How to Self-Publish Your First Book

My name is Nicholas Cole and I have self published 10 books. And each month my library of self published books pays me around $10,000 on autopilot. I have very strong opinions about why self publishing is better than traditional publishing. So in today's video, I'm going to first share my argument for why 99% of writers would make more money and have way more creative freedom if they just self published. And then I'm going to answer some of the most commonly asked questions on how to actually self publish your first book. Okay, first, let me explain why book deals are such a bad idea for the vast majority of authors. Which means you, my fellow writer who just wants to be creative. You need to understand the business side of how traditional book deals work and what the publisher is actually promising you versus what you're getting. A publisher is good for three things. Number one, they're good for playing the New York Times bestseller game. You actually can't really play the New York Times bestseller game unless you're with a big publisher. Okay? If you sell a gazillion copies as a self published author, the New York Times list doesn't count you. So it's sort of a Ponzi scheme. You have to be with a publisher in order to play that game. Second is they help you get into physical bookstores. We'll talk about that in a minute. And then third is it gives you status and approval. So let's walk through each one of these. First, a publisher will help you win the New York Times bestseller game. All right, so listen to the words very carefully. New York Times best seller game. Not best written game, not most creative game, best seller game. So just think through it. If you're a writer who has a very particular vision and wants their book or story executed in a certain way, or has a strong point of view on an unpopular topic, not a mainstream topic, or just wants to write something from the heart and share it with the world. Right. Do you think you're going to win at the best seller game? No, you're not. And I think the thing that so many writers misunderstand is that that's okay. The problem is every writer wants to believe two opposing things at the exact same time. They want to believe that they should be able to write whatever they want to write about. And simultaneously, they want to believe that whatever they want to write about will also win the best seller game. And that is not true. Obviously, there are outliers, but broadly speaking, in 99% of cases, that's not true. But writers are Romantics, okay? They want to believe in the magic of writing for love and writing for capitalism all at the same time. So they rationalize the decision by saying to themselves. Which leads to the second point. A publisher will help you get into bookstores. The vast majority of writers think, if I sign a book deal, I will get into bookstores. And if I get into bookstores, I will become a best seller, regardless of the topic of my book. Okay? So you can see how the faulty beliefs start to compound on each other. So let's break this down. Have you ever walked into a bookstore? How many books are in the average bookstore? Okay, because on average, 3 million new books are published every single year. Now, are all 3 million books in every bookstore around the world? No. Right. But wait, I thought you just said taking a book deal would get you into bookstores. And this is where my dad used to always say this to me. He'd say, oh, you look, but you do not. See, grasshopper, a publisher doesn't get you into all bookstores. First of all, it depends on how big of an advance the publisher gives you. So a massive advance, like the kind they give to celebrities? Sure, they might start you out in Target and Barnes and Noble and throw you in, you know, 500 different locations around the country or around the world. A small advance, you'll be lucky if you get in five bookstores in the middle of Arkansas. This is a really important point. Bookstores are not a destination. They are a marketing channel. And so what the publisher does is put your book in a couple bookstores, and then they wait and they wait to see how it sells. If it sells really well, they'll put you in a couple more bookstores. And if it doesn't sell very well, then the test failed. And no more bookstores for you. Which again, goes back to the first point. Our Are you trying to win the best seller game? Then maybe bookstores will work to your advantage. But if you're not, then what's going to happen is you're going to take a book deal thinking, if I get into bookstores, I will sell lots of copies. Not realizing you aren't even writing a book that has the potential to sell a lot of copies in the first place, which means bookstores do nothing for you. And by the way, just some really important context here. The number of books bought online goes up every year, and the number of books bought in physical stores goes down every year. So the thing I never understand is why writers are chasing a declining trend line. I'll tell you exactly why. Though, because this is the real reason writers want book deals, even if the deal isn't in their best interest, and even if they know they would make more money self publishing, because a book deal gives writers status and approval. If you say you self published your book, the average person goes, oh, good, good for you. But if you say you got a book deal with a traditional publisher, even if that book deal was horrible financially, the average person goes, wow, that's so incredible. Congratulations. And so that