
Listen, lots of really well-written books get lost, and writers get depressed over this. But don't tell yourself, "Oh, I'm a loser cuz my book didn't sell 50,000 copies. " Don't judge your writing skills by how well your book sells.
Judge your marketing skills. Those are two very different skill sets. And the second harsh truth that you need to know is being a genius at marketing doesn't guarantee success.
I don't know if you guys have heard of The Age of Scorpius, the debut novel by Audrey Winter. She was a Tik Tok star. This was her first book.
And let me tell you, she is a genius at promoting herself. Her book sold 6,400 pre-sales. For a debut author, that is unheard of.
Those are serious numbers. Unfortunately, the book really sucked. Not like bad, but like horrible.
When I checked on Amazon, I think it had one and a half stars, and now it's up to two and a half stars. So yeah, she was really good at marketing but then didn't do the work to actually tell a good story. Yeah, you kind of need to be good at both writing and marketing.
Now for the third harsh truth is that copy editing will be an eyeopening experience. A friend of mine had a book coming out in a week and he said he already had it copy edited by an English teacher friend of his and I started reading it and I found five to 10 mistakes per page. And I'm not even a copy editor.
I'm a developmental editor. That's why Danielle here on my team at BookFox, she handles all the copy ending stuff because she's an absolute genius at it. What most writers think is, "Oh, I've read through my manuscript a 100 times.
Like, I've got 99% of the mistakes out. " No. No, you don't.
If you work with a professional copy editor, they will find 5 to 10 mistakes per page. I guarantee it. A good copy editor will correct thousands of things in your manuscript.
Not like 10 or 20 mistakes, but thousands. And by the way, consider joining BookFox Lab, my new coaching program. We currently have 24 writers in there writing all sorts of different genres.
They're absolutely wonderful and brilliant. And if you want to join the next cohort starts in January, the fourth harsh truth that you definitely need to know is that traditional publication is slow. So, I don't know whether you're still trying to decide between self-publishing or going the traditional route, but I will say that your time frame matters a lot.
If you're going for traditional publishing, you have to allow a 2-year time period, at least 6 months for sending it out to agents and for the agents to send it to publishers and then anywhere between a year and a year and a half to lead time before that book comes out. So, if you want your book out in 3 months or in 6 months, it really means that self-publishing is the only option for you. I'm just trying to give you the proper expectations for when you send a book out.
You're not measuring it in months. You're usually measuring that time span in years. Now, it's time for the fifth harsh truth.
it is 50% of your marketing is cover design. So, when someone tells me that their first book isn't selling, I can usually reply, "Well, it's because you need a different cover. " Even without saying the cover, I'm right, I don't know, like 90% of the time.
And it's just impossible to sell even the best book in the world with a very bad cover. Now, sometimes your cover is really beautiful and it looks really good, but it doesn't signal the genre correctly, and that can sabotage your sales just as much as having an ugly cover. So, here's a test.
Just show your book cover for one second and one second only to anyone who doesn't know anything about your book and see what they would say. See how they would describe your book from that book cover. If the first thing they say doesn't apply to your genre, like if they don't say something about fantasy or sci-fi or romance or whatever it is that you're writing, you done bad.
You done messed up. So, please do yourself a favor and get the absolute best cover designer you can afford. The sixth harsh truth that you definitely need to know is that launch week is absolutely bonkers.
So, you know how in the film industry they always talk about opening weekends and they compare all the millions of dollars that each film had during their opening weekend and it's really a makeorb breakak moment. If a film plummets, they're like they write it off, they abandon it, they don't care about it anymore. However, if it has a great opening weekend, they pour more advertising into it.
So, there's an analogy in books. You also have a short window when your book launches to make an impression. And if you don't make an impression there, it's very difficult to get momentum later on in the cycle.
For books is the first one to two weeks. That's your chance. What that means is if you have a full-time job, this is the time to take time off and devote yourself full-time to marketing, getting interviews, appearing on podcasts, promoting it on social media, and you know, guilt tripping everyone you know personally to buy it.
It's really not possible to come to a book say 8 months or a year after you publish it and be like now I'm going to promote it. It just you lost the momentum. You lost it.
