We all make mistakes. On my self-publishing journey I have made more than a few, but you don’t have to follow in my footsteps in that regard. I’m sharing what I did wrong so that you can get it right the first time.

My top 5 self-publishing mistakes:
1. Assigning an ISBN for a PDF version of my first book… I’ve never sold it as a PDF. WHY did I burn an ISBN?

2. Not listening to podcasts sooner. I feel like I could have done things so much better on each of my books if I had stopped to google podcasts or top people who have advice on self-publishing. I was reading a lot of blogs instead.

3. Using KDP Select – keeping my third book out of wide distribution for a year and a half put me way behind on getting that expanded reach for that book just for a couple of bucks a month? Really?

4. Not connecting with other authors sooner, not reaching out for community. For as much as I wanted a community, I still had this lingering insecurity from an earlier experience that if I went to a meetup or tried to connect with people online they would realize I wasn’t as successful as them or hadn’t sold as many books or made as much and that I would be seen as a loser. But what I’ve realized of late is that it’s ok that I’m not as successful as others because community is about giving and there are people who are at the spot I was at four years ago and I can help them. So it was definitely a mistake to not reach out sooner.

5. Barking up the WRONG trees. Focusing so much on getting my book into one local book fair, I was convinced this would be such a big-ticket item and it turns out that it was good that I didn’t do it because it would have been super expensive, the authors that I knew who went said it wasn’t very well attended so they didn’t sell much. But I still put a lot of time and energy into this idea and all the items that would go with it, but I didn’t spend that time focusing on my writing. Same with my website, I spent a few days optimizing my website, but you know what? Most people just go to Amazon for my books. I know I need a well-optimized website but I have to prioritize. So not prioritizing earlier was a big mistake.

I share a lot of my mistakes in the Author Your Ambition books (https://authoryourambition.com/) so that you can skip those mistakes and get right to what works.

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Now you can get back to writing your book!

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