is the unfortunate root of the root reason why most writers want book deals. What they really want more than being on the New York Times list or even seeing their book in bookstores or even making money, is for an authority figure to tell them, good job, you are now a real writer. They want the badge. And as someone who feels very strongly about the benefits of self publishing over traditional publishing, I live this on, on a daily basis. It is painfully apparent to me how much more status I would have and how much more validation I would get if I pursued a traditional book deal. The problem is the entrepreneur in me just I can't do is such a horrible financial decision. And the only way it turns out being ROI positive is if you win the lottery. Taking a book deal seems like an amazing idea if you end up writing the next atomic habits, but if your book doesn't reach that level, you're going to lose money on it. And just for some context, so you know, the average book deal advance is not a quarter million dollars. The average nonfiction book advance is around 25 grand, and the average fiction book advance is around 15 grand. And that might sound like a lot of money until you read the fine print and realize you, you don't get all of that all at once. You get a third now and then a third when you turn in the manuscript and then a third when your book gets published. And so that amount is spread over two or three years. So really you're getting paid like seven grand a year to write your book, AKA way less than minimum wage. Second, the average book deal pays you, the writer, on average, a 10 to 15% royalty after your advance has been recouped. Okay, so said differently, when the publisher gives you, say 25 grand, they are effectively buying 85% ownership of your book. So imagine you started a business and you went looking for investors, and an investor said, sure, I'll invest in your business, I'll give you $25,000, but I want 85%. In that context, almost every single person on earth, no matter how bad they are at business, understands that that is a horrible deal. And yet writers agree to this every single day. And it just makes absolutely no sense. So with all of that in mind, let's answer some questions about self publishing. All right, Greg the homie, what's up? Greg asks, where is the best place to find an editor? So, short answer, there's a really cool platform called Reedsy that is essentially a marketplace for editors. I use Reedsy because they also have this SAS tool that allows you to format your ebook and then you can just export it as an ebook file and as a PDF and you can upload it straight to Amazon. It's a really great tool, but the core of the platform is that it's a marketplace for editors. So if you're looking for an editor, I would poke around there. You could also find people on Upwork, you could find people on Fiverr like you could find people on Twitter. Editors are everywhere. My longer answer here is I think it's important to define the word editor. Like what are you actually looking for help with? Are you looking for someone to just do a final pass on grammar and spelling? This is primarily what I do with my books. I will write the whole thing and then I'll hire someone to just do a pass. I'll say flag any misspellings, flag any punctuation errors and leave like open ended questions as a comment if there's anything that's unclear that you want me to expand on. To me, that is the primary value of hiring an editor, especially when you have some competency in writing. But you might be looking for something different. You might be looking for someone to help you with the structure, someone to actually help you think through the book. Right? And if that's the case, you know, you can find individuals. The challenge with that is whenever you're looking for help with structure, what you're largely paying for is that person's subjective opinion. You know, like you, if you talk to three different editors, they might all tell you to structure it in three completely different ways. So you sort of have to find someone whose point of view you like or feels aligned with you, because that's really what you're buying. But if you just want sort of a repeatable or proven structure, I might look at a company like scribe or even publishing.com that does this all on the self published side, these companies are really great at creating repeatable structures. So you sort of have to decide what do you want out of hiring an editor. High level though, just my opinion. I think that hiring an editor is largely overrated and the reason that I think that is because the best editor is always the market. If you hire an editor, what you're really paying for, like I said, is their subjective opinion. But what would be a lot better and what's a lot more helpful is if you take all of the things that you want to write a book about and you just publish them out into the world, and then you're basically getting micro editors in all of your readers. Right? They're going to tell you, I understood that. I liked that, or I didn't understand that. I don't like that. I have a question. I don't have a question. That was great. You know, the market is the ultimate editor, and you get so many different perspectives on your writing. And I find oftentimes there's a direct correlation between the people who ask for, where do I find an editor? And they're also the same ones who go, I'm not going to write about any of these topics in public. So they jump straight to writing a book. And I always find that that person is always the same