Build It And They Will Come? The Biggest Lie in Self-Publishing.

When Dale L. Roberts Roberts joined me live, I told him I felt like I was talking to a celebrity.

I’ve been following his YouTube channel — Self-Publishing with Dale — for years. He’s a best-selling author, a self-publishing advocate, and one of the few people online who talks about this business without trying to sell you a fantasy. So when he agreed to come on, I did what any good host does: I asked him the question every indie author is desperate to ask.

How do self-published authors actually sell books — and sometimes even outsell the traditional publishers?

It starts with the foundation (and most of us skip it)

Dale’s first point is simple: before you spend a single dollar, you have to know who your book is for.

He told me about the biggest mistake of his early career — writing a fitness book “for everyone.” A friend took off his glasses, looked at him dead-on, and asked: “You mean to tell me you’d give the same exercise advice to a teenager that you’d give to an older adult?”

Once you’ve got that, Dale says three things carry the weight:

* Your cover has to communicate the genre and grab the right reader. (More on his painful cover story in a second.)

* Your description is copywriting, not a summary. It’s “the art of writing for the purpose of a sale.” Don’t write it the way you wrote the inside of your book. Hit the pain points. Give people a reason to click buy.

* Your keywords make you discoverable. Use the exact words your ideal reader is typing into search — and now into AI tools too. Put them in your title, subtitle, description, and series name. Just do it tastefully. Nobody wants to read a paragraph of stuffed keywords.

The $5 cover vs. the 12-hour cover

Back in 2015, Dale had a fitness book selling well with a simple cover he’d bought on Fiverr for five bucks. Sales started dipping, so — in his words — “in my infinite wisdom,” he decided to redesign it himself. He opened GIMP, spent twelve-plus hours building a slick comic-book-style cover (he’s a comic nerd). Friends on Facebook loved it. “You made that?!”

He published it. Sales went to zero.

He let it ride for a month, got a smattering of sales, then finally admitted: “You’re not a cover designer, Dale. Stop it.” He put the original $5 cover back — and the sales returned.

The lesson isn’t “never DIY.” It’s know what your audience expects from your genre, and don’t let your ego override the data.

The email list is the whole game

If I had to pick the one thread that ran through our entire conversation, it’s this: build an email list.

Dale put it plainly — you don’t strictly need a website or social media if you have an email plan. Because the whole point is to take readers off Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, and bring them into an ecosystem you actually own.

Two more tactics I’m adding to my list:

* Newsletter swaps — you promote another author’s deal to your list this week, they promote yours next month. No email addresses change hands. The rising tide raises all boats.

* Group promos — a newsletter swap on steroids, where a whole group of authors cross-promotes together. Tools like StoryOrigin and BookFunnel run marketplaces for exactly this.

The truth nobody selling a course will tell you

I asked Dale about the urban legend: can you actually support yourself and your family full-time as a self-published author?

His honest answer: a vast majority of self-published authors don’t make even a part-time living. And he’d know — he lived the cautionary tale himself. He wrote his first fitness book, made about twenty dollars, tasted blood like a shark, and promptly quit a job he loved. The next two years were, in his words, “the worst.” If he could redo it, he’d have kept the job and ramped up slowly.

His breakthrough only came after he worked with a coach who told him: do everything I say, no shortcuts, give it six months. He put in 12-to-16-hour days writing and editing, morning to night. In January 2016, it clicked.

Three quick things before you go

* Segment your list. Dale is pivoting into fiction and — despite having a big email list already — he’s building a separate one, because his self-publishing subscribers didn’t sign up for sci-fi horror. If you write in more than one genre, tag and separate your audiences (Kit makes this easy). A guest in the chat put it perfectly: “I fought segmentation for so long, but it was amazing when I finally did it.”

* YouTube and shoppable video work. Deliver a few minutes of real value, then a quick 15–30 second ask — in the video, the description, the end screen, the pinned comment. My own proof: I read the first two paragraphs of Karma Unleashed on a TikTok shop video, said “you can grab it right from here,” and someone bought it on the spot. Exposure is exposure.

* The platforms won’t sell for you. Amazon, IngramSpark, KDP — they’re doorways, not salespeople. As Dale said, it’s Field of Dreams in reverse: you can’t just build it and expect them to come. You have to be the biggest cheerleader your book will ever have. Because if you aren’t — who is?

Where to find Dale

Catch Dale Roberts at selfpub.substack.com and on YouTube, where he’s got over 2,000 videos on self-publishing (not an exaggeration).

P.S: For more conversations like this, make sure to check out the Substack Writers Salon, my Substack podcast in which we talk about publishing on Substack, the writing journey, and, of course, books!

Keep writing!

Natasha

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