A slew of sobering truths that always surprise nonfiction authors

I’ve now worked on 80 nonfiction book projects. Writing books doesn’t work the way people expect. Publishing certainly doesn’t. And book promotion is equally confounding. As a result, I have to repeat the same surprising truths over and over to each new author.

I’ve compiled 47 of these sobering truths here. I’m sure it’s futile — my next 20 authors are probably going to ask these same questions and give me the same incredulous look when I tell them about this stuff. But if you’re writing a book, you’ll be a lot smarter if you know these things.

One useful note: Check out the survey results at AuthorROI.com to get a clearer idea of what authors are typically spending to promote their book — and how many units they’re selling.

Sobering truths about publishing

1. Publishing is slow. It’s going to take 18 months to two years for your traditional publisher to get your book in print. Unless the book is about something super-timely — like an election — you don’t get to jump to the head of the queue.
2. You need an agent to get taken seriously. Most publishers won’t consider a book proposal unless it comes from an agent or an author they already trust. Agents know which editors to send your proposal to. You don’t.
3. You need a publishing lawyer. You need an expert to read your contract and tell you what to negotiate and what can’t be changed. That might be your agent, but somebody who’s an expert needs to advise you. A regular lawyer who’s not an expert in publishing is not going to be much help.
4. Selling books is your job. Traditional publishers care more about the size and power of your promotional platform than your idea. If you can’t sell 10,000 copies of your book through your own efforts, they’re not interested. And no, it’s not “their job” — and hasn’t been for at least two decades.
5. Shorter is better. You’re better off with a 40,000-word book than an 80,000-word book. Shorter books are faster to write, cheaper to print, faster to read, and priced lower.
6. You should hire your own editor. Publishers used to put a lot of effort into editing authors’ books. Most of them now expect you to produce the finished manuscript — which means you’re better off hiring your own developmental editor. (Like me, for example.)
7. You need to check your own facts. Publishers don’t have fact checkers (any more). If there’s an error in your book, that’s on you.
8. Your color graphics are going to look like crap. Publishers generally don’t print your book in full color, unless it’s an art book or a cookbook. It’s just too expensive. I know you’re a whiz with PowerPoint or Illustrator. But your color graphics are probably going to going to look muddy when rendered in shades of grey.
9. Making the graphics look nice is your job. Don’t count on the publisher to have designers on staff to make your graphics beautiful. If you’re not a designer, hire one.
10. It takes months to get books into stores. You’ll get author copies a couple months before the book is available in bookstores (if it ever is). Pushing books through the distribution channels is slow.
11. Very few copies will show up in bookstores. Your publisher has distribution. That means they can get copies into bookstores if the bookstores order them. Unless your book is a big seller, the number of copies of your book in a typical bookstore is either one . . . or zero. Think about it. The last time you bought a book, did you buy it online, or in a bookstore? The same is true of your readers.
12. Airport bookstores are a paid placement. Except for smash bestsellers, every book you see in an airport bookstore is there because somebody paid for it. That might be the publisher, and it might be the author, but somebody is paying to get it there.
13. You’re not going to have enough author copies. Unless your contract says you get hundreds, they’ll send you about 15. If you want more, you’ll have to pay, and you’ll have to wait.
14. The publisher is guessing about sales. If your book sells more than you and they predict, they may run out. That’s embarrassing and can take weeks to fix. The cure is to print too many copies, and the publisher doesn’t want to pay for that.
15. Foreign translations will wait until you’re a success. It’s extremely hard to sell foreign rights these days unless you’re already famous and proven. The translated versions will likely have to wait until about two years after the book is a big seller in the U.S. (China is apparently an exception — it seems like every book gets translated into Chinese.)
16. You don’t have to do everything the copy editor says. The copy editor’s job is to find problems. If you want to ignore their suggestions, you can always just write “stet” and retain what you originally wrote. (That’s usually a bad idea, but it is up to you.)
17. You can’t just “change things” after the book is published. A book is not a blog post. If you find an error or simply want to update the content with more recent facts, the publisher will have very little interest in doing that. If the book is selling, you can sometimes slip in fixes in subsequent printings, but they need to be limited. Your next chance to do a real update is for the second edition or the paperback release, if the book is successful enough to warrant those.
18. Shipping is expensive, and you need to pay for it. The publisher will charge you shipping for sending you additional author copies. You need to pay to ship books to people. You need to pay to get books shipped to events. You might be able to persuade the publisher to cough up extra copies for a good cause, but you’ll never get them to pay for shipping.
19. If it’s not an academic book, your publisher won’t sell it as a textbook. Textbooks get sold by academic sales forces. If your publisher doesn’t have one — or if they do, but your book isn’t written as a textbook — then professors aren’t going to hear about it or recommend it.
20. The publisher can’t do the cover until you settle the title. So nail that sucker down soon. And while you get to consult on the cover, in the end, you may have to live with what they create. Cover approval is a good thing to include in your contract.
21. Advances are shrinking. If you’re a new author without a huge platform to drive sales, you’ll be lucky to get an advance at all. The days of six-figure advances are receding.
22. If your book sells well, it will take a while to get paid. This is how royalties work: The publisher counts sales for a six-month period. They then set aside an allowance for returns. They then calculate whether they owe you royalties because your book earned more than the advance. If they do, they’ll pay you (or your agent) three to five months after the end of that six-month period. So if you’re getting paid at all, you’re getting paid for sales that happened many months ago.
23. The prospects for your next book depend on how well this book sold. I know you want to write a sequel right away. The publisher isn’t interested until they see if your book is selling.
24. Hybrid publishing is real, but it’s expensive. If you don’t want publishers gatekeeping your book, hire a hybrid publisher like Amplify, Greenleaf, or Ideapress. You’ll have far more control, better service, and a faster path to publication. You’ll also spend at least $25,000 to get published.
25. Self-publishing generates limited influence. Self-publishing is cheap. It’s fast. And it makes far less impact than working with a traditional or hybrid publisher.

