Why Self-Publishing a Book Doesn’t Work (For Me)

At the beginning of 2022, I decided to stop working with any author who had previously been self-published. There are two reasons why.

The first reason is practical. Many people don’t know how much work it takes to market, promote, and sell a book. Most of the authors that were coming to us with previously published books had low sales numbers and wanted to overcome that history with a traditional deal. 

But here’s the catch — publishers and publishing experts (like me) can guess at what a book’s sales history has been based on data like the book’s ranking on Amazon, the number of reviews (as well as the number of stars) the book has received, and even by what the cover looks like. On average, I would say that it takes me about 10 seconds of looking at a book on Amazon to guess whether it’s been self-published — and how the author approached the publication of that book. And that’s before I even take the extra step of looking up actual sales numbers in Bookscan, a database I have access to. 

And — since Amazon is the #1 distributor of books in the United States, a poor sales history with a book available on Amazon is incredibly tough to overcome. It used to be that you could easily remove a book from the Internet . . . but that’s not so true anymore. Agents, publishers, and even independent experts in the industry like me have caught on to the fact that once you have a book that sells poorly — other books are likely to sell poorly too. That’s why most authors can’t overcome a bad sales history, self-published or otherwise.

The second reason my team and I don’t work with self-published authors anymore is because of a problematic mindset — the idea that a book will somehow promote, market, and sell itself . . . and somehow promote your business as well. I’m not sure where this idea got started or why it proliferates but it makes the work my team and I do incredibly difficult. Frankly, I’m in the business of making dreams come true, not arguing reality. 

Books are incredibly useful tools — for teaching, inspiring, and yes marketing too — but it’s important to remember that a book is only a calling card for what’s most important: you.