person. And on the other side of the spectrum, the people who are constantly writing about their ideas out in public, usually as I explain this to them, they realize, oh, I don't actually need an editor because the market has been my editor. So if you're sitting there and you're jumping straight from, you know, I've never written about any of these things online before. I want to write a book. That is a mistake. You should be writing about all of these things online first and letting the market be your editor. All right, SGG research asks, how do you balance writing what you love versus writing what sells? Is there a secret formula or do we just cry into our keyboards while caffeinating? So we did a whole study about this and the nonfiction world in my book Snow Leopard. It's one of the books in this pile. And what we found is that of the best selling 444, we did the top 500, but there were some duplicates and like the same title in ebook and print, whatever. So top 444 business books of the last two decades, the vast majority fell into two categories, personal development and personal finance. And the takeaway there is that people either want to improve their lives or they want to make more money. And those are the easiest topics for them to rationalize. Buying a product. Right, because the return is, if I buy this $20 book, you're going to give me something that improves my life or makes me more money. Everything else, every other topic, it didn't matter how great the book was, how well written it was, didn't. It didn't matter. And for the only ones that performed well that weren't personal development or personal finance, like maybe a leadership book, for example, they were written by someone extremely noteworthy, so a celebrity or some sort of mainstream famous CEO. And if you notice, almost every single nonfiction book on the New York Times bestseller list tends to fall into one of these two categories. So that's important context, right? If you want to write a best selling nonfiction book, what's the single best way to increase the likelihood that you achieve that goal? Well, it would probably be to write in one of those two categories. And by the way, the same rules apply to fiction as well. Okay. The single largest fiction category is romance. And most people don't realize that romance is twice as big as the next largest category, which is fantasy. So if you want to write a best selling fiction story, which two categories should you probably play in? Romance or fantasy? Right. Because if you they're the largest markets, so how do you increase your chances of success? You play inside the largest markets. And I think the mistake that writers make is they say, well, I don't want to do that. I want to write what I want to write about. Which is fine, but you can't say that and also ask, but how do I guarantee financial success? Or. And again, it's that cognitive dissonance that writers struggle with so much because they go, I have opinions on what I want to write about and I want to write about it for me. But also how do I guarantee that people buy it? And oftentimes those are not necessarily the same thing. All right, Sensei asks, what is the best way to pick and validate a topic? So I talk about this all day, every day. Short answer, start writing online. Okay, My best selling book, the Art and Business of Online Writing, which is another book in this pile, is really just one big collection of all the things I've written about online, about writing, about editing, about formatting, about rhythm, about hooks. Everything that I've written about this topic over the past 10 years. So I'm actually not surprised that my most engaged content in book form led to my most popular book. But a different way of thinking about this question, which I think is a lot more important, is isn't which topic will make for the best book? The real question is, which topic can you build a content engine around? And I think this idea is so powerful, and I find the vast majority of writers really do not understand this. Ryan Holiday is a Great example of this. Ryan's books on stoicism by themselves probably would not be as popular as they are today at as a topic. It's not necessarily the most popular topic on earth, and it's probably not something that just magically is going to stand out in a bookstore and everyone's going to want to buy it. The reason his books have grown so much in popularity is because he's built a content engine around the topic of stoicism. So he tweets about stoicism, he writes medium articles and blog posts about stoicism, he makes YouTube videos about stoicism, he has a newsletter about stoicism. It's the content engine that drives the book sales, not the other way around. And I find that most writers think, oh, if I just come up with the perfect idea, my book will sell itself. And that's not going to happen. The goal shouldn't be to write one book anyways, right? The real goal should be to build a one person publishing empire and to build an entire content engine and product ecosystem around a niche topic and then write books into that niche and dominate that niche for a very long time. That's the real goal. Joe asks, is it worth trying to self publish even if you haven't established an audience and tested on social what topics work? Short answer, no. No. And the irony is I say this all day long, even to really, really smart people, and they still ignore this advice. I can't tell you how many times I've talked with some executive and they're like, I want to write a book. And I'm like, have you written about