I published my first book back in 2012. Apparently that means I’ve been in this game for 12 years.
So here are 12 things I’ve learned during that time (not in any particular order of importance).
1: THIS IS A LONG GAME
This is a unique business, in that books are assets with an exceptionally long shelf-life. You can still make really good money from a book that you wrote 5 years ago (or even 50 years ago).
Whenever I shift my thinking from “what’s the immediate benefit” to “how does this help the next book do better” or “how does this position me better for next year” then I tend to make better decisions.
Sometimes you just have to survive in the short-term. But most of the time feeling like you have to scramble is an illusion.
2: BUILD BRICK by BRICK
Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in this game for a while, your career can look a whole lot different three years from now. That could be financially, lifestyle (hours worked), the type of books you write, how you market, and so forth.
That’s because three years is a pretty long time.
The biggest challenge I’ve faced with my own writing career is related to point #1: I’ve thought how can I be successful this week, this month?
This inevitably led to bad decisions.
For a long time, I wanted things now. Or, at the latest, a month or two from now.
The problem is, a month is not very long. You cannot do very much in that span of time. And if you treat each month as disconnected from the rest, then you end up with a bunch of half-finished projects that don’t add up to a whole lot.
On the other hand, if you treat each month (and each week, each day) as a brick in a much longer career, then you can stack them together and actually build something substantial. And three years from now, you have the cumulative effects of 36 months of compounding in your favor.
This is how I treated the promos, the launches, and so forth when managing ads for clients. Each was a brick that was part of a larger chain. And even though I had month-to-month agreements with most of them, I ended up working with a lot of people for years. Which is really rare when it comes to ads management.
The reason was this brick-by-brick approach. It’s super simple. But it’s super important.
Now, sometimes with my own career—because three years is a long ways away—I’ll also fall into a different trap: believing that today doesn’t matter all that much. Each brick is small, after all. So I can not write those words, or practice that skill, or read that book. And that can lead to days and weeks of not much progress.
To be clear: rest days are fine. They’re important. I’m talking about days where I planned to work on something. Skipping these days has a huge negative compounding effect if you do it often enough.
The trick is recognizing that the months, weeks, and days are small on their own—but they compound into something much greater when you chain them together.
That compounding can either be positive or negative. You choose what bricks you lay down. And then you get to see the results a few years down the line.
3: CONCEPT IS KING
Look at the type of books people are currently buying on your sub-genre’s Top 100 Bestseller list on Amazon. If TikTok is big in your genre, check out what books are going viral and trending there as well.
This is what readers are interested in. It’s easier to riff on something that people want than to try to reinvent the wheel. Take what people like and then add your own unique spin.
4: CONSISTENCY IS KEY
I call this the Threshold of Progress: show up 80% of the time to make progress in a skill. Showing up 80% of the time is a lot harder than it sounds.
This doesn’t mean daily; for example, if you have a workout routine where you workout 3 days a week, it’d be showing up on 80% of those days.
Note that it takes a lot more effort to build a skill (or your career) than to maintain it. You might only have to show up 10 – 25% of the time to maintain a skill or your current career. But that’s after it’s built; building is the hard part.
5: LEARN ONE MARKETING SKILL AT A TIME
You can learn the absolute basics of multiple skills at once. But if you’re trying to make significant progress in writing better emails, or getting better at Facebook Ads, or honing your TikTok chops, then you have to go beyond the absolute basics.
And that generally takes more time and effort than people anticipate. So what usually happens is they bounce back and forth between the various skills, never leveling up in any of them. Their career and skillset stalls out. Frustration sets in. They look for more skills to add to the mix. Things get worse, stress rises.
Sound familiar?
In my experience, once you’re trying to advance beyond the basics, focusing on one marketing skill will get you there much faster.
Here’s what you do: you want to put your other marketing skills into maintenance mode—doing enough to keep that skill at around the same level, and also get results from it—and really focus on one thing. So if you’re running Facebook Ads effectively and want to learn Amazon Ads, keep the Facebook Ads going, but just do the bare minimum required.
And then the rest of your time and attention and thought goes to the Amazon Ads.
I suggest doing this for 90 days. Truth be told, if you want to get really good at something like Facebook Ads or Amazon Ads, you’re probably gonna need to focus on them for a year.
People reject this and say I don’t have three months to spare. Definitely not a year!
And then, five years down the line, they still don’t know how to run ads on any platform well.
Going back to point #1, if this is a long game, then it means we have time to learn various skills. And we also have time to learn them properly. So do the 90 days first, and then you’ll probably find that there’s a bunch of stuff you want to brush up on or learn, and you’ll keep going.
Or maybe 90 days is enough for what you need the ads to do.
But do the 90 days and see what happens.
I discovered this approach by accident. For a while, I managed Facebook and Amazon Ads (plus the occasional BookBub Ads) for clients; then I only managed Amazon Ads for a couple years. My Amazon Ad skills leveled up massively. And then a funny thing happened when I returned to learning about Facebook Ads…I was not only better at those, but I got better at them faster as well (point #8).
As a current example of this approach, right now I’m learning how to write better sales copy. I committed to doing 30 minutes of practice each day. Over the last 128 days, I’ve shown up 73 times (57%). I have spent a total of 57 hours building this skill over that time.
Despite not hitting the Threshold of Progress, I’ve seen my skills dramatically improve.
Which leads us to the next point…
6: IT’S NOT JUST PRACTICE TIME THAT PRODUCES PROGRESS
A key reason narrowing your focus works well is because of bandwidth.
