I recently attended the Taylor University Professional Writers Conference in Upland, IN. There, I had the pleasure of connecting with authors and editors, agents and publicists.

I sat with authors as they asked me what they should do—should they self publish? Should they try for an agent? Should they work with a hybrid publisher? What if they had no budget? What if their book was already out? How could they sell something that released early or late? How could they sell something that had been out for a few years and never really connected with their readership?

While I did my best to offer some answers or guidance to these authors in the fifteen minutes I had with them, it never felt like enough time to make a big enough difference.

But the other thing I noticed was that most of my answers now depend on one of two things—growing your platform and increasing your name recognition, or “throwing money at the problem.”

Sometimes the best option is to pay to have your book seen. There are a lot of places where that can be done, but often those are extremely pricy or they involve selling your book at a discount. And even then, the numbers I’ve seen on books that aren’t selling well are an increase in sales from 0 sales to 30, or from 20 sales to 200. But that’s nowhere near 1000.

Short of giving away copies for free or heavily depending on a strong, well-established and long-running platform, I felt myself at a bit of a loss.

So I’m very glad that literary agent Linda Glaz recommended a book in her Advance Track teaching. I bought it while sitting in the class, and today I started reading it. It’s why I’m writing this blog post. It’s clear the author is speaking from experience.

If you want to sell your first 1000 copies, you might want to read this book with me. (You can follow my progress on Goodreads.) I plan to read some of this book every day for the next few weeks as a way to continue investing in my own education.

Let’s go learn more together!