this at all before? No. Have you tweeted about it? No. Have you written a newsletter about it? No. Have you written a single blog post about it? No. Then why do you want to write a book? And they want to write a book for all the wrong reasons and that is the worst place to start. So sometimes you need to learn this lesson the hard way, you know? But if you're trying to write a book about a topic you have not written about online, first, you are just wasting your time, wasting resources and making a huge mistake. All right, Noah asks the biggest question has to be distribution. I understand writing in public in order to get the feedback loop necessary to validate the value. But when it comes time to publish, should you do a soft launch to your list or just post on all platforms and let it ride? So I could talk about book marketing and distribution for eight hours, but I'll compress it down here for you. I have Found there are two types of book launches. The first is the really big launch, you know, six to 12 months of marketing leading into the day of the launch week. And then the other approach is you hit publish on Amazon and you immediately start working on the next one. And there are strong cases to be made for both approaches. Personally, I've always done the second and I think when you're a first time or second time author, I think that is the right strategy because you are still learning and acquiring so many of the skills. Right? Like what is the first bottleneck to becoming an author and writing a book? The very first bottleneck is actually writing and publishing your first book. It has nothing to do with getting the launch, right. It's have you ever written a book before? Great, go do that. You know, what's the next bottleneck of becoming a successful author? Well, it's actually not getting the launch right, it's having a library of books. Right? Because when you attract a reader, okay, great, you have one book. But it's so much better if you have three books or you have five books or you have 10 books because then they can go through your library, right? So work on the second one, work on the third one, and as time goes on, it will make more and more sense to focus on bigger launches. I'm feeling this my own career. I mean, I've self published 10 books, so I've learned a lot. And I can start to see how with the next one, with the next one, it might be worth me slowing down and doing three months of marketing ahead of time or six months of marketing ahead of time. But that's because I'm here and I self published my first book in 2016. So that's almost a decade later. But I'm of the opinion that until you've acquired a lot of these skills, it's kind of a waste of time and resource to engineer this perfect launch. Because there's so many components that you don't know what you don't know yet. And I'm more of the mind of get reps in, build your library and then focus on those things especially too, because if you do some huge launch and let's say the book absolutely explodes, well, there is a huge upside difference between doing that with your first book and say your first book becomes a giant bestseller versus doing that with your 10th book and you have a library of nine other books. Like could you imagine if James Clear's Atomic Habits wasn't his first book but it was his tenth book? If it was his Tenth book. The sales on all of the nine books before that also probably would have gone up and some might have even exploded, Right? But if it's your first book, the reader goes, hey, cool, I love this thing. What else do you have? Oh, you don't have anything else, Right? So I am so much more of the mind of postponing these things so that you can build foundations and build a library so that when something does hit, the whole average of the library goes up. The other thing I want to mention here about distribution is everyone thinks there's some sort of trick or secret strategy, like there's something that the best selling authors know that everybody else doesn't, or they think if I get a book deal, the publisher is going to take care of distribution for me. And I can tell you, I have talked to people at the biggest publishing houses in the world, okay? And here's what they tell you. They tell you if you want to sell books, you should start writing online and you should build an audience. And that is it. The whole secret is literally just, are you going to do it? Yes or no? And so many writers hear that and either convince themselves that's not it, just don't want to do it, talk themselves out of it, or they just are on this endless hunt for, no, that can't be it. There's probably some secret that makes me a bestseller. No, I'll tell you what the secret is. Ryan Holiday executes the blueprint every single day. Write about stoicism 100 times a day and then write books about stoicism. And then tell everyone who reads your free stoicism stuff to go buy your paid stoicism books. That is the model. And so you just take a niche and you build a content engine around it and you do it over and over again, and you do it for two decades. And that is the secret. The secret is just the long term consistency in a niche. That's the only thing that separates the really successful writers from everybody else. All right, Garrett asks, how many books in a series should you do before doing another series? Or pivoting? Is it different by genre? And at what point should you switch to a new series? So this is a great question. I am a recovering perfectionist. And the way I've learned to stay sober from overthinking is, is by