Seventh harsh truth is a book is a stepping stone not a money tree. So when authors come to me and they say I want to earn money through publishing this book we have to have a difficult conversation because you don't earn money off a single book. You earn money if you have a series of books and that one book is sort of a teaser that hooks people and then they buy the next six or seven books in the series.
You can earn money that way. You can also earn money if that book is a stepping stone to teaching opportunities or speaking opportunities. In other words, you leverage that first book as a way to earn money in other ways.
It gives you possibilities that weren't open before you publish that first book. The eighth thing you absolutely need to know before that first book is one book isn't enough. So, I know what you're going to say.
Harper Lee only published To Kill a Mockingbird and then you know she coasted on that for 40 years. Okay, for 99. 9999% of authors, you can't just publish a single book.
You have to publish multiple books in the same genre or in the same series. I mean, series always do sell much better than standalones. It's true.
And you definitely need a backlist of titles that if you hook a reader on that one book, then they'll go and buy all your other books. Think about each book that you write as an advertisement for you and your stories. You wouldn't want just one advertisement.
No, you want to be running a whole bunch of advertisements. So, the more books that you have, the more chances that people will latch on to one, like you, and then read a lot more of you. The ninth harsh truth is that publishers want you to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
So, this is if you publish the traditional route, but I think this is helpful for self-published authors to know. So, if you got some sort of huge 7 figureure advance from a publisher, of course, they're going to do a lot of heavy lifting to help you with marketing and help you get, you know, do a book tour and all that sort of stuff, but very few people get that. If you got 5K or 10K or 15K or 30K for your book, then you're going to be responsible for paying for a book tour.
They're probably not going to pay for a lot of advertising. Their publicist is not going to have very much time for you. I think a lot of self-published authors dream of traditional publishing because they have this fanciful notion that the publisher is going to take so much of the work off of their shoulders in terms of marketing.
But in my experience, that's simply not the case. You still are doing the lion share of marketing. It's just you have someone to assist you and to coach you through the process.
The 10th harsh truth is that you want to start writing the next one. We've talked about the delay from when you're done with a book and sending it out to when that book actually gets published. What do you do with that space?
You got to start writing the next book. If you're not writing the next book in the series, then at least you should be writing something in the same genre. So people who appreciated the first book have a good chance of appreciating this next one.
Honestly, it's kind of a race because once you publish that first one, if it goes really well, you need a followup or else readers are going to forget about you. I want you to imagine going to a swap meet and setting up a whole booth and then just having one thing to sell, one lonely thing to sell as opposed to going to a swap meet and having a whole bunch of things on your shelf. you have a much higher chance of actually selling stuff if you have a lot of options.
So, get those books out there. Have a whole bunch of options for your readers. Okay, time for the 11th harsh truth.
Pre-sales is the most important metric. So, I ended up selling 1,200 pre-sale copies of the Lynchpin Writer. What that means is on the day that my book became live to Amazon, it looked like I sold 1,200 copies in a day and they're like, "Whoa, who is this guy?
" So, I shot to the top of the rankings in all the bestseller categories that applied to my book. And therefore, a lot of people found me and I ended up selling about 800 more copies just in that week because people are like, "What is this book? Who is this guy?
He must be huge. " Yeah. Yeah, I am.
Anyway, I mean, it's important to get those pre-sales because it can really double the amount of books that you sell in that first week or two if you can get to the top of those bestseller lists. And the correlary to that is that means you need to do a lot of the marketing and promotion before your book even launches. That's the correct order.
You don't do it after your book launches. No, no, no, no. You need to spend a couple of months, 3 months, really preparing all the stuff so that when your book launches, there's a huge flurry of sales.
The 12th harsh truth is that publication day can feel anticlimactic. You work so hard on this book, writing it, promoting it, doing all the things, and then there aren't even fireworks on the day of your publication. Like, you don't get a nice review in the New York Times.
You don't have strangers emailing you and being like, "You're incredible. " The sad truth is that nothing really seems to happen on the day of your publication. So, just don't be dismayed by that.
If you think about the numbers, there are what, 4 million books published just in the United States alone. not even worldwide, just in the United States. So that correlates to roughly 11,000 books a day.
So your goal, your mission is to make publication day feel as special as you can. Line up a whole bunch of podcasts to go live on publication day. Go out to dinner with your friends and have a celebration of yourself.
