My best advice is to start from the end.

Ask yourself:

• Who is the target market?
• How will you reach them?
• Is your book just for friends and family, or do you want to reach a broader audience?
• Do you have the network to support that?

A book, no matter how great it is, won’t sell itself. The market is highly competitive and saturated. Your book either needs to be better than the rest, have a clear and broad target market, or your network needs to be solid enough to get the word out. The truth is, success comes from thinking outside the box, working hard, pushing sales, and appealing to your audience. The harder you work, the more books you’ll sell.

A bestselling book doesn’t always have to be the best book. Truthfully, a lot of it comes down to the marketing spin. Does the author have an interesting backstory the media can latch onto? Is there a significant network they can tap into?

A few years ago, we published a novel that wasn’t the best novel out there, but it was reasonably good. We expected it to sell between 200-400 copies, it ended up selling out its print run three times and sold over 1,500 copies. A trade publisher even picked it up for a second release. Why? The author had an interesting story: she wrote her first book at 91 years old. The media loved it, loved her, and that coverage made all the difference.