making as many decisions as possible based on data. So how can we gather some data here? Well, before investing 5,000 hours writing some epic 10 book fantasy series, let's write one book. And maybe before we write even one book, we can write some short stories and publish those as short reads on Amazon instead. And maybe before even publishing any of those short reads on Amazon, we can start even smaller by publishing them as like a web serial on Royal Road or Wattpad or something like that. The point is that you always want to find ways to accelerate your feedback loops so that you can conduct a valid science experiment. And the only way that I've found to do that is start small, probably smaller than you're thinking or that you want to start with. Everyone wants to jump to, I have a 10 book epic fantasy series. Don't do that. Start very small. Write one short story, see if people are interested. Second is practicing in public. So not alone in your bedroom, not by yourself at a coffee shop. You have to get it in front of some people to see what's working, what's not. And you have to deploy volume. You know, you can't just write one thing and if that one thing doesn't work, then you throw in the towel. You know, you have to write lots of things because you need volume to see. Well, if you. Is the bottleneck just effort and it's hard. I struggle with this too. I mean, it's really hard to put a specific number on how much you should create before pivoting. But in general the answer is usually more. It's just more so. For example, this secret fiction series I'm working on that I'm hoping to have the first one out by the end of the year. I'm going to start with three books, three books in the series. If the first one flops, that's okay, I'm going to try again. I've already committed to a three book series, so I'm going to write the second one regardless. And then if the second one flops, two doesn't matter, I'm still going to press on and I'm going to do the third one. And then after three, you know, if nothing is clicking, I might consider pivoting to a different story. But before I do that, I'm really going to stress test whether or not I'm doing everything that I possibly can to run a clean and valid science experiment. And so I'm gonna put excerpts up on Royal Road. I'm going to tweet about it, I'm gonna make YouTube videos about it, I'm gonna write newsletters about it. I'm going to try and get early readers. I'm gonna ask them if they can give me some feedback, maybe in exchange for a couple free bonuses or something. I am going to deploy as much effort and resource and attention as possible so that I can get a real read on, no pun intended, a real read on whether or not is it a series problem or is it an effort problem? And I just, I find more times than not, the bottleneck for writers is usually not talent. A lot of people are very talented. The real bottleneck is effort. They just deploy almost no effort and they expect the world in return. And, you know, no shade here, Garrett, but I also find that people who ask this question, you know, they're like, at what point should you pivot? They're trying to solve a problem they don't have yet. Most of the time, the people who ask this question haven't even written anything yet, period. So they're like, what do I do If I write 20 things and it doesn't work, then? So they want the answer to a question that comes way further down the road, but they haven't even done the first thing, which is, well, did you write something and did you publish it? And until you actually go write and publish 10 or 20 things, this question and this problem is, isn't even on the table yet. And this is something. Writers have a special talent for trying to solve problems they don't have. You know what problem to solve, it's right in front of you. Write a bunch of stuff and put it out into the world and see what happens. Then when you do that, then you can focus on tweaking and going, what could I do better? All right. Gene asks, most self publishing stories focus on genre writing. What are the best practices for writers of literary and upmarket fiction? Any success stories to share stories? So I love this question because to be perfectly honest, of all the different types of books that I read, I enjoy literature the most. It was my favorite part of studying in college whenever I'm traveling or. So I'm way more likely to pick up a piece of literary fiction than I am genre fiction. And probably because deep down I am romantic about great writing, you know, And I really love the idea of writing literary fiction. It's something that I want to do. The challenge, though, is I am not confused about the fact that generally speaking, literature is where writers typically make the least amount of money because literature is the hardest to read, which by definition means it is the smallest total addressable market. You know, I always forget, I forget what the stat is, but it's like a huge percent of the country and of the world can't even read English. So that's bottleneck number one. And then number two is literary fiction is such upmarket and complicated English and language that the vast majority of people can't read beyond like a third or fourth grade reading level. So you're playing in the smallest market of publishing and of fiction. So you have to sort of anchor your expectations to that and recognize if you play in the smallest market, your upside is significantly less and significantly more rare than someone who plays in a giant category like romance or fantasy or even sci fi, mystery, thriller, stuff