Are your expectations even realistic given your current reality, tho?

Writers don’t fail from bad books. They fail from failing to grasp the reality of the situation. Luckily, this is fixable.

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Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Stop using the wrong solutions to solve the wrong problems

Business owners don’t have an “action problem.” If anything, they have an overaction problem. They jump at whatever solution is closest and try to force it to work.

It doesn’t matter that you can’t put out a fire with turpentine. That’s what’s on hand, so they try it anyway and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, solving the wrong problem with the wrong tool usually just makes things worse.

You can’t solve a monetization problem with growth hacking. Those require opposite approaches. Growth is about lowering costs and increasing reach. Monetization is about increasing leverage and value per customer. Mixing them almost always keeps you spinning your wheels.

The HAPI Compass exists to help you sort that out. It’s a four-point system for identifying what kind of constraint you’re actually dealing with, so you can match it with the right solution instead of cycling through tactics that were never going to work.

This framework sits underneath everything I teach, because once people stop misdiagnosing their problems, progress becomes simpler and more predictable.

In my next workshop on Feb 23, 2026 at 3:30pm PT / 6:30pm ET, I’ll walk you through how to apply it to your own business.

If you want your effort to start compounding instead of dissipating, I’d love to have you there.

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Hi,

You pour your soul into the work. You sacrifice time, sleep, and sanity. You finish an impossible thing. Then it comes out, and the world shrugs. That’s what breaks people. Not the work or the rejection, but the gap between what you thought would happen and what actually did.

And the gap is almost always about expectations. Even if we don’t say it out loud, or whisper it to ourselves, we still expect our book to be the breakout, sleeper hit of the summer, right?

We’re lying to ourselves, obviously, but it is such a convenient and happy lie.

We tell ourselves the genre won’t matter. We tell ourselves the platform won’t matter. We tell ourselves time doesn’t matter. We tell ourselves infrastructure doesn’t matter. We think our book alone can carry the weight of success.

But those lies don’t protect us. They gut us.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have goals. Managing your expectations doesn’t mean giving up ambition. It means protecting your energy, because energy is the fuel that gets you through book two, book three, book ten, and beyond. Energy is what keeps you in the game long enough for success to finally catch up.

We waste our energy when we lie to ourselves, even if they are such comfortable lies. When we keep throwing energy at this impossible goal, we leave nothing left for the next impossible goal.

Publishing is a war of attrition. If we can get out of a launch with our sanity, our energy, and our bank account intact, then we live to fight another day. If we survive long enough, then we will have a hit, even if it’s not this time.

I want you to have the energy to last that long and be able to double down when the timing is right. In order to do that, we have to stop lying to ourselves.

These are some of the biggest lies we tell, both to ourselves and each other.

The genre lie

• Expectation: Genre doesn’t matter. A good book is a good book.

• Reality: Genre defines your ceiling.

A memoirist just finished writing about their life-changing journey. They expect their book to break out because it’s raw, heartfelt, and important. And it is important, just like every book is important, but importance doesn’t equal relevance. Most memoirs, unless the author is already famous, sell in the hundreds, not tens of thousands.

That doesn’t mean memoir is hopeless. In fact, memoirists often have more opportunities than fiction authors, just not always inside the book itself.

A memoir can open doors into coaching, teaching, speaking, or consulting. It can build a platform beyond book sales in a way most fiction never will, but if you measure success purely by romance-level sales numbers, you’ll miss those doors and drain your energy thinking you failed.

Don’t get too discouraged by this. Genre popularity doesn’t stay fixed forever. For decades, poetry was a very small market. Then Instagram came along, and suddenly poets were topping bestseller lists by posting single poems as graphics. Genres evolve, but your expectations still have to match the reality of where your genre sits today.

Breaking the block: Marry your story to the right genre tropes. Keep the core you care about, your truth, your themes, your voice, but hold the rest of it loosely.

• Does your small-town romance need to be set in a gun store? Or can it happen in a bakery, a setting that sells infinitely better?

• Does your main character have to be a psychic? Or could she be a witch, something that is much more popular?

If you really care about something, by all means keep it. Otherwise, default to the evergreen expectations of the genre. Your goal is to take the things you care about in your story and then find out how to match everything else to the conventions of the genre you’re trying to enter.

Advantage of genre awareness: Every choice you make narrows or expands your potential audience. Genre is just as much about strategy as the content.

Energy anchor: Expecting memoir to perform like romance wastes your energy. Aligning your expectations with your genre’s unique strengths frees you to build a career that actually lasts.

The platform lie

• Expectation: A sale is a sale. Where I publish doesn’t matter.

• Reality: Platform shapes your entire career.

Take the steamy romance author releasing rapid-fire novellas in KU. They’re killing it in page reads, stacking royalties, feeding a hungry audience that devours three books a week. They hear authors brag about hitting “the list” and think, “That’ll be me soon.”

But KU locks your ebook into Amazon exclusivity, which means almost all your digital sales (which are still most sales for indie authors) happen inside one storefront. The “lists” doesn’t care how many KU reads you rack up. Lists were built to count velocity across multiple retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and physical bookstores. Then, they curate the list to remove anything that don’t want there, like indie authors.

If you’re in KU, your book is invisible to that system. Worse, lists like the New York Times actively filter to avoid those books.

