As an author, I have to live in a bit of a state of delusion. Delulu as the kids say. Because 1. I have to write the books. And 2. I have to believe that the book will do well. Even though I know how saturated each market is. How difficult it is to get anyone to read, let alone review. I have to have a delusional belief that my biggest goals and dreams COULD happen and therefore I need to prepare for that success.

Many of you know I’ve been self-publishing since 2015 and last year with the book I had on hand, I realized the best chance of success for that book was the traditional route. Because the audience for that book gets their recommendations from book clubs and traditional media sources. So I signed with an agent. We’ve been working on edits and were hopefully going on submission soon.

How am I setting myself up for success here? Well, continuing to grow my audience (please subscribe here, follow me on Insta or TikTok, or subscribe to my newsletter, all the links are below).
My thoughts are, let’s say I get the big dream, the big deal, the book gets a big deal and lots of marketing support, it sells so well that so many people are hungry for me from me that they want to go back to my backlist and read more.

For me, that means making sure my backlist is great. I went back and revised my very first novel, Nailbiters, in 2019 ahead of the 2020 release of the sequel Architects. I cleaned up my rookie grammatical errors and I love it that much more now.

I have one book whose cover is definitely hurting it. In 2017 I self-published Enemies of Peace. This is my best-selling fiction book. I had huge support from the FI community in terms of podcast interviews, bulk orders for meet ups. It did amazing, in spite of the cover. When I published this I had two books out, only in eBook as 99 cent eBooks. I was making dollars a month. It was sad. So I had nothing to reinvest. With Enemies of Peace I decided to launch print for all the books. This book had an audiobook. I did more for this book and it did better. Go figure. But the cover.

So I worked with Formatted Books in late 2023 to give it a makeover. Again, if this next book does amazing and people want to go to my backlist, I don’t want anything to keep them from checking out those books. So It has a new cover now.

Just as I’ve done with previous second editions I:
Registered my NEW ISBNs for my second edition
I reviewed the entire text

For this second edition I did a new cover and a foreword for book from a fellow author who has been very supportive of this book. This gives this edition more content, a better marketing asset in the cover, but the story is the same so I was able to port over all my reviews. (This is in my 2024 KDP Upload tutorial, you can check that out and skip to the second edition chapters)

I want you to think about what you would fix now if you could about your earlier books. What if your book, or latest book, is a runaway success? What would you do differently now to better positon yourself for success? Do that thing!

**The service I reference in this video, FormattedBooks, has decided to close their doors. For anyone looking for a similar service, 100Covers now also offers interior file formatting: 100Covers: http://100covers.com/?ref=49 **

Second Editions Checklist: https://authoryourambition.com/ultimate-checklists/
Enemies of Peace: https://1mkwilliams.com/enemies-of-peace/

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