like that, where there are not just 100 times more readers, but 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times more readers. Now, a couple interesting success stories to look at. I can acknowledge that literary fiction doesn't make as much money as genre fiction, but there are still some. Some cool success stories. And these are people that I look to for inspiration. And I think they bring unique perspective to how you can write upmarket fiction but still find a way to achieve some version of mainstream success. So the first one is Gabrielle Zevin. She wrote this novel most recently called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. This novel is a really amazing blend of, I think, of genre fiction with literary qualities. Fun fact. She's a Harvard grad where she studied English with a concentration in American literature. And it shows, I mean, in her writing, it's very clear that she has a strong understanding of language. And reading the novel, it's very clear that it is not a genre fiction book. That said, it is more fun to read and it is an easier read than the average literary novel. You know, like, really highbrow literary novels are hard to read. Like they are a mental exercise. And this doesn't feel that way, but it still feels smart. So if you want to write highbrow fiction, but you don't want to write, you know, other side of the spectrum. Colleen Hoover, romance fiction, stories. I think aiming somewhere in the middle is a good idea. And Gabrielle Zevin as a writer is a really good middle ground to look at. Her books are fun. Her books are really smart. There's some very clever wordplay and use of language in there, but they are not. It's not like reading Crime and Punishment. You know, a different success story would be George Saunders. So he's an American literary writer and he's a professor at Syracuse where he teaches creative writing. And he has for the past, you know, two decades, and he's written all sorts of literary fiction, but he's found a lot of success recently with two projects. So first he wrote this book on Russian literature called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Which again, going back to everything that I talk about in terms of writing and writing in the digital age, that is really just him doubling down on a data point. That book is essentially the book version of the class he's been teaching at Syracuse for the past two decades. So he just went, wow, so students love my class. I should probably scale my class by writing a book about it. And no surprise, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain has become one of the, if not his most popular book. Right? So take what's working, double down on it. But then second, and this is where, you know, it goes even further, doubling down again. He also has a paid substack, where it's essentially an evergreen version of his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is the reflection of the class he's been teaching for the past 20 years. So in his substack, he just picks other different stories to break down and explain and dig into the writing. Right. And that's exactly what he's doing in his class, which is what he does in his book. But now he's just doing the evergreen version. It never ends in his substack. No surprise. His substack is very, very popular. It's one of the most popular substacks, one of the most popular paid newsletters on Substack and my napkin math. I don't. I don't know if this is correct or not, but judging by, you know, engagement and how many paying users I think he might have, he's probably making upwards of 50 grand a month from his substack at this point, which is way more than he's making from his. His book deals and his literary fiction sales, and way more than he's getting paid as a professor at Syracuse. Okay, so, of course, if you ask this question to a bunch of literary snobs, you're going to get very different answers. How do you make a living as a literary writer? They all live in the cognitive dissonance. They're like, you shouldn't care about money. You should write only for the love and only for the passion. And then two seconds later, they're going to pull you aside and be like, writers don't make any money anymore. So they all live in the cognitive dissonance. My takeaway is, I think if you really like literary fiction, write it, but write it with the expectations that most people don't make a ton of money writing literary fiction. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. There's a lot of value in it. And some of my Favorite writing is literary fiction, but just find other ways to monetize your talents. I really think that George Saunders is an amazing framework here. I mean, he writes literary fiction, he's really good at it, it's super high quality. But he essentially makes all of his money from the nonfiction side, explaining and digging into what makes great literary fiction. And that is such an amazing barbell. And I think about that with my own writing too. I will write literary fiction, but I'm not going to, you know, expect those books to pay my rent. Right. Like, I'm going to do it because I love it and I'm going to monetize my talents in other vehicles. All right. And lastly, Bobby asks, how do you handle the design side of self publishing? So the design side is not as complicated as people think. So just so you know, when you self publish on Amazon, literally all you have to do is you create a KDP account, you upload your manuscript, you upload a cover image, either a JPEG for an ebook cover or a