If your book is published in hardcover, the sales reps will usually sell the paperback edition of it along with your next book a year later. When the reps reach the page about your book in your publisher’s catalog, booksellers will check their computers to see how many copies the hardcover sold and order the paperback edition and the sequel accordingly.

In addition to making your first book profitable for you and your publisher, you have another objective: to establish yourself in the marketplace with maximum impact. If you have a choice of which book to write first, choose the one that will have the greatest impact from a literary or commercial point of view or, ideally, both.

One day in the not-too-distant future, you will take stock of what you have accomplished, and you will be amazed to see how something as fragile and abstract as an idea was the Big Bang of an expanding universe of books, products, and services that you are proud of and that force you to keep enlarging your goals.

GUERRILLA TACTIC

Start an idea file. Check it while you are deciding which book to write next. Your idea file will grow in value throughout your career, both to yourself and to other writers.

Reprinted from “Rick Frishman‘s Author101 Newsletter”
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