It’s not that KU is bad. KU is fantastic if your goal is steady royalties from voracious binge readers, but if your dream is a shiny New York Times bestseller badge? It’s the wrong platform for your expectations.

Breaking the block: Pick the platform that matches your actual goals.

• If you want binge royalties and fast cash flow → KU.

• If you want stability and a shot at lists → Wide (and probably trad).

• If you want upfront money → Kickstarter.

• If you want community and recurring support → Substack or Patreon.

Advantage of platform leverage: Every platform has built-in strengths. The trick is to stop fighting the rules and start using them.

Energy anchor: Nothing drains energy faster than chasing milestones your platform literally can’t deliver.

The time lie

• Expectation: Effort in = reward out. If I work harder, I’ll get bigger results.

• Reality: Different books live on different clocks.

Picture an epic fantasy author who just finished their 150,000-word tome after three years of drafting. They see romance authors releasing 20,000-word novellas every month and think, “I’ll never keep up,” but these aren’t the same game and they aren’t the same rules.

A novella and a doorstopper don’t live on the same calendar.

Hard work matters, but hours invested don’t automatically equal reward. The market doesn’t grade you for effort. It rewards delivering what readers want when they want it.

The key isn’t working harder, it’s finding where you have an unfair advantage. The place where effort feels frictionless.

Breaking the block: The fact that effort is not tied to reward is actually great, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now. It means that there are also things you can do with very little effort that gives you exponential returns. You just have to find them.

Advantage of Time Awareness: Time is a tool. Fast authors use it by flooding the market, at the expense of letting any one book grow. Slow authors use it by planting seeds, at the expense of having something new to share. The advantage comes from bending time to serve your career, not just letting it pass.

Energy anchor: Trying to match someone else’s clock wastes energy. Finding your unfair advantage turns effort into momentum instead of friction.

The infrastructure lie

• Expectation: If my book is good, it’ll sell.

• Reality: Books don’t sell themselves.

Think about a debut thriller author with no list, no ads, no press, and no launch team. They sell 250 copies, which should actually a win since most books barely sell 100 copies, but they expected 5,000, so it feels like failure.

That’s when most writers quit instead of building the foundational infrastructure to have success in the future, and that kind of boring work is where success comes from 99.99% of the time.

You can’t send water through a pipe that doesn’t exist, and the size of the pipe determines how much water can flow. Infrastructure is the piping that allows success to flow. Your email list, your ad system, your partnerships, your network, that’s what carries readers to your book. If you don’t build it, nothing flows. If it’s small, only a trickle flows. Expecting a flood without first laying down the pipes is delusional.

Even the debuts that “break through” have infrastructure on their side. Maybe it’s a publisher’s PR machine. Maybe it’s a viral social platform. Maybe it’s years of connections in another field. The book didn’t do it alone. The pipes were already there.

Breaking the block: Stop expecting your first book to carry the weight of a full career. Celebrate the 50 sales and 10 subscribers who chose you. Those are your first pipes. Everything you do to strengthen that infrastucture expands the flow, but only if you keep building.

Advantage of intimacy: When your infrastructure is small, you can be close to your readers in ways big authors can’t. Reply to every email, experiment with your marketing, and learn what works for you. That intimacy becomes the foundation of your career.

Energy anchor: Expecting skyscraper results without skyscraper pipes just breaks your spirit. The size of your results will always match the size of the pipes you’ve built.

At the end of the day, authors expect success to happen instantly, but your potential can only rise to the quality of your infrastructure.

Without pipes, your potential is tiny. Even if lightning strikes, there’s nowhere for the water to go. Build bigger and your potential stretches into the thousands. With massive infrastructure, PR teams, wide distribution, years of audience-building, your potential can rise to bestseller status.

That’s why some debuts explode. It isn’t magic. It’s because they already had massive pipes laid before the book ever came out. The book lit the spark, but the size of their infrastructure determined how much success flowed to them.

Your potential can only match the size of your pipes. You don’t do yourself any favors by lying to yourself otherwise.

If you write in a niche genre, you can’t expect mass-market results. If you publish in KU, you can’t expect a New York Times hit. If you write slow, you can’t expect rapid-release numbers. If you have no infrastructure, you can’t expect a flood of sales.

That doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. It means your expectations need to match your current reality.

Luckily, your disappointing launch only reflected your reality at the time you published, nothing more.

It wasn’t destiny. It wasn’t proof you’ll never succeed. It was just a snapshot of where your genre, your platform, your cadence, and your infrastructure stood in that moment.

And your reality can be altered.

You can shift genres. You can change platforms. You can adjust your cadence to something you can actually sustain. You can build bigger pipes through mailing lists, ads, partnerships, and community.

Writers don’t understand that success is a trailing indicator. It comes later, after the work, after the bricks are laid, after the pipes are wide enough to carry the flow.

Your potential can only rise to the quality of your infrastructure. And if you lie to yourself about that, the only thing you’re building is heartbreak.

What do you think?

• Have your expectations ever crushed your energy more than the actual results? What happened?

• Which “lie” do you catch yourself believing most often?

• What’s one way you can start building bigger pipes for your next launch?

Let us know in the comments.

What do you think? If you liked this one, then check out my new Kickstarter campaign. It’s for two books, The Six-Figure Author Stack and On Being Happy and a Successful Writer at the Same Time, that I think are each powerful alone, and even more powerful together.