You're Not Them

On borrowed strategies, shelf envy, and the one thing no other author has

Getty Images for Unsplash+

There is nothing new under the sun.

Every genre has been written. Every marketing strategy has been tried. Every author platform has a template someone else already built. If you’ve spent any time in Facebook groups, Reddit threads, or LinkedIn communities, you know this. You’ve seen the posts. How did you find your first readers? What ads actually work? How long before your platform started to grow? The questions cycle through, and so do the answers, and that’s not a bad thing. That collective experience is genuinely useful. There’s no reason to figure out from scratch what other authors already learned the hard way.

Here’s what’s really happening.

You’re in those groups watching someone else’s numbers. Their launch results. Their ad spend. Their follower counts. Their review totals. And at some point, without really meaning to, you start measuring your progress against theirs. Their timeline becomes your timeline. Their results become your benchmark. And when you don’t match up, it feels like evidence that something is wrong with you or your book.

It isn’t.

What that author in the Facebook group has is not what you have. Their book came from a different idea, a different life, a different perspective, a different set of experiences and relationships and hard-won insight. Their platform grew from a different starting point with different resources and different goals. Their network is not your network. Their reader is not your reader.

There is nothing new under the sun. But there is something new in you.

Your book hook is yours. The angle you took, the story only you could tell, the argument only you could make. That doesn’t exist anywhere else. Your author platform, however small or new it is right now, is built on relationships that belong to you. Your network, the people who know and trust you, is something no template produced and no other author can replicate. Your life experience, the thing that made you write this book in the first place, is singular.

Shelf envy is real. An author finds a book in their genre that’s outselling theirs and starts pulling it apart, looking for the secret. What did they do that I didn’t? What do they have that I don’t? Sometimes that’s useful research. More often it’s a distraction that leads somewhere dangerous. I’ve heard authors say they spend weeks, months, even years researching a genre before writing a single word — not because the story demanded it, but because they were writing for the market instead of from themselves. And then wondering why it didn’t work.

You can’t write your way into someone else’s audience. You can only write your way into your own.

The communities are worth being in. Keep asking the questions, keep reading the answers, keep borrowing the ideas that make sense for your situation. Just remember that you’re the variable those strategies have never accounted for. The authors giving advice in those threads didn’t have your book, your voice, your readers, or your story.

Take what’s useful. Build from what’s yours. Those are two different things, and knowing the difference is most of the work.

Have you ever borrowed a strategy that just didn’t fit? Tell me about it in the comments.

Lynn brings her more than 30-years experience in small business marketing, publishing, and multiple best-selling author campaigns to her Substack newsletter. She helps authors build and grow their platforms to reach their unique marketing goals through private coaching, non-fiction consulting, and done-for-you marketing programs. And all this, through her computer, in her little lake house in rural Pennsylvania which she shares with her husband, son, and two fluffy companions, Kaiju and Bella. Learn how to work with Lynn here.