I Came Here to Write Books

Somehow I ended up managing ISBNs, QR codes, ads, inventory, booths, and a small empire of spreadsheets.

I thought starting a writing/editing/publishing/documentation company would involve writing books. Technically, it does—there is, in fact, quite a lot of writing involved: drafting, revising, editing, and then rewriting things I was absolutely certain were finished until Future Me came back with stronger opinions. But what I did not fully appreciate was how much of publishing is actually logistics and marketing wearing a trench coat and pretending to be creativity.

Somewhere along the way, “I write books” quietly became: I assign ISBNs. I resize covers. I compare trim sizes. I fix QR codes. I upload files to Amazon and Ingram and then stare suspiciously at dashboards waiting for them to acknowledge my existence. I create ARC campaigns. I run ads. I design banners. I order inventory. I count inventory. I forget where I put the inventory spreadsheet. I buy shelves for the inventory. My family sees empty shelf space and immediately begins colonizing it.

Apparently this is entrepreneurship.

And none of these jobs is individually dramatic. Nobody says, “Beware! One day you will spend forty-five minutes trying to figure out why a hardcover refuses to move through Ingram when the paperback using the exact same interior has already published.”

Nobody warns you that 200 perfectly good bookmarks can become 200 mildly annoying bookmarks because you used a bad QR code.

Nobody tells you that you can create an adorable set of coloring pages for a children’s book, save them somewhere perfectly reasonable, and then later discover that “perfectly reasonable” is apparently a place outside the known universe.

And nobody really explains that a published book can become a logistics problem all over again.

I’ve been revising We Didn’t Start the Phire, the first book in my World in Draft series. Since it was my first real publishing experience, I knew it needed some work. I expected cleanup. I found structural problems. Then more structural problems. Then a phrase repeated three times in close succession, which is exactly the sort of thing you do not want to discover while staring at a stack of already-printed copies.

So now those copies have been promoted to Legacy Edition status, which is publishing language for, “I don’t want to just throw them away.” For now, they’ll be a bonus with the other World in Draft books and will include an insert pointing readers toward the revised version when it is ready. If life hands you obsolete inventory, apparently you make promotional material.

Marketing is its own species of chaos.

There are Amazon ads, Instagram posts, Facebook posts, Bluesky posts, ARC services, bookstagrammers, newsletters, websites, series pages, reader guides, review campaigns, pinned carousels, booth banners, bookmarks, stickers, and the eternal question:

Did anyone actually buy the book? Usually the answer is no. Sometimes the ad gets thousands of impressions and several clicks and precisely zero sales. This is also the point where I learned that Amazon ads are considerably less comforting when the product page has no reviews. Apparently “please spend money on this book that no one on this website has publicly vouched for yet” is not the strongest conversion strategy.

Sometimes a social ad gets likes and saves—which feels weirdly encouraging because at least someone cared enough to say, “I might want this later.”

Sometimes two people download an ARC and both of them actually review it, which turns out to be far more satisfying than twenty downloads disappearing silently into the void.

And sometimes you spend an afternoon designing something promotional only to realize the most successful thing you posted that week was a joke about how the only people who comment on your posts are “send me this post” bots.

Marketing keeps you humble.

Then there are events. My upcoming street fair has introduced an entirely new category of questions: Does Square work? Do I have enough change? Where did I put the tablecloth? Do the signs fit? Will the banner attach to the tent? Do I need bags? How many books do I bring? How many bookmarks? How many coloring pages? How many things can fit on one table before it starts looking like a bookstore exploded? And, perhaps most importantly, have I tested any of this before the morning of the event?

I am trying very hard to make the answer to that last question yes.

The odd thing is that none of this makes me feel less like a writer. If anything, it has made me understand publishing differently. The writing is still the center of it. It is the reason all the other work exists. But the logistics are what get the book from my computer into someone’s hands. The marketing is what helps that person discover it exists. The websites, QR codes, ARCs, booths, ads, ISBNs, proofs, spreadsheets, and mildly cursed hardcovers are all part of building the bridge between those two things.

Would I prefer that some of that bridge required fewer forms? Absolutely.

Would I like Ingram to occasionally explain itself? Deeply.

Would I enjoy knowing where I saved those coloring pages? More than I can express.

But I’m also beginning to appreciate the strange satisfaction of making all these pieces work together. Or at least mostly together. Or at least well enough that nobody notices the duct tape.

I came here to write books. Apparently I also came here to run a tiny publishing company. Which means some days I’m an author. Some days I’m an editor. Some days I’m a marketer, web designer, inventory clerk, event planner, bookkeeper, graphic designer, technical support department, and reluctant expert in QR-code replacement stickers.

And some days I do all of those things before dinner.

Signed somewhere between writing and all the rest,
S.G., Keeper of the Wondrous Ledger