This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Guess how many new books come out every single day? I had to look this up myself because I was like, I don't know, like a thousand maybe? I mean, that seems like a big number, but there's actually 4,500 to 6,000 English language titles, new books that come out every single day. And it's great that there are lots of new authors out there, but of course a lot of these books are coming out being AI written, written very quickly, computers, bots, et cetera. So we've got all these new books coming out and an author or an aspiring author out there wants to know, like, should I even bother? How can a first time author stand out in a market of 5,000 or so books coming out every
day? He's actually wondering, is it even worth finishing the manuscript? Well, let's talk about it. I love writing books. Been doing that for 15 years. No plans to stop over here just to be
clear. But let's talk about a first time author. What might they do to stand out? And how should you even think about, you know, these thousands of books that are coming out every day? Great question. Going to delve into it after this quick shout out to our sponsor. Stay tuned.
Hi, Chris. I'm Jared from Colorado Springs. I recently heard a stat that tens of thousands of new books hit the market every single day, both traditionally and self published. If that's even close to true, how on earth can a first time author stand out? I'm halfway through writing my own nonfiction book and the idea of competing with that kind of volume feels overwhelming. Can you
put the numbers in perspective and talk about what a new author can realistically do to break through all the noise? Well, Jared, it does sound overwhelming, right? To consider how many of those books come out. But I want you to understand that a lot of those books sell zero copies. Like a lot of those books sell zero copies, maybe 10 copies. You know, the average new title is selling fewer
than 250 copies its first year. So most of those books are not really your competition. There are some breakout indie and first time author successes that still happen almost every month. So the difference lies in positioning and marketing. You really want to think about like hyper specific positioning of your book. Like who are you trying to write for? Like who are you trying to serve
with your book? I was reading something from Johnny B. Truant recently. He's an old friend of mine. And he's done a lot in this space. He's self published many, many books successfully. He
wrote the Fat Vampire series, which became a TV show. He's written a bunch of other series as well. He's got this whole strategy of like giving away the first one for free and then people get hooked. They want to read the rest of them. He also has a new book called The Artisan Author, which subtitle here is the low stress, high quality fan focused approach to escaping the publishing rat race. So he knows more about self publishing than me. But as I said, he's
been very successful with it. So I've been reading an advanced copy of that book. And something that I've learned from it is, you know, a book without an audience is noise. So you want to start with a six to 12 month runway, you want to be sharing about the book before it comes out. If you have a newsletter, well, if you don't have a newsletter, you should set one up and start sharing about it.
And you don't have to have huge numbers. You know, if you have a thousand engaged email subscribers, that that is enough doesn't have to be 10,000 or 100,000. What you want to do is trigger the algorithms at Amazon and Apple books to lower the price of the book and then see your book get recommended more often, because Amazon really rewards relevance. It's also great to have some advanced reviewers lined up. Make sure people actually read the book, they need to be genuine reviews, but having those posted goes a long way. Release ebook paperback and audiobook simultaneously,
that can help and then treat your launch week like a product launch. So maybe you want like a 99 cent ebook promo for the first 72 hours. That doesn't work with traditional publishing, but that's something you can do with self publishing. Go on as many podcasts as you can as a guest. And it's not that hard these days, there's so many podcasts out there. So the more that you do with this,
then the more you're going to separate yourself from that batch of 5000 books coming out every day that no one's ever going to read. Most of those titles have zero marketing behind them, so I wouldn't worry about that. If you do even these basic things, it's not guaranteeing that you're going to be an overnight success, of course, but you are going to be separated from all of that noise. It's going to help you leapfrog thousands of books instantly. And also check out Johnny's book, The Artisan Author. I do think it's very helpful in these situations. I think it costs
something like $6. It's on Amazon and he does good work. Most importantly, Jared, don't give up. Don't delay that manuscript. I definitely think you should finish it and put it out there.
Let us know what happens. Listeners, let me know if you have a question or comment, sidehustleschool.com. Notes, pages for every episode. You can download or stream the entire archive there as well. And of course, new episodes drop every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
