I have 11 books published, spanning fiction and nonfiction. On top of that, I have 3 digital products in AI and health and wellness. I have not had a regular job since 2019. Let me be honest with you before this article goes any further. Most of those books have sold close to nothing.
Not because they are bad. I have had readers write to me about a story of mine involving a dog that made them cry on a train. I have had a book picked up by a publisher in India for the paperback rights. I have written young adult science fiction, motivational nonfiction, and a novel that blends the multiverse with the Shrimad Bhagavatam, which is a strange enough pitch that agents still remember it after they reject it.
The books are fine. The problem was never the writing. The problem is that nobody tells beginner authors what actually happens after you hit publish.
The Myth That Ruins Everyone’s First Year
Here is the story we all get sold. Write the book. Publish it. Readers find it because it is good. Word spreads. You wake up one day with a small but loyal audience and a modest but steady income.
That is not what happens. What happens is your book sits on Amazon next to nine million other books, in a category so broad and so crowded that a reader would need to scroll for an hour to reach you by accident. Nobody scrolls for an hour. They search seven words, glance at whatever the algorithm hands them, and move on.
I learned this the slow, expensive way. I spent months treating the writing as the whole job. It is maybe forty percent of the job. The other sixty percent is a mess of categories, keywords, descriptions, and constant, unglamorous outreach that nobody puts in the author bio.
The Boring Stuff Actually Matters More Than You Think
I want to give you one real example, because vague advice is worthless and I promised myself I would not write another vague article about publishing.
My novel was sitting in Teen and Young Adult Science Fiction, a category so large that ranking in it does almost nothing for visibility. A closer look at narrower categories taught me something I did not expect. A nearly empty category is not automatically a good move. You can rank number one in a shelf that gets almost no traffic and win a badge nobody sees. What you actually want is one or two of those thin categories for the badge itself, since it does lift conversion once a reader lands on your page, plus one category with real foot traffic where people are genuinely browsing. Three empty shelves gets you three badges and zero readers. One thin shelf plus one busy shelf gets you both.
Nobody teaches this in a creative writing class. You learn it by staring at ranking data at midnight, which is a strange way to spend your forties, but here we are.
The Part That Actually Humbles You
Writing is a solitary act. Selling a book is not. This is the part that took me the longest to accept, probably because accepting it means admitting you cannot do this entirely alone, and most writers become writers precisely because we like being alone with our thoughts.
I cannot afford paid ads right now. I do not have fifty thousand followers on any platform. What I do have is a catalog of books people genuinely enjoy once they find them, and a growing understanding that the fastest way to get books in front of readers is through other people who already have an audience. Affiliates, reviewers, bloggers, fellow indie authors willing to swap a mention. I am actively building out an affiliate program for my catalog right now, offering a real commission, because I would rather share a slice of a sale that happens than keep one hundred percent of a sale that never does.
That single sentence took me longer to write than the rest of this article combined. Asking for help in public does not come naturally to most of us. It should. The writers who are actually earning something from their books are, almost without exception, the ones who stopped trying to do every single thing themselves.
What I Would Tell The Version Of Me From 2019
Publish the book. Then treat the next six months like a second job, because it is one. Learn your categories properly instead of guessing. Write a description that hooks in the first line, because readers decide in about three seconds whether to keep reading. Find your reviewers before you need them, not after your book has already gone quiet. And when someone offers to help carry the weight of getting your work seen, say yes.
The writing was never the hard part. Getting a stranger to notice it in a sea of nine million other books, that is the actual craft nobody warns you about. I am still learning it, in public, one honest mistake at a time. If you are further along this road than I am, or just starting down it yourself, tell me what you have learned. I read every comment.
Let’s Actually Work Together On This
This goes both ways. If you are a reader, my full catalog of books and digital products lives on Gumroad. If you are an author with your own audience, or an affiliate marketer looking for a fresh, genuinely good catalog to promote, I am actively recruiting affiliates right now with real commission rates. Authors need people who already have an audience, and affiliates need products worth recommending. If either of those is you, the links are below.
My books and digital products:
https://harshashastry.gumroad.com
Become an affiliate to earn 40 % commission on my books:
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