Vanity is alive and well in self-publishing

So you spend 12 years dreaming about this book you started writing and then you finally finish it. Along the way you pay for a Copyright, you build and subscribe to a website hosting service and buy a domain. Next, you hire an Editor. You pay for graphics tools and then get asked about an audio book. Now get go and hire a narrator. You pay for interior formatting and more images and a tool to bring that all together. AI research and transcription tools, more subscriptions. Let’s print Beta copies, feedback comes in and you print more beta copies. Finally, launch day arrives, but what about marketing? Let’s go subscribe to Zeely and do some cool AI marketing. Wait we forgot about Ingram Spark, Facebook and Amazon marketing - more cash. It’s ok, this is the book of your dreams and once folks read it, this thing will go crazy, movies will be made, readers groups will debate, children and grandchildren will be proud to be your family.

Launch day arrives and you decide to spend $500 on a Press Release. Cool but expensive. So while your doing your day job as a ServiceNow Practice lead and attending ServiceNow’s biggest annual convention your private in-box goes ballistic. Friends text and talk about seeing your book on the local Fox 4 website, a representative from Oprah’s book club reaches out. WTH - WHOA!! But, as the week progresses and you sit in your hotel room in Vegas at 4am, your body is still on Central time, you start reading your emails, responding to your inbox. 99% of what turned out to be - hundreds of emails (seriously haven’t read them all) are folks wanting to help “FOR A FEE”. They LOVE your book, the most unique sci-fi story told in a generation. “This will sell wildly on the Asian market”, one email proclaimed. Does the ego get stroked, absolutely. But as I sit here on a Friday evening, completely exhausted from a flight home that was delayed almost 6 hours, I am not losing hope. What I know is that there might be a second non-fiction book in my future about this whole process. Secondly, what I promise to anyone crazy enough to still be reading, is that my guidance, direction, advice will always be completely FREE. Are you on Goodreads? I can show you the path. Does your KDP listing have A+ content? I can guide you down that path. Did you use AI for any single, tiny part of your process, I am your guy. Copyright, trademark - I have your back. I would love for my book to break even financially, but if I never make it to the screen play, I can say with compete sincerity that I have loved the process and can’t wait to escape to the world I enter while writing book two of this trilogy.