Thoughts On Starting A New Publishing Line

Practicing The Write Stuff Issue #60

I already have a publishing line. If you go to Amazon and search for ‘Paul Wolfe Bass Books’ you’ll find me. And it. I currently have 25 books for sale as ‘Paul Wolfe’ and will probably add two more this year.

Although I’ve made mistakes - and who doesn’t? - I’ve learned a lot. (And sidebar: if you’re thinking of publishing books on Amazon, I do a consulting session called ‘The Three Biggest Mistakes I Made On Amazon’ that - if this is for you - will save you time, money and energy.

But I’ve wanted to start a new publishing line for a long while now for multiple reasons. Resistance has been kicking my ass, but finally I’m dragging myself into this new venture - there will be an announcement this week with more on this, so look out for that.

Now no plan survives first contact with reality. And I don’t have a detailed plan as such, just a collection of ideas.

But for this Issue I wanted to sketch out some of the ideas that are guiding the deecisions I’m making. With the caveat that nothing is set in stone and at every significant step I’ll review and potentially make changes to the direction I’m heading in.

So let’s check out some of these ideas. (And note: I’m putting these down on paper as much for me as anyone else.)

#1 Not Playing The ‘Build Audience Then Sell To It’ Game

Apart from this Newsletter, which I will probably move to my personal website at some stage, I don’t - and won’t - engage in what seems to be standard advice to build a business. Namely:

• Post free content on twitter/medium/substack/linkedin etc.

• Try and get ‘followers’ onto an email list by using some kind of lead incentive.

• Once on the email list, you can then sell them products and services via email.

This advice was outdated 10 years ago, even though it kind of works.

Problem is: the amount of work it takes building and maintaining the ‘free’ audience. To then sift through that audience to find buyers.

Quick story which I think I’ve shared before in PTWS: in 2016 I launched the same promotion to a list of around 600 buyers and a list of 16,000 freebie peeps. The 600 buyers outsold the freebie list by four or five to one.

So instead what I’ll be doing is just publishing to Amazon. Using amazon advertising to promote books. Plus this newsletter (with it’s tiny audience!). And maybe doing a bit of social media promotion….but nothing that takes hours to write. Nothing that takes even 30 minutes to write. If it can’t be done in 10 minutes…it won’t be done.

This is the first step. And so I may have to modify once I start getting hard data. But, I’m going in with this kind of mindset:

#2 Perennial Seller…Not Best Seller

Here’s a factoid for you: my best selling bass guitar book - which I published three and a half years ago - sells roughly the same amount of copies per month in 2026 as it did in 2023. What’s just as interesting (to me): there’s a book that is a competitor’s book - though I wrote mine to be complementary to that - which sells a similar number of copies to mine. And was first published in 1989.

That’s a perennial seller.

I doubt the Publisher who took that book over do anything to promote it. Yet word of mouth plus reviews plus designed obsolence probably accounts for 99.5% of sales. (Here’s a note to music publishers: music books are designed to go on music stands. If you publish a music book with any kind of hard and glued binding - and not SPIRAL BOUND - the book will fall apart. My first edition of this competing book was bought in 1989….it’s still in great condition. Not offering spiral binding is my biggest gripe with Amazon.)

So I’m not interested in writing best sellers. I want to create a line of books that will still be selling in 5 years or 10 years time. (My favourite example of this: William Zinsser’s ON WRITING WELL….first published in 1976 and is on the way to racking up 2 million copies sold. My brain math that’s around 35,000 to 40,000 copies sold a year as an average. If you know what you’re doing, just 10,000 copies sold a year will keep you comfortable for the rest of your life.)

Trying to write one perennial seller though is possible. Far better is to use…

#3 …The ‘Logs In The Fire’ Code

This - amongst many other things - was taught to me by my first mentor Sean D’Souza. You should read Sean’s article on this…which you can find here:

https://www.psychotactics.com/the-logs-in-the-fire-success-code/

The TL;DR version:

• Even with market research you never know what is going to resonate with your audience until you’ve hit publish.

• This applies to YouTube vidoes, podcast episodes, articles. And of course books.

• So you need to publish a number of whatever format you’re publishing…and monitor the results as you go.

• Along the way…one of your ‘logs’ will burn brighter than the others. (See #4 The Michael Crichton Backlist Effect below for an extreme example of this.)

You could also visualize this from the perspective of the 80-20 Principle. I like Sean’s metaphor much better.

Point is: you need to commit to a body of work to truly know what is going to work.

