How to Start Self-Publishing: One Book at a Time

The best way to start self-publishing is one book at a time: take a single book all the way to the market, look at how it sells, and carry what you learn into the next one, at a pace you can keep up every day. I have put out 230 books and my ads have shown them more than 200 million times, and the biggest lesson from all of that is that improving each book matters more than almost anything else. Below are the mistakes I see most often and how to avoid them.

Is one book enough?

A client of mine, Gary, was working in my one-on-one program at the time. He is not with me now. He was putting out superhero books, and his plan was to put one book on the market and be known for it. He did not have a lot of ideas and he figured one book would do the job, with no need for any more.

One book is rarely enough, and self-publishing does not work like that. Another author told me they were worried about how they would handle all the emails and the people wanting to get in touch about their one book. I told them that would not be their problem.

Why focus on one book at a time?

Trying to work on all your books at once burns you out fast. Take one book. Go through the steps that get it on the market, then the steps that get it selling. When that is done, move to the next.

Many of the clients I sit down with make the same mistakes on every book. They publish, then publish again, and end up with a pile of books and no sales. They wonder what they did wrong, and the answer is that they did not optimize and they did not learn from the last one.

What the one-book approach looks like in practice

Say you are starting. You pick the book you will do first and you write down the steps from manuscript to launch. You do not look at book two. You do not tidy up a cover for a book you have not written. You get this one on the market and you get it selling, as well as you can for now.

Then you stop and look. How are the sales? What does the cover look like next to the best sellers? What would you change? That is the information the next book needs, and it is the information you never get if you are spread over twenty projects.

Run a loop and never go backwards

Treat each book as a loop. You finish the whole process as well as you can. Then you look at the sales, the cover and everything else, work out what went wrong, and take that into the next book.

One rule is to not go backwards. Plenty of clients tell me they do not want to go back and change an old cover or rewrite old content. I say that is fine. Do not do anything that demotivates you. Keep moving forward and apply what you learned to the next book.

You can only avoid repeating a mistake if you can see it. Many authors cannot see what is wrong with a book that does not sell. It helps to have someone who has plenty of books on the market and has run a lot of ads, who can look at your book and tell you why it is not selling. In my services, that deep look at what is wrong with a book is the thing people thank me for most.

Self-publishing has many layers. For the full process the loop runs through, see how to self-publish your first book. It goes down and down. There is the psychology of covers and what makes one work, the pricing, the ads. You do not hit every layer on the first book, and that is how self-publishing made easy works: one step at a time, learning from the mistakes, and using the lesson on the next book. Each book you finish adds to the ones before it, and they start to build momentum together.

A loop also keeps you from the pile problem. The author with a pile of books and no sales has run the same process six times without ever stopping to learn from it. The author who runs the loop has six books that each got a bit better than the one before.

How fast should I go?

Go at a steady daily pace, not in bursts. The biggest mistake new authors make is not pacing themselves, and there are two versions.

The first is waiting until you feel inspired. Steven Pressfield tells a story in The War of Art about the novelist Somerset Maugham, who said he only writes when inspiration strikes, and that fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp. He sits in the chair whether he feels like it or not. The inspiration is the habit.

The second is going too fast. I have clients who say they will get 20 books out next month, when they do not yet know anything about optimization. Then they get four out and feel they failed. That is how you lose your motivation, and I’d rather you never did that to yourself.

Perfectionism can stall you in the opposite way, so see perfectionism vs self-doubt. Don’t set big, hard deadlines for your books. Decide how much time you will give it each day and use a checklist or task system to hold the steps in order. I use Todoist and recommend it to my clients. I am an affiliate, and it has a free Beginner plan, with a Pro plan at $5 a month billed yearly or $7 billed monthly (Todoist pricing). If you have no task system right now, that is a big gap. Everyone in my family uses it.

Which mistake sounds like you?

Maybe you wait for inspiration. Maybe you try to do everything at once, or maybe, like Gary, you think one book is enough. I would like to know in the comments, because it helps me see where you are coming from.

If you want someone who has been through this to look at your book with you, book a free 25-minute discovery call. There is no commitment to buy anything afterwards.

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