Speaker argues that authors should master one marketing channel before moving to another, illustrated by a personal anecdote about convention-selling. The speaker reports doing roughly 150–200 shows pre-pandemic, and claims deep mastery of selling books at conventions — not necessarily the highest earner, but predictable and consistently effective at selling compared with peers.
This is the thing that most people miss is they don't master the one thing before they move to the next thing. They're like, oh, cool. But, like, I could go to convention by the end of it. My, like, big run, which ended basically in the pandemic, and I did like 150 or 200 shows, something like that. Like, I could show up two minutes before a conference, before a convention, and like, no, I just. I knew what I was going to make. But by, like, the first hour of that conference, I knew what I would make walk away with by the end of it most of the time. Because, like, I mastered doing the. Like, I was not the best person at the convention. I did not make the most money, but I knew that my. What my thing was and how to sell my books better than any other human being that was there commensurate to how they felt. People make more money, but no one knew how to sell their books better than me.