Yes, I’ve only spent 57 hours practicing copywriting. But it’s been a bit more than that, because I’ve been thinking about sales copy, noticing things as I look at marketing materials, reading books, and so forth.
It’s been top of mind. So a lot of the other things I’ve been doing have been filtered through the lens of copywriting over the past 4 months.
If I was trying to build 3 other marketing skills at the same time, then the bandwidth would be split between them. And I wouldn’t get nearly the same amount of “unscheduled” practice time and reps.
7: DOUBLE DOWN
If something works, keep doing it. This is one of the many reasons authors struggle with not having enough time.
A series is working really well but they got bored of writing it, so they start something new.
Or because they get Facebook Ads working, then they immediately feel they have to add Amazon Ads on. But they could have mined way more performance out of Facebook Ads (or vice versa). Without significantly increasing their workload. Or maybe even decreasing it. Because as you get more advanced, you often find ways to automate repetitive tasks.
The next thing will still be waiting for you later. But it’s an unknown. If you know something is working really well right now, then why not double down instead of shifting gears?
8: LEARN MANY THINGS THROUGH A FEW THINGS
This is another reason why narrowing your focus pays big dividends.
If you get really good at say, Facebook Ads, then many of the principles and ideas transfer to Amazon Ads (conversion, cost per unit, and so forth). Or even other non-ad marketing stuff like email newsletters (e.g., things like tracking, being able to identify what metrics matter, etc.).
So when you go to learn or improve that other skill, you have a better foundation to work from. And you can add that new skill to your stack much more quickly.
Whereas if you just learn the absolute bare-bones minimum, then immediately switch to learning something else because someone said it was the marketing thing that works best in your genre, or the next killer tactic, or whatever, then you don’t have that foundation. Progress will generally be slower.
And, worst case scenario, you lose the original skill since you’re not practicing it / keeping up with any changes. This is often the culprit when people say “I used to know how to run Facebook Ads, but don’t any more.” They built a very small amount of skill and knowledge, then moved on too fast. And then they forgot.
But if you solidify a skill before moving on, then your forgetting curve is much slower. So you can return to it in the future without relearning everything.
As Miyamoto Musashi writes in The Book of 5 Rings: “From one thing know ten thousand things.” If you learn one thing well, then you can transfer that knowledge across other skills. And you may find that you don’t actually need to learn those other skills at all.
9: PROGRESS IS NOT LINEAR
Whether you’re learning a skill like Facebook Ads, or have a revenue goal of making $1k or $10k a month, or want a certain number of subscribers, it’s common to say, I will do this in 3 months (or whatever time frame you select).
But this usually doesn’t work, because the time frame to get that result is unknown and often outside your control.
It may take 3 weeks.
It may take 3 months.
It may take 3 years.
It takes as long as it takes—provided you’re actually doing work and not just ruminating instead of taking action. But you can only keep testing things and writing books, newsletters, making ads, and executing the actions that will lead to the ultimate result you want.
When that particular result occurs, however, is usually out of your control.
10: TEST
Having a system for testing good ideas, whether it’s a productivity hack you find on a blog, or a marketing tactic, is critical. Because what works for your brain, your books, your life, and so forth might be very different than what works for someone else. Or they might be full of shit.
Either way, if you have a repeatable process for testing new ideas, as well as tracking what you’ve already tested, then you can figure out what’s worth keeping around.
11: THIS CAN BE REALLY SIMPLE
If you split your time between 3 different pen names, 4 different ad platforms, 6 different social media sites, and 12 different genres, then it’s almost impossible to win.
If, on the other hand, you focus on 1 pen name, 1 genre, 1 ad platform, and 1 social media site (or another ad platform, if you’re not into social media), plus a regular (weekly or monthly) newsletter, then things are pretty simple.
Put out four solid books a year in a commercial genre.
Add one marketing skill to your tool belt a year.
Throw in some tracking and you’ve got what can be a six-figure business in three to five years.
Not easy.
But simple (which makes it much easier to win). And streamlining makes the day-to-day much more pleasant in most cases, because you can ignore all the noise about things you “must do” and actually see yourself making progress.
12: SHIP
There are a million reasons not to do something.
If it’s a needle mover, then always err on the side of shipping (taking action). There are occasional good reasons not to ship. Most of the time, however, I just talk myself out of a good idea and am worse off in the long run for it.
For example, this essay: there are tons of reasons not to publish this.
Maybe it’s a waste of people’s time.
Maybe it’s not good enough. The writing, the structure, the concept.
Maybe people won’t care at all, and it’ll have the same effect as not pressing publish.
Or maybe people won’t like it, and will actively tell me so by emailing me.
That last point, I think, is often what stops people the most. They ship, and then not only does nothing positive happen…but they’re seemingly “worse” off as a result.
It is not the case that only good things happen when you press publish.
Ads will burn money and not work.
Readers will leave you negative reviews.
You’ll get negative reactions to a newsletter or social media post.
All these things will happen if you’re in the game long enough.
But the only way for your career to move forward and for good things to happen is to ship. In the moment, the result might seem “bad.” And that it would have been better to do nothing at all.
But all those negatives I listed? They’re just feedback. And feedback helps you get better.
So worst case scenario? You get better.
Best case scenario? You get better.
That’s a win-win.
So press publish on the newsletter.
Stop debating which ads are the best and actually test them to get the data.
Stop doing research and get started writing that new book (advice for myself here).
Because the only other option is to fade away.
So while you’re here, why not take some swings, ship some things, and create the life and career you want?
