Publishing strategery: how my blog-to-book plan went bad

   

Ironically, I must soon press pause on my book about how I became a successful writer, just a few chapters into it, because I screwed up my crafty publication plan. But I’ve never done a book quite this way before, so I hope we can all just have a good laugh about it and get back on track in six months.

The idea was to hook you, dear reader, and then charge admission to the rest of the book. I was going to post about half the chapters and then stick a price tag on the remainder. If I’m doing my job right, you’d be all “shut up and take my money,” and — since there are so many of you — I would then be fabulously wealthy and buying a boat would start to seem reasonable, and you would all have a nice book. Everyone wins!

I was so preoccupied with making sure I stayed several chapters ahead of schedule that I made an itsy bitsy tactical error: merely being a few chapters ahead is simply not going to cut it. This may sound crazy, but I have to actually finish the damn book before I can offer to sell it to you. You can see how I would overlook something so subtle.

It think this is why writers traditionally have publishers. We’re using so much of our mental capacity dreaming up apt analogies to notice anything else.

This is what I’m going to do:

Brilliant. You might think this kind of brainstorming is why I’m already a successful writer, but it was actually my friend Kennedy Goodkey who suggested this solution. I was pretty stumped. Thanks, Kennedy!

So stay tuned for all that. Meanwhile, Chapter 5: The Syrup story.