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There's a piece of advice that gets handed to authors more than almost any other:

"Your next book is your best marketing asset."

There's an element of truth in it. More books does help. A new release does breathe life into a backlist. I'd never argue otherwise.

But followed blindly, this is some of the most expensive advice in publishing.

Because it answers a sales problem with a writing project. Those aren't the same thing.

An author messaged me earlier this week after they picked up on a part of my own story that I'd almost glossed over, that I've revived books years after they'd been published. They told me I didn't stress that part enough. Reviving a quiet backlist is absolutely possible, and authors need to hear it more often.

They were right. So let me stress it in today's newsletter.

The books you've already written are not failures. They're not lottery tickets that came up blank.

They're assets.

They've already absorbed the hardest cost there is, which is writing them. Everything else is small, cheap work compared to that.

When a book isn't selling, it's rarely because the writing was bad. It's because the foundations underneath the book aren't doing their job.

The cover doesn't fit the genre. The blurb reads like a synopsis instead of a sales pitch. The categories are wrong. The keywords are off. The price is too high or too low for the genre. There's no email list capturing the readers who do find it.

None of that gets fixed by writing another book.

I've spoken to authors who revived a flailing book by simply rewriting the blurb. Same cover, same price, same categories. Some authors changed only a handful of words in their blurb, and their sales went up almost overnight.

I've worked with authors whose books were five to ten years old, sitting quietly, doing nothing. With some solid foundational work and a proven ad strategy on top, those books came back to life. Same words on the page. Different positioning around them.

One honest caveat. Every so often, a book just doesn't respond well to ads.

In over six years of working with authors, I can count the times I've seen this happen on one hand.

And it's almost always a book in an obscure genre or sub-genre where the readers are too few or too scattered for ads to find them efficiently. It's rare, so don't use it as a reason not to try.

There's a trap inside the "next book" advice. It treats every release as a fresh roll of the dice. If this one didn't land, the next one might.

The numbers tell a different story.

A book that isn't selling almost always has a fixable reason, and the fix takes weeks, even days, not months.

Treating what you've already published as something worth diagnosing, instead of something to move past, is where compounding starts.

Your next book might well be a marketing asset. But the books you've already written are marketing assets too, and most of them have never been given a fair shot.

So before you write the next one, take a look at the books you've already published. Most aren't underperforming because the writing failed. They're underperforming because the foundations underneath them have never been put right.

That's not a problem with the books. That's a problem you can fix.

Here's what I want to leave you with...

A backlist isn't just a record of what you've written. It's the engine that pays for what you write next.

Every book you've written can earn royalties for years while you work on the next, and the next one launches into the audience your backlist built for you. That's not a catalogue to move past. That's a catalogue to build on.

That's it for this week. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
Matt