Selling Books: Nobody's Coming To Save You

One of the weirder experiences I had running a small press is the number of authors who viewed me as some sort of savior. One or two of our own authors felt this way, but the truly strange part is how many people felt this way even though we didn’t publish them at all. Somehow they thought that something I was doing was going to magically sell them more books. For all of you who thought this way about me, or who think this way about some other publisher (small, medium, or large), I have bad news.

Nobody is coming to save you.

The modern publishing industry is brutal on every level. If you’re self published, you know a huge part of the pain. Over a million new books per year are published on Amazon - and that’s before AI. Meanwhile, overall book sales have been stagnant or trending downward for at least two decades. And at the same time, new forms of entertainment like video games, streaming video, and social media are competing for the same leisure time that books once occupied.

But it’s not just the indies suffering. Big presses have been struggling as well, and have fundamentally altered their business models. Mid size presses are mostly non-existent now.

On top of that, the new era of online book sales and social media has fundamentally transformed the sales environment. Most advertising is now online, and is often too expensive to be worth it for low margin products like books. Putting books at a visible spot on the shelf still works, but only for the top 0.1% of books.

If you want a successful career as an author, you have to take charge of marketing your own books - even if you already have a publisher.

Who’s the youngest big-pub blockbuster author you can think of? Go ahead and take a minute to think. I’ll wait. Or better yet, sound off in the comments, then come back.

The youngest big-pub blockbuster author I can think of is Brandon Sanderson, and he’s 49.

I can hear some nitpickers in the crowd saying that it takes a long time to truly become a blockbuster, and I get it. It usually does. But I think you could unambiguously call Sanderson a blockbuster author when he took over the Wheel of Time series from Robert Jordan - 16 years ago. And he achieved that blockbuster status in no small part from that exact takeover.

Who else has true blockbuster status at a younger age? What younger author could put a book out now and instantly sell a few hundred thousand copies based only on his name?

Big pub isn’t really taking new authors to start their careers anymore. There are a number of reasons for this. It’s always been hard to start a new author’s career from scratch, but it’s even harder . With profits declining, big pub has been cutting into the unprofitable activities. That means slashing up and coming authors. But also, the corporate restructuring of big pub has transformed them mostly into a vehicle for syphoning corporate funds toward payouts to favored individuals - politicians whose votes the corporate owners need and classes of individuals they want to promote for their own reasons.

Will they accept new authors? Sometimes, yes. If you fit into one of the protected classes, or if you’re a powerful politician they want to bribe - or if you already sell well enough that you don’t need them.

Mid tier presses aren’t engaged in the money laundering the same way, but they’re still really only taking authors who have already proven they can sell. If you can’t sell already, they’re not interested - and if you can sell already, you won’t really benefit from them.

The average fiction novel sells about 150 copies.

I chose my words specifically there. That’s not the average self published novel, or the average small press novel. That’s the average novel, period. Realize that that average includes traditionally published novels. Authors like J.K. Rowling and R.L. Stine who have sold hundreds of millions of books are bringing those averages up.

In today’s market, you can’t even rely on a publisher to do that for you. It’s not that they’re not trying, either. Believe me, we tried. I’ll have future posts about exactly this topic and why publishers mostly can’t do it anymore. But trust me, it’s true. The world works differently now. Whether you have a publisher or not, you’re going to have to market your own book.

That average of 150 copies? It means that most authors run out of steam after they sell copies to all of their friends and family. If you want to sell beyond friends and family, you have to get serious about it.

And that means that you have to treat it like a serious business.

That doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands of dollars on it. It doesn’t mean you have to work 80 hour weeks. Do keep in mind, though, that if you want to be successful, you do have to put in either time or money. And if you want to be very successful, you’re probably going to have to put in both.

But mostly what I mean is that the time and money you do spend on it needs to be taken very seriously.

Because nobody is coming to save you.