August 29th, 2026   •   4 minute read   •   Issue #169

There's a pattern I keep running into, and it's the wrong way round.

The authors doing the most are earning the least.

Ask an author earning a few hundred dollars a month what they've got running to sell their books, and the list keeps going:

→ A newsletter
→ A Substack
→ Instagram
→ TikTok
→ A reader Facebook group
→Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads
→ Advertising in the US, UK, Canada and Australia 
→ A reader magnet started and never finished
→ A direct sales store half-built
→ A podcast planned for the autumn
→ A second pen name

Ask an author earning a few thousand a month and the list is shorter.

Ask one earning $10,000 or $20,000 a month and it's shorter still. Often three things. Sometimes two.

That isn't a coincidence, and it isn't that success bought these higher earning authors the freedom to drop things.

It's the other way round. The shortlist is what got them there.

The authors doing all the things aren't lazy. They're exhausted. And here's the part that hurts the most: not one of those eleven items is a bad idea.

But those ideas are what throttles the authors stuck at a few hundred dollars per month in royalties.

Complexity never arrives as one bad decision. It arrives as twenty good ones, taken one at a time, each of them sensible on the day you took it.

Adding Feels Like Progress

Every time you add something, you get a little hit of momentum. A new account. A new project. Something to point at when someone asks how the writing business is going. It feels like progress. It isn't. It's adding more weight to the ball and chain keeping you where you are.

Subtracting gives you none of that.

No new dashboard, no launch post, nothing to show for it. It feels like giving up, right up until the point it starts working.

So authors add. Then they add again.

Here's what nobody mentions on the day you add: adding is a decision you make once. Maintaining is a decision you make every week for the rest of your business's life.

The TikTok account you set up in an afternoon wants three videos a week forever. The second ad platform you opened wants your attention every time it misbehaves, which is often. The Substack wants an essay. The store wants order fulfillment and a financial headache.

None of it is hard. All of it is heavy.

Non-fiction authors do the same thing on the product side. A book, a course, a workshop, a membership, a coaching offer, a workbook, all of them half-built, none of them selling, because attention got divided eight ways and nothing reached the depth where it starts paying.

Every Channel Has A Threshold

Nothing works at 15% attention.

Facebook Ads don't start paying the day you open the account. They start paying once you've run enough tests to know which book, which hook, and which ad creative actually pull. That takes weeks of focused attention and a budget you didn't split across three platforms.

Amazon Ads are the same. Those readers are searching with a wallet out, which is a gift, but only once you've done the keyword work and given it long enough to gather data.

An email list doesn't pay on day one either. It pays after you've built the reader magnet, put the capture in the back matter of every book, and mailed consistently for months.

Every channel has an entry cost you pay upfront and a payoff you collect later. Dabbling is the worst of both worlds. You pay every entry cost and collect none of the payoffs.

You can pay the entry cost on five platforms, or you can collect the payoff on one. Not both.

The Subtraction Test

Take ten minutes this week and write your own list. Everything currently running, not everything you've tried.

Then go through it line by line and ask one question of each item:

If I stopped this today, what would actually change in 90 days?

Be honest with yourself. For most of the list, the answer is nothing. That isn't a failure. It's information.

You'll end up with three buckets:

→ Things paying you now. Keep them, and give them the attention they've been missing.

→ Things that would pay you if you finished them. Usually foundations: the book page, the blurb, the back matter capture, the reader magnet that's 80% done. Pick one, finish it, move on to the next.

→ Things that cost you every week and pay you nothing. Stop them. Not forever. Just for now.

Nothing you stop is lost. It's parked. The TikTok account will still be there next year if you want it, and you'll come back to it with a business behind you instead of a business waiting on it.

What Simple Actually Looks Like

Go back to those shorter lists for a second, because it's worth knowing what's actually on them.

A book page that converts. One ad platform you understand properly. An email list you actually communicate with. That's the whole business, at a few hundred dollars a month and at $20,000 a month. The scale changes. The list doesn't.

It looks unimpressive from the outside. It looks like you're missing opportunities, sitting out platforms, ignoring whatever everyone else was excited about in January.

You're not missing anything. You're just not paying for it.

And here's the advantage of a simple business:

It survives a bad month.

When the kids are ill, the day job blows up, and the book is overdue, the eleven-item business collapses, because eleven things all need you and you've got nothing left to give.

The three-item business keeps running. The ads keep spending. The book page keeps converting. The email list keeps growing.

That's the test I'd apply to everything you're doing. Not "could this work?" Almost anything could work.

Ask instead: would this still be running on my worst week?

You don't need a bigger business. You need a business that doesn't need you quite so much.

Simplicity scales. Complexity fails.

That's it for this week.

Thanks for reading. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt