My two main goals

In yesterday's post of rejection, I spent some time explaining how the book publishing world used to work. Today I am going to explain what happens in this age of online bookselling and then ask if you'd be willing to help me stack the deck. In writing my soon-to-be-published memoir 99% True, I had two main goals: spread the word about audiophiles and high-end audio and help aspiring entrepreneurs make it through the dark periods of multiple failures. For the first task of spreading the word about audiophiles, my plan was simple: Write a heartfelt memoir of a struggling youth finding his way through drugs, hippies, Vietnam, and the 60s (which is what's covered in the first half). Hopefully, if the story's compelling, readers will stick with it long enough to learn about what you and I love. The word of high-end audio would be spread to non-audiophiles. The second task of helping aspiring entrepreneurs through the dark times of repeated failures was easier: All I had to do was tell the story of my business career—the 40 years of failures it took to become an "overnight success". Knowing how many times I have failed might help others through their struggles. Now that the work is finished my next challenge is getting as many people as possible to read it—especially people that have never heard of me, audiophiles, or what we all gather here for. That turns out to be quite a challenge. There are well over 1 million books published each year and offered on Amazon. To get noticed, a book has to rise to the top of Amazon's best seller list. How does that happen? It turns out the secret lies in week one of the book's launch and that's what I'll discuss in tomorrow's post, the last in this little mini-course on publishing.