For me that means I’m going to write and release at least 10 books that are connected by a related niche. Though if one starts to burn bright….my focus may have to shift. But you don’t know what you don’t know.

So until I collect accurate data, I’ve got a list of 18 possible books to write. Am just about to publish the first, and the second and third have already been started. And the fourth and fifth are already in my thoughts.

As well as getting books published to build my publishing line, it’s also important to build my backlist. If he were still alive, you could ask Michael Crichton:

#4 The Michael Crichton ‘Backlist’ Effect

Back in the early 90s - pre Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton was what was known as a midlist author. A category of author that doesn’t really exist anymore. He’d published a number of books - under his own name and under pen names. And he’d had enough success to keep publishers interested, but not enough success that he could be a full time fiction writer. He worked in TV and Film - West World (the film) and E.R. the TV Series were both creations of his.

Everything changed for Crichton when he threw the Jurassic Park log on the fire. The book took off and when readers finished it, they wanted more. Crichton’s publishers not only rushed out new editions of his back list, they dusted off the books he’d written under pen names and released those too with a new byline: Michael Crichton writing as John Lange.

If memory serves, at one point Crichton’s books occupied 4 or 5 places on the New York Times Best Seller Lists - when you had to sell serious amounts of books to get one book on the list. And his books were flying off the shelves.

The key point: he had a back list of books so that when one became successful, that success was the kind of rising tide that lifted all his boats. Plus he got to sell movie rights, merchandising rights and all that good stuff.

So my writing approach going into this is: I’m building my (future) back list. Because I have a tiny audience to start with, I don’t expect sales to start out strongly. They will have to build over time. (Which I have thoughts on.)

#5 An Added Benefit Of Building A (Future) Backlist

As well as publishing a number of books in order to discover what truly resonates with your audience, there’s another benefit of building a future backlist. If you’ve got multiple books in your back list, you can make promotional decisions based on that.

For example….back to my music books….I now know with reasonable certainty what months are great selling months on Amazon and what months aren’t - although I’m making the assumption that this is broadly true for both my music books and my upcoming new line.

Which means with my music books, in the months where sales are lower I can strategically pick a book and promote it to my email list. (Because I do have a freebie email list for my music stuff). That promotion can include:

• A limited time price drop.

• A limited time bonus.

• Or both.

The way Amazon works, the more you sell the more their selling algorithm is primed to work in your favour. If within your back list you have a number of titles grouped in a series, then if you run a promo on one of those books people who buy that promo book will get emails from Amazon at some stage in the future about other books in the series.

So the promotion not only gives you a short spike in sales. But it may lead to future sales of other books via Amazon’s algorithm. And you should also have info in your book about your other books, products and services. And a way to get them to contact you with their email address.

The reason for this: someone who has bought your book, invested several hours to read it, implement what you’ve taught and got results….is exponentially more valuable to you than someone who gave a throwaway email address to get a freebie of some sort. Especially if you use Sequential Selling. (More on that soon….)

#6 Keeping The End In Mind

Whenever you create any kind of plan, you need to have a rough idea of what the end goal looks like at that point in time. This is not a line drawn in the sand, because life always throws unexpected curves and goals and targets change. Here are the three ‘end goals’ I have in mind:

• To use this non-fiction line as a way to transition from being a music instructor to being a writer. I’ve got two years worth of stuff to produce for bass guitar, and then it should be set up in a way that the bass guitar books continue to sell themselves in their own modest little way, and lead to higher priced offerings.

• Part of that transition is to generate revenues to replace some of my existing revenues from teaching bass guitar….so that I can do less of that.

• The big one: to get to the point where I can write fiction again. Two or three hours a day.

I’ve been thinking about these three end goals for several years. Probably since 2019. Thinking isn’t action though. And 2025 is the year I’m going to really push at these goals.

There will be more on that this week.

The Ride Out

This isn’t everything I’ve been thinking about. But it gives enough of a 30,000 foot view to guide me over the upcoming year. Even though there will be twists and turns along the way. And new learnings.

PTWS Issue #61

Issue #61 will bring what it brings. But it will be published next Sunday at approximately the same time. I was going to write an issue titled ‘THE ART OF WAR METHOD OF WRITING A BOOK’ today…but the idea for this emerged in my morning freewriting. And I dictated a couple of sections while walking my B4LF, imported them, and the rest kind of fell onto the paper. I’ll need to write more about that at some stage too.

If you’d like to see the ART OF WAR METHOD OF WRITING A BOOK next week, then leave a comment and let me know!