PDF if you're doing a print copy because it shows front and back. And then every time someone buys the book, Amazon prints it on demand and ships it to them. I don't hold any of these. I don't hold them in a warehouse. I don't hold inventory. I'm not the one driving to ups shipping these out to readers. I just upload it to Amazon and every time someone orders Amazon prints it on demand and extracts my printing cost and there you go. So you literally have everything that a publisher would have at your disposal. And it is that easy. Like all of the information, all of the walkthroughs and everything is on the Internet and you can figure it out in a couple hours. And it is not complicated at all. It's gotten a lot easier. I remember self publishing my first book 10 years ago, and it's 10 times easier now than it was 10 years ago. You know, so anyone can do this. Most writers also don't realize that all of the designers who work for major publishers also want to freelance on the side. Okay? So you can literally get the same designer who designs Stephen King's book covers to design your book cover. You can get the same person. And so that's why I don't understand when writers say, you know, oh, I can create such a higher quality product with a, with a publisher. Yeah, maybe they'll help you print some super fancy ding dong hardcover, something that Amazon won't let you. Although Amazon now you can do hardcover as well. But a lot of Times writers talk about this through the lens of design. Like, oh, I'm going to get access to these special people that are going to make my book look beautiful. You can hire them. You can literally hire them. And it is not as expensive as you think. It's not like, oh, it's going to cost me 100 grand to work with this person. It's going to cost you like three grand, you know, five grand, ten grand, max, Max. And so if you have a business or if you have, you know, you start with something a little cheaper. Maybe you, you don't invest as much in your first book or your second book. I remember my first book, I invested like a thousand bucks into, you know, and then that starts to make you a little money and then the next one makes you a little money. And then eventually, you know, now every book that I self publish, I invest about five grand into it. But that's okay because I invest five grand into the art and business of online writing. And that books made me $200,000. Right. So you have to look at your books as many businesses and then start to ladder it up and realize that you can increase the quality with each one. And hiring these people is not as expensive as you think. And you have access to all of them. If you want to find a lot of really great designers, there's a website called I need a book cover.com and it's basically like a big directory of all sorts of designers who currently work or have worked at major publishers or publications or. I mean these are really talented people and they all want to freelance. And so I always find that so many of the questions people have on the self publishing side and why they default to I'll just take a book deal is because they don't realize, they don't know the answers to these questions. They don't realize how easy this process is and how it's like, yeah, you invest 10, 20 hours in learning these skills and then all of a sudden you are a one person publishing machine. And now I can write and self publish a book every three months if I wanted to. I could do this every month if I wanted to. And that is my plan. I'm going to self publish books for the rest of my life and I am going to write a hundred of them, 200 of them, and I'm going to build a library and I'm never going to go buy rental properties. I don't need rental properties. My library of books is going to pay me. And I just want to pass along this point of view to as many writers as possible because these skills are not that difficult. They are so doable. This is not capital intensive. If you have any aspirations of writing lots of things over the course of your life, self publishing is the way to go. Now, I will end this by saying there is a time and a place to take a book deal, but you should not do it when you don't have leverage. At a certain point I will probably do a book deal, but I will do it for one book. I will do it when I have maximum leverage. I will do it when I can negotiate a deal that the average writer cannot. Right. I will have postponed this decision for a very, very, very, very, very long time. And to be perfectly honest, I'm only going to do it when I say I'm ready to play the New York Times game and I'm going to do it one time and I'm going to get the New York Times bestseller badge and then I'm going to be done and I'm going to go right back to my library of self published books. And I think just internalizing that as a mental model. If you want to build a successful career as a writer and really as an author, it's important to understand that you have these options and you don't have to jump to taking a book deal. You can start self published, you can postpone that decision and I encourage you to postpone that decision until you have maximum leverage. There are some really great. I'll leave you with this. There are some really great podcasts with Hugh Howey, the fiction writer who wrote the Silo series, where he talks about negotiating his book deal and things that he postponed and things that he negotiated and things that he learned about working with traditional publishers and decisions he ultimately made. Like he ultimately decided that he wanted to keep