Meet up with your writing club and one of them should bake you a birthday cake to celebrate your book's birthday. You can make the right plans to make your publication day feel special, but if you don't do it, nobody will. The 13th harsh truth is that negative reviews are unavoidable.
Listen, you need to steal yourself. You need to gird up those loins. And just be ready.
There's going to be some one stars. People can be crazy. They can misread you.
They can just not be the right reader for your book. They'll have really odd reactions to your book. They'll have weird misinterpretations.
Eh, you know, you shrug it off and be like, you can't win everybody. Really, the only hard and fast rule is you never respond to bad reviews. It's always a bad idea.
No matter what you think you're trying to correct, don't do it. Don't reach out. Let them have their opinion.
It's okay. You've already had your say, right? You wrote the book.
They've heard plenty from you. So, you're not going to convince them in any way. And writers often ask me, "Hey, John, what do I do about negative reviews?
" Well, I'll tell you what you do. One, you work on getting more reviews. And the way you do that is by finding the right audience for this book.
If you find the right audience, they're going to tend to rate it higher. And the second thing to do is don't let it get in your head. You should expect this book is not for everyone.
Not everyone's going to like it because no book is for everyone. So, you know, you just go on with your day and write another book and know that that book is going to find an audience, an audience who will like it and love it. The 14th harsh truth is that you can't stop piracy.
Listen, after you publish your book, within weeks, sometimes even shorter than that, your book's going to be available on all sorts of free sites for free download. And yeah, you could try to take some sort of legal action, get a lawyer to drop some contracts and say in some mean letters, but the legal cost will be like way more, exponentially more than you would ever lose in actual sales. It's very much like a whack-a-ole game where you hit one and it immediately pops up in another location.
It's pretty much impossible to stop. I know that's frustrating. I know some of you are like tearing your hair out right now just thinking about it.
But I encourage you to take these two steps. First, you want to copyright your book. And I think the recent anthropic class action suit where people are getting payouts as long as their book was copyrighted shows how important copyright is.
Second, you want to focus all of your efforts on an audience who would prefer to buy your book because they like you or they respect you or they want a physical copy rather than steal it or pirate it off some sort of dodgy website. All right, we have three more points. Let's look at 15.
Have proper expectations for book reviews. So, I think when you publish your first book, you're like, I have sold so many copies, why aren't I getting any reviews? I think a proper expectation in terms of numbers is 3 to 5% of people who buy your book will end up reviewing it.
Now, if you have an absolutely incredible book or really terrible book, those numbers might skew higher, but I think those are about the proper expectations as 3 to five. And you get those type of numbers because, hey, some people just didn't finish it and a lot of people might not even have started it. And then there are others that, you know what, they just didn't like it that much and so they don't feel like leaving a bad review.
That's okay, too. just keep getting more and more sales. And then I would also recommend that at the back of your book, you have some sort of page that says, "Hey, you know, like if you like this, review it on Goodreads and Amazon.
" 16th harsh truth. You need to know this one. Imposttor syndrome never goes away.
I know so many authors who have been pretty successful and they've published four, five, six books, well-reed books, and they still feel like they haven't made it. Listen, just feel good. Pat yourself on the back.
You're like, "I published this book. I'm pretty amazing. " A lot of people say they're going to write a book and then they don't ever do it.
I did. I'm awesome. This is the ticker tape that should be running in your brain.
You should be encouraging yourself. You should feel good about this accomplishment despite all the, you know, sales or negative views. Ignore all that stuff, right?
You published a book. It's your story. Great work.
And the very last point, number 17, is publishing is a long game. So instead of viewing publishing your first book as a finish line, look at it as the beginning of a race. Have a long-term view of all the other stuff that you can publish.
And you know, keep your chin up. Even if this first book is a disappointment, think about everything that you can learn about the process of writing a book so you can improve it for next time. And I'm not just talking about the writing side of things.
Obviously, you're going to get better at that, but I'm also talking about all the marketing and publicity, too. like the stuff of being a writer in terms of a career. You're going to get better at that, too.
Overall, this list of 17 things isn't meant to discourage you. Being an author is wonderful. I really want that for you.
And I think if you listen to these truth, you can manage your expectations and know how to prepare for the launch of your first book. And also, don't forget about BookFox Lab. It's a wonderful community of writers and mentors.
Uh you will gain so much if you join. So check out the next cohort start date.
