Charrots
Member
I have friends who are traditionally published authors - known, big publishers - and have experienced some of their journey with some books over the years. They do not behave in this way - there’s a difference between being a writer and playing at being a writer, and there’s a dramatic difference between publishing and self-publishing, which can only really be discovered the hard way, and Adam is making a lot of decisions that strike me as being made by someone who is playing at being a writer.
The entire process has been interesting to watch - discussions with a YouTube agent and a literary agent which seemed quite odd, some of the comments that Adam was saying don’t really seem representative of what a literary agent would actually say in that developmental stage. Not a reputable one. Writers live inside their work and become obsessed with it, granted it doesn’t seem like an exact science but him saying he‘d written it and after 5 or 6 reads was sick of it, doesn’t bode well. Paying an obscene amount to have a book proofread and edited and then changing it when he confesses that he might be dyslexic (which in itself isn’t a great look, not in being dyslexic, but in suddenly portraying a struggle for sympathy), you’re just asking for trouble.
The obsession with having it look aesthetically right, to a character that has to look and sound like an idealised younger version of himself, shows it’s a vacuous vanity project which is fine, because he has the money to blow through, but it doesn’t make a book readable.
Nor does selling a lot of copies - he has 120,000 subscribers on YouTube, plenty of followers on socials, and has paid a significant amount of money to get promotion and shift copies of books. Self-published authors with some spare cash often do this because it adds some faux credibility. They enlist a marketing company like BookBub, they have deals with magazines like Cosmopolitan (I think it might be the Hearst magazine group who take their adverts), so the book features there in an advert, the self-published writer gets to say their work was featured in Cosmo as a ‘recommended book of the week’. Watch out for this trick in later vlogs.
Amazon does general and niche tags, so while he’s correct to say it would take more than 5 copies to get to number 2, there is a chance that you could get to number one in a category on one day selling little more than two handfuls. That said, I wouldn’t devalue anyone their day in the sun, even if they did pay handsomely for it. The impressive number is getting into the 200s overall, but that would be expected from an instant launch with a captive audience his size, for a first novel when nobody knows how good or bad it would be.
He has shown a lot of excitement about people pre-ordering, but has calculated for them to do exactly that, says he doesn’t like doing the hard sell but literally begs in the direct terms ‘PLEASE BUY IT’ in targeted advertisements totaling over 2 hrs so far. He says he’s ordered 6,000 copies and doesn’t want 3,000 to sit in a warehouse. There’s probably a good chance because of his reach that he will be able to sell most of them over time but it was a ridiculously unnecessary over-speculation that screams of vanity and having way too much money, and also either being badly advised or not advised at all.
Few published authors get to go and watch their books being printed - every step of the process has been him paying to do something and then showcasing it.
None of this says the book is any good, and the likelihood is that taking over the editing is going to be a fatal blow for the book on a critical level.
I suspect he will make sure he guilts his fanbase into 5 star reviews, he will convince himself that those are critically good reviews, and it will convince him to pay through the nose for a second self-published book, on the theory that the first one will probably make just about it’s money back.
But, like the first one, there was a reason it wasn’t picked up, and publishing is a brutal world. If he couldn’t get a traditional publishing contract with a reach like his, then that says editors are completely unconvinced with the product, because they’ll usually take any old tat from someone with a social reach of over 100k.
Apologies for the essay. Might hire myself an editor, a cover designer and get it self-published and see if I get a number two.
The entire process has been interesting to watch - discussions with a YouTube agent and a literary agent which seemed quite odd, some of the comments that Adam was saying don’t really seem representative of what a literary agent would actually say in that developmental stage. Not a reputable one. Writers live inside their work and become obsessed with it, granted it doesn’t seem like an exact science but him saying he‘d written it and after 5 or 6 reads was sick of it, doesn’t bode well. Paying an obscene amount to have a book proofread and edited and then changing it when he confesses that he might be dyslexic (which in itself isn’t a great look, not in being dyslexic, but in suddenly portraying a struggle for sympathy), you’re just asking for trouble.
The obsession with having it look aesthetically right, to a character that has to look and sound like an idealised younger version of himself, shows it’s a vacuous vanity project which is fine, because he has the money to blow through, but it doesn’t make a book readable.
Nor does selling a lot of copies - he has 120,000 subscribers on YouTube, plenty of followers on socials, and has paid a significant amount of money to get promotion and shift copies of books. Self-published authors with some spare cash often do this because it adds some faux credibility. They enlist a marketing company like BookBub, they have deals with magazines like Cosmopolitan (I think it might be the Hearst magazine group who take their adverts), so the book features there in an advert, the self-published writer gets to say their work was featured in Cosmo as a ‘recommended book of the week’. Watch out for this trick in later vlogs.
Amazon does general and niche tags, so while he’s correct to say it would take more than 5 copies to get to number 2, there is a chance that you could get to number one in a category on one day selling little more than two handfuls. That said, I wouldn’t devalue anyone their day in the sun, even if they did pay handsomely for it. The impressive number is getting into the 200s overall, but that would be expected from an instant launch with a captive audience his size, for a first novel when nobody knows how good or bad it would be.
He has shown a lot of excitement about people pre-ordering, but has calculated for them to do exactly that, says he doesn’t like doing the hard sell but literally begs in the direct terms ‘PLEASE BUY IT’ in targeted advertisements totaling over 2 hrs so far. He says he’s ordered 6,000 copies and doesn’t want 3,000 to sit in a warehouse. There’s probably a good chance because of his reach that he will be able to sell most of them over time but it was a ridiculously unnecessary over-speculation that screams of vanity and having way too much money, and also either being badly advised or not advised at all.
Few published authors get to go and watch their books being printed - every step of the process has been him paying to do something and then showcasing it.
None of this says the book is any good, and the likelihood is that taking over the editing is going to be a fatal blow for the book on a critical level.
I suspect he will make sure he guilts his fanbase into 5 star reviews, he will convince himself that those are critically good reviews, and it will convince him to pay through the nose for a second self-published book, on the theory that the first one will probably make just about it’s money back.
But, like the first one, there was a reason it wasn’t picked up, and publishing is a brutal world. If he couldn’t get a traditional publishing contract with a reach like his, then that says editors are completely unconvinced with the product, because they’ll usually take any old tat from someone with a social reach of over 100k.
Apologies for the essay. Might hire myself an editor, a cover designer and get it self-published and see if I get a number two.