Sobering truths about writing

1. Your idea is going to evolve. You think you know what your idea is. After you write the manuscript, it will have changed. That is actually a good thing. Just don’t get too attached to the original version.
2. Stop polishing. You’ll make a lot more progress writing the chapters in order and then revising, rather than polishing chapter 1 nineteen times until it seems perfect. (You’ll want to revise it again, trust me.)
3. You don’t have to write the whole book before you approach publishers. Publishers want a proposal, not the book. Even if it’s done, they won’t read it.
4. Beta readers add complexity. Sure, it’s great to get your friends to read the manuscript. But then you need to chase down their comments, address them (not easy when they contradict each other), and deal with emailing back and forth because they all think they’re the most important. That’s very time-consuming.
5. Footnotes are your job. Footnotes are a pain. Somebody needs to do them, though. That’s either you or somebody you hire. And keep track of sources while you’re writing. They’re a pain to track down if you haven’t been fastidious about sources while writing.
6. You can get sued. If you publish a wrong fact or plagiarize content, people can come after you. You can get insurance to protect you, but you have to pay for that.
7. You can’t just use song lyrics, photos, or cartoons without permission. Even a few words of a song are protected by copyright. And you don’t get to include a photo or cartoon unless you negotiate the rights with the photographer, artist, or rights owner.
8. Revising a first draft is time-consuming work. You’re not done when you complete the first draft of all the chapters. You need to go back to the beginning and deal with repetition, inconsistencies, and new ideas you came up with along the way. That’s going to take weeks, not hours.
9. You don’t get to make up your own grammar rules. You don’t get to capitalize random words, embrace comma splices, spell things your own way, break subject-verb agreement rules, spell out numbers inconsistently, or write things in all caps. Book text has rules. It’s unwise to break them. (But see what I said about copy edits in rule 16 above.)
10. AI can save you time and cost you even more. AI-generated text can’t be copyrighted. AI makes up facts and quotes. And AI can rip off ideas without credit. If you’re using AI for any purpose, be aware of the risks.
11. Ghostwriters are expensive. Sure, you can pay somebody to write the book for you. A credible ghostwriter is going to cost you at least $50,000, and a really good one will cost at least twice that. And you’re not off the hook — working with a ghostwriter is going to take up lots of your time, and you’ll need to check everything they write.
12. Coauthors won’t necessarily save you time. If you work with another author, you’ll need to work carefully to divide up the work and check what each other are coming up with. Even if you’re totally in sync, that often takes up more time than it saves.

Sobering truths about book promotion

1. Your publisher won’t do all the book promotion. They’ll pay attention to your needs for about three weeks, then they’re off to promote somebody else’s book. You need to work your ass off promoting your own book, rather than depending on the publisher.
2. You need to plan your promotion months ahead of time. Spend at least six months before the pub date mapping out your promotion plan.
3. Speaking slots take lots of effort and lots of lead time. Plan to apply to conferences nine months to a year ahead of time. You’ll need to be clever in what you plan to speak about — they won’t just let you go on stage and plug your book. And they often want to see a video of you speaking before they’ll commit.
4. Social media only goes so far. Your friends love seeing and hearing about your vacation. They don’t necessarily want to hear about your book. Even if you have tens of thousands of followers, they’re not necessarily going to line up to buy your book.
5. A professional publicist can help, but has a significant cost. Publicists are experts at getting you bylined articles, podcast interviews, TV appearances, and the like. That costs thousands of dollars per month. And there are no guarantees — they can’t make you and your content interesting if it’s inherently boring.
6. Bookstore appearances are hit or miss. Unless you and the bookstore reach out together to your followers, you risk very low attendance, as well as low impact.
7. Bestseller lists are tough to crack. Everyone wants to be a bestseller. But cracking the New York Times or Washington Post lists is tough, since they measure not just sales, but sales concentrated in a short period of time from specific bookstores. You can pay shady services tens of thousands of dollars to manipulate you onto a list, but the lists are often wise to their tactics and will thwart your efforts, leaving you poorer with no bestseller credential. Getting a bestseller ribbon in a subcategory on Amazon (“Top New Release in Digital Marketing Strategy”) might tickle your fancy but won’t have an impact on sales or your reputation.
8. The promotional period is at least six months. It’s arduous. But if you give up after a month, you’re not going to have a sustained impact.
9. Reviews are virtually impossible to obtain. Many publications have given up on book reviews. Don’t imagine that your book is going to be reviewed in your local paper or in a trade publication — that’s often extremely hard to accomplish.
10. Scams abound. Authors are suckers, at least as far as the scammers are concerned. There are hundreds of AI-generated scams targeting authors for fake Amazon reviews, imaginary book clubs, lame podcast appearances, and so on. The only thing they all have in common is their attempts to get your money. Don’t work with anyone unless they come recommended by an author you know.

Feeling down?

Yeah. This is a lot to swallow. If I’ve depressed you by unloading it all at once, I apologize.

But all these things are true. You’re better off knowing about them than getting blindsided by them.

It’s also true that most authors are glad they published a book and find it pays off in unexpected ways.

Writing, publishing, and promoting a book is a strange experience. Be prepared to be surprised.

And add your own sobering truths to the comments. I’m sure you’ve had revealing experiences that I’ve missed.