My first book, Life Is Also a Game, goes on sale this Saturday at major bookstores across Taiwan.

The first print run is 1,100 copies.

So for the past few months I’ve been chewing on one question:

How does an unknown, first-time author sell 1,000 books?

I don’t know yet. And so far I’ve done nothing at all!

Over the next few months I’m going to try, and write down the whole process and everything I test along the way.

Before I start, I want to lay out the constraints I’ve pieced together over the past year.

Constraint 1: the publisher can only do so much

Of course my publisher helps sell the book.

But they work more like a VC. Like a fund backing startups, they bet on many books at once, and one hit pays for the rest.

My publisher has a lot of books coming out at the same time. Bestselling authors, people who already have hundreds of thousands of followers, topics with an obviously bigger market than mine.

My book is just one of the many small bets they’re placing.

As a first-time author with zero track record, I can’t expect the publisher to pour more resources into selling these 1,000 books. Given a choice, they’ll back the stronger author every time.

They do what they can. Getting the book onto shelves at chains like Books.com.tw and Eslite, sending the book’s info to some media outlets.

Everything else, selling included, is on me.

Constraint 2: selling books doesn’t make money

My book is priced at NT$420, my royalty is 8%, and the first run is 1,100 copies. (It bumps to 12% if it sells 5,000, but I can ignore that for now.)

The money I can make on the first run is easy to figure out.

420 × 8% × 1,100 = NT$36,960.

In other words, even if the entire first run sells out, my author’s cut is under NT$40,000.

The publisher pays me the first-run royalties up front, so even if it doesn’t sell out I still get all of them. But financially, selling books in Taiwan gives me almost no incentive at all.

What I’ve already put into this book (illustrations, an editor I hired myself, and so on) is well past NT$70,000. I won’t break even until the second printing sells out.

Honestly, wanting to sell out the first run is just ego. It’s also doing my part for a publisher who trusted me.

I spent a year writing a book I think is genuinely useful, so of course I want as many people as possible to read it. And 1,000 is a beautiful number.

But the thin margins of a traditionally published author also quietly decide how I have to sell from here.

In Taiwan, I can’t pay for ads to acquire readers. I only make NT$33.6 on a book (8% of NT$420), so even if I spend NT$100 on ads to sell one copy, I’m still down NT$66.4. So I have to find ways to promote it that are free, or very cheap.

It also makes me even surer that I have to self-publish the English and Japanese editions myself. That way I keep a much bigger share, plus more freedom on pricing and marketing.

Constraint 3: I have a short attention span, I can’t sell the same book forever

Plenty of authors can spend years selling the same book.

I absolutely can’t.

As someone with ADHD, even while writing this book I opened up countless new rabbit holes, and I’ve still got five or six more books in my head, plus other things I want to try.

Rather than spending a lot of time figuring out how to sell a few more copies, I’d honestly rather spend that time writing the next book.

So I’m not going to sell this book forever, and I don’t want to design a marketing strategy that needs me to keep it up indefinitely.

If it requires me to shout “come buy my book” every single day, that strategy is not for me.

Right now I’m giving myself a three-month deadline, until the end of this year. Play hard for three months, then go play with something else.

That means my marketing is best spent on things that “stick around”: writing blog posts, making YouTube videos, going on podcasts. Even after I stop actively pushing the book in three months, those things can keep getting found by people.

Constraint 4: most books don’t succeed

Publishing is far more competitive than I first imagined.

Roughly 90% of new books never sell out their first print run.

Every year there are thousands of new self-help and psychology titles alone, and that includes overseas bestsellers. Trying to stand out is genuinely hard.

Every bookstore has only so much shelf space. If a book launches and nothing happens, it gets swapped out for the next batch fast. Look at the bestseller rankings inside an Eslite and you’ll find the same few books over and over. Apart from new releases in prime spots, books moved to the back shelves or returned to the publisher’s warehouse are hard to ever find again.

And in the age of AI, how-to books are even harder to sell. When people have a question, they just ask AI and get a personalized answer. Why buy a long book? If you’ve got that kind of time, you might as well watch a YouTube video.

So I don’t want to assume that because I spent a year writing a book I think is good, it deserves to sell well.

I think my rule for action should be:

Times have changed. This book will probably not sell well. What can I actually do?

Statistically, not selling well is the normal outcome. I’ll do everything I can, but after trying all kinds of approaches, if it really doesn’t sell out, then I just move on and write the next one.

I want to write many books, so how this one does matters a lot in the big picture, and also not that much.

If this were the only book I’d ever write, I might push all my chips in. But if there are still five, ten more to come, this is just the first.

First time writing a book, first time publishing, first time selling.

Messing it up a little is normal. To me, this isn’t a battle I have to win. If Taiwan doesn’t work, I can still try the English edition, the Japanese edition, or the next book.

Laying all these constraints out like this, it looks pretty grim.

I wrote a book that barely makes money.
I can’t run ads.
I don’t have the patience to sell the same book forever.
There’s a 90% chance it fails.
The publisher can only do so much.

The strange thing is, this actually made me less anxious.

Because it makes everything a lot clearer. Even under these constraints, there’s still a lot I can try.

Let me keep sharing as I go.