What Really Happens After You Publish a Book
When most people imagine what happens after you publish a book, they picture things like book tours, bookstore appearances, television interviews, and perhaps, if everything goes spectacularly well, your face on a cereal box.
Okay, maybe not the cereal box.
Still, the general expectation is that the world somehow notices.
What actually happens is that your inbox fills with emails.
Lots of emails.
The emails generally follow a familiar pattern. First, they congratulate you on writing what is clearly the most important memoir ever produced by human civilization. Then they explain that your book is tragically invisible, structurally misaligned, strategically under-positioned, algorithmically misunderstood, and suffering from one or more severe visibility-related conditions that only they can diagnose.
Fortunately, they can help.
I originally thought my books were about family, memory, growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, Irish Catholic life, neighborhood characters, and the enduring power of ordinary moments.
Thankfully, a number of experts corrected me.
Apparently my books are really about:
“High-authority cross-cultural narratives”
“The emotional architecture of working-class American memory itself”
“High-impact narratives that dissect environmental pressures, identity thresholds, and the raw mechanics of personal sovereignty”
“The current that never stops moving beneath the surface of our lives.”
“The intense psychological and sociological labor of tracking localized cultural drift and shifting neighborhood architectures”
“A radiant catalyst for examining the anatomy of the past and the structural resilience of the individual heart”
“The true, raw friction of behavioral boundaries, localized social systems, and individual sovereignty under severe systemic duress”
I mean… what? Those are all actual quotes from various emails.
Somehow every expert looked at the same memoir and saw a completely different thing. One person thought it was about memory. Another thought it was about sovereignty.
A third concluded it was an operational framework for navigating localized cultural drift.
Clearly, they know things that I don’t. By sheer good fortune they are willing to share their expertise for a fee (always undisclosed, with the exception of the guy who said I could “simply tip any amount you feel is fair”. Very unusual business model).
These experts assure me that they can rescue my books from obscurity and perhaps The Ninth Level of Amazon Hell through the application of sophisticated systems and strategies. Things like:
Using Algorithmic Metadata Engineering.
Creating a Translation Layer.
Identifying the Visibility Gap and the Discovery Gap (complete with spontaneous capitalization).
Creating a Strategic Value Roadmap.
Identifying the key Category Realignment Nodes.
Targeting precise long-tail cultural and geographical keyword strings, to train the algorithm
Who are these people, you might ask?
Well, judging strictly from their signatures, they are:
Organizers.
Curators.
Featured author curators.
Experience curators.
Strategists.
Marketing specialists.
Author Success Consultants
Book momentum strategists.
Readers community managers.
Team coordinators.
Book members.
And at least one “Corporate Anthropology Researcher”.
I don't know what a Corporate Anthropology Researcher is.
I don't want to know what a Corporate Anthropology Researcher is.
I only know that I desperately want it on my business card.
To date, I have received 51 of these emails. At first I read these emails individually.
Then I started noticing patterns. The same words kept appearing.
Visibility.
Discoverability.
Positioning.
Momentum.
Eventually I realized I was no longer receiving marketing emails. Even the people assuring me they were not marketing gurus operating from secret underground bunkers had begun contacting me.
I was documenting an entire ecosystem.
Over time they sorted themselves into categories, and eventually into an awards program.
There were awards for:
Best Use of a “Gap”, a tie between The Visibility Gap and the Discovery Gap
Best New Gap, the “long-tail cultural keyword gap”
Most Aggressive Use of Metadata, presented to the person who offered me a “premium opportunity to adjust your backend metadata”.
Best email Subject Line: “His yellow Lab died in January and the book explains exactly why that mattered so much” (that wasn’t in the book)
Most Honest Description of a Group, presented to the person who represented “a community of open-hearted people, who are very real and sometimes forget to read the book”
Best Group Name, a five way tie between:
Eclectic Wine and Cheese Book Club
DC Fun & Stimulating Book Club
Luminous Voices: The Architecture of the Modern Heart
Readers & Drinkers (Amsterdam Book Club)
The Rejoice Book Club
Quantum Outreach Excellence Award, presented for the person who had emails existing in multiple inbox states at once (inbox, spam, a reply to the spam, and a form submission from my website, all containing the same content).
Most “Communities” Identified in a Single Email (seven).
And, of course, Lifetime Achievement in Repetition, to the guy who referenced the hockey puck from book two seven times in one email.
Eventually someone suggested I share their recommendations with my team.
This was awkward because my team consisted primarily of Bob.
Bob, for the record, is in all three books and (according to him) will absolutely be in the fourth.
And really, what else would anyone need