the rights to a lot of his work and it's made him a ton of money as a result. So just educate yourself. You know, I'm going to continue talking about self publishing. I hope answering these questions for you was helpful, but this is not as hard as you think. And anyone can get started very, very quickly writing and self publishing their first book. Just don't want to do it. Talk themselves out of it, or they just are on this endless hunt for no, that can't be it. There's probably some secret that makes me a best seller. No, I'll tell you what the secret is. Ryan Holiday executes the blueprint every single day. Write about stoicism 100 times a day and then write books about Stoicism and then tell everyone who reads your free stoicism stuff to go buy your paid stoicism books. That is the model. And so you just take a niche and you build a content engine around it and you do it over and over again and you do it for two decades. And that is the secret. The secret is just the long term consistency in a niche. That's the only thing that separates the really successful writers from everybody else. All right, Garrett asks, how many books in a series should you do before doing another series or pivoting? Is it different by genre and at what point should you switch to a new series? So this is a great question. I am a recovering perfectionist and the way I've learned to stay sober from overthinking is by making as many decisions as possible based on data. So how can we gather some data here? Well, before investing 5,000 hours writing some epic, you know, 10 book fantasy series, let's write one book. And maybe before we write even one book, we can write some short stories and publish those as short reads on Amazon instead. And maybe before even publishing any of those short reads on Amazon, we can start even smaller by publishing them as like a web serial on Royal Road or Wattpad or something like that. The point is that you always want to find ways to accelerate your feedback loops so that you can conduct a valid science experiment. And the only way that I've found to do that is start small, probably smaller than your thinking or that you want to start with. Everyone wants to jump to, I have a 10 book epic fantasy series. Don't do that. Start very small. Write one short story, see if people are interested. Second is practicing in public. So not alone in your bedroom, not by yourself at a coffee shop. You have to get it in front of some people to see what's working, what's not. And you have to deploy volume. You know, you can't just write one thing, and if that one thing doesn't work, then you throw in the towel. You know, you have to write lots of things because you need volume to see. Well, is the bottleneck just effort? And it's hard. I struggle with this too. I mean, it's really hard to put a specific number on how much you should create before pivoting. But in general, the answer is usually more. It's just more. So, for example, this secret fiction series I'm working on that I'm hoping to have the first one out by the end of the year. I'm going to start with three books. Three books in a series. If the first one flops, that's okay, I'm going to try again. I've already committed to a three book series, so I'm going to write the second one regardless. And then if the second one flops too, doesn't matter, I'm still going to press on and I'm going to do the third one. And then after three, if nothing is clicking, I might consider pivoting to a different story. But before I do that, I'm really going to stress test whether or not I'm doing everything that I possibly can to run a clean and valid science experiment. And so I'm going to put excerpts up on Royal Road. I'm going to tweet about it, I'm going to make YouTube videos about it, I'm going to write newsletters about it. I'm going to try and get early readers. I'm going to ask them if they can give me some feedback, maybe in exchange for a couple free bonuses or something. I am going to deploy as much effort and, and resource and attention as possible so that I can get a real read on, no pun intended, a real read on whether or not is it a series problem or is it an effort problem? And I find more times than not, the bottleneck for writers is usually not talent. A lot of people are very talented. The real bottleneck is effort. They just deploy almost no effort and they expect the world to in return. And no shade here, Garrett, but I also find that people who ask this question, they're like, at what point should you pivot? They're trying to solve a problem they don't have yet. Most of the time the people who ask this question haven't even written anything yet, period. So they're like, what do I do If I write 20 things and it doesn't work? Then they want the answer to a question that comes way further down the road. But they haven't even done the first thing, which is, well, did you write something and did you publish it? And until you actually go write and publish 10 or 20 things, this question and this problem isn't even on the table yet. And this is something writers have a special talent for trying to solve problems they don't have. You know what problem to solve, it's right in front of you. Write a bunch of stuff and put it out into the world and see what happens. Then when you do that, then you can focus on tweaking and going, what could I do better? All right. Gene asks, most self publishing stories focus on genre writing. What are the best practices for writers of literary and upmarket fiction. Any success stories to share? So I love this question because to get.