From the Contributing Editors: October 2023

You’re not doing marketing wrong; you’re doing the wrong marketing. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over our combined twenty-five-plus years of helping authors, it’s that most people don’t hate marketing; they hate the marketing they are forced to do. Whether that means putting your books in Kindle Unlimited, being on every social media platform, launching a Kickstarter campaign, building a huge mailing list, or learning paid ads, almost every author feels forced into doing something that doesn’t feel right for them.

Unfortunately, success often feels like balancing on the head of a pin, so even though authors don’t feel compelled to do certain things, they dive in headfirst either to prevent failure or finally find success.

This is the surest path to burnout. Luckily, we’ve also met thriving authors who run wildly innovative businesses that fly in the face of orthodoxy.

From this, we realized most marketing and sales strategies can’t be generalized. They’re an incredibly personal experience that must resonate with each author’s natural tendencies. That’s the basis for the Author Ecosystem, which you’ll find detailed in these pages: to give you a sense of what matters to you in the core of your being. Once you develop the language to pinpoint what resonates with you, then you’ll be one step closer to growing the business of your dreams—with the experts we’ve highlighted in this issue as leaders helping shape the future of publishing to guide you.

We hope somebody featured on these pages holds the message you need to hear to build an author business that resonates with you in 2024 and beyond. After all, that is the future of publishing: a personalized business that works for the author rather than a business the author is working inside of while struggling to stay afloat.

Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohelty
Founders, Writer MBA