No Fire to Share

How To Write a Book You Don’t Have to Pretend Is Selling Well

 

When I was young, and demonstrably dumber, I subscribed to, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” ideologies. My clients depended on me to write their briefs, negotiate with their attorneys, research their cases, sometimes even to save their lives. All that “hustle” focused on their lives almost cost me mine.

These days all my clients require is that I make books they’ve written available to the public. But they always want me to make their books sell more copies. More copies. More copies. Moar!

Here’s a book I did for a Congresswoman that I took from 0 copies to more than 1000 copies a year:

Kiss Lori for Me on Amazon

 

Both in color, and in black and white.

Here are the atrocious covers the previous publisher wanted her book to go to market with:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1F9Ou_6cFNbVsgkFBGBSsgHdIz6m6hksl?usp=drive_link

Here are the alternates we had for her to choose from:

Everybody wants to sell more copies, build more audience, annex more reach.

Given what’s at stake, I did what I used to do when my occupation held people’s lives dangling precariously in the balance.

I investigated the rules. I read all the literature. I tested the theories. I played Chicken, and then Truth or Dare, with the consequences.

From that awkward alchemy, I fashioned blueprints and stratagems. I successfully reverse-engineered why some books sell many units, and some get chucked into digital and physical wastebins without guilt or further contemplation.

Every book that fails breaks the same rules.

1. Cover is unprofessionally done and gives, “My nephew is doing a PhotoShop course after school so he helped me with this.”
2. Editing and formatting is poor or non-existent. Errors from the first page to the end.
3. Writing is abominable, self-serving, delivers no value, is more focused on the author than the reader.
4. The author hates being a salesperson, and either doesn’t trust or can’t afford marketing.

Marketers will tell you about niches, and riches, and riches in niches but most of that is bullshit. Publishers have never been good at categorizing books. Publishers don’t even know how to properly classify books written by Colleen Hoover and she sells more books than God Himself. No joke. Colleen regularly outsells the Bible. And her publishers regularly fight over what categories her books are going to be placed in.

Moreover, categories aren’t uniform across platforms, across library classification schemes, or across agents’, editors’, or publishers’ experience or areas of expertise. How your book is classified at Bowker is not how it’s going to be classified in Barnes and Noble, and is certainly not how the Library of Congress is going to classify it. Niches matter, but not anywhere as much as the writing, or the marketing.

This is not to say that if your book navigates all these jagged shoals a bestseller magically presents itself; that your book gains whimsical cotton wings, soars off shelves, and nestles affectionately into readers’ empty bosoms like puppies seeking comfort. People still need to like your book. Your book needs to touch people. Lots of people. Make them laugh, cry, learn, think, discover truths about themselves, or the world they inhabit. 

The best books show readers that the world they believed they knew was false. That the real world is deeper, more complex, but still manageable. Maybe even easier to navigate by the light of the new flame you’ve risked your life clambering down the mountain to give them.

The authors of all good books, best selling books, cosplay Prometheus. They steal from the gods and spend the time after their discovery setting readers’ minds ablaze. Most would-be writers abhor reading, and having never read, have never walked with gods and have no fire to share.

In short, if what you want is a best selling book, then YOUR book needs to do more than just exist. Your book needs to be enjoyable. Your book needs to make your readers want more. Make them declare that this will do for now, but still somehow just isn’t quite enough. It needs to do that to people you know, and people you will never meet.

That’s the rules.

If you don’t know how to do that yourself, I’m happy to do it for you. I’ve already done it twenty times. If you can’t afford me, I’ll teach you how. I know lots of rules. Even if I am agnostic about them.

I don’t take selfies. That’s not a rule. Merely a consequence of how I live. Don’t judge me. 😔 I’ve always been more interested in everything else; more focused on the adventure than being concerned with me.