I got my first book advice within hours of publishing.
“Price it higher. At least $4.99. You’re leaving money on the table.”
The advice was good. It was also the wrong time for it.
I priced 100 Rules to Live By at $0.99. On purpose. I wasn’t optimizing for revenue. I was optimizing for one rep. Get a book out. Feel the process end to end. Hit publish. That’s the variable I isolated.
Pricing? That’s a future pass.
Distribution channels? Future pass.
Cover design, marketing, Apple Books? All future passes.
This is how I think about building anything. Books, software, buildings. Each pass through, I pick one variable to optimize. The first pass is almost never about the thing people think it should be about. The first pass is about getting off zero and into motion.
People see a $0.99 book and think the price is the problem. The price isn’t the problem. The problem is most people with a 10-year dream of writing a book are still on page zero. I’m on page done.
After the first rep, I can run the next passes:
- Test a higher price point
- Expand to new platforms
- Invest in cover design
Each pass isolates one variable and gives me signal on whether it moved the needle.
When you try to optimize pricing, distribution, packaging and marketing on pass one, you get paralyzed. If sales are low, which lever failed? You can’t tell. You changed too many things.
This is the same logic behind good experiments. Change one thing. Measure. Then change the next thing. If you change five things and something breaks, you’re debugging in the dark.
The deeper pattern: perfectionism disguises itself as preparation. “I need to get the price right. I need to be on all platforms. I need a great cover.” Each requirement is reasonable on its own. Stacked together, they become a wall. And the wall keeps you at zero.
I’d rather be live at $0.99 than perfect at $0.00.
More books are coming. The price will change. The distribution will expand. But each of those changes will be its own isolated pass, one variable at a time.
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What would you build if you knew the first version was allowed to be “bad”?
