Let's talk about my Week 1 sales
...and why publishing needs a major overhaul
A few weeks ago, I nervously posed the question: How can I possibly move the needle when even publishers, multimillion-dollar corporations, don’t seem to know what sells books right now?
Threads concluded the answer was “authors can’t.” Then several legacy newspapers ran an AI-hallucinated summer reading list and a certain ginormous book subscription service spotlit the novel of a known grifter who proudly used generative AI to help write his book. Trade wars, economic uncertainty—this was not a great time to launch a thriller (even a transportive tropical-island thriller like The Last Ferry Out).
But I’ve been through all that before: My sophomore novel, The Herd, came out in late March 2020, the very week the world shut down.
And that’s why my early sales for The Last Ferry Out surprised me so much:
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