First, let me frighten you. Let me frighten you REAL GOOD.

What I'm about to tell you will sound like a lot of work. Let that sink in for a minute. A lot of work. Try 18-hour workdays with 6 hours of sleep. Now try 19-hour workdays with 5 hours of sleep. Crank it up to 20 and sleep only for 4 (my case at the moment). No weekends. No days off. Nada. (Don't piss your pants yet. This is not forever. Only in the beginning.)

This ain't a recipe to free bags of gold, what you're about to read. It's a guide and a restructuring of your conventional thinking as to what selling is and isn't (I'm talking to writers here, primarily). You can apply the below to selling anything, not just books: socks, vodka, couches, raw human hearts. It's a step-by-step explanation of how I raised my book sales (paperbacks sold off my lovely website here) from 1 a day, to 6 a day, to 10, to 14, to getting too overwhelmed with orders and running out of cash to replenish the stock, to keep up with 20 sales a day (I was forced to slow it down, so I could develop a system that will allow me to scale).

That is my armor. Imma red, bloody bird. Fear me! *cackles*

Well, actually, this whole crusade thing is not new but rather forgotten. I've gone full circle from firmly believing that to make money writing books you have to sell them (when I started writing five years ago, fresh from working on my start-up and surviving by selling my product to everyone left and right) to believing that well-written books will sell themselves (when about two years ago I retreated from selling into learning the writing craft) to finally believing again that no matter how well-written your book is, if you don't make an effort to sell it, it will linger in all its well-writtedness in obscurity. And yes, in two weeks, on May 15th, it'll be five years since I started writing full-time. And yes, I'll write a post on 25 things I learned from writing full-time for five years. But this is in two weeks. Right now I'm preoccupied with this realization that self-publishing is a lot like having a small business. What do you have to do to survive? Sell. What happens if you don't sell? You perish.

13 secrets to selling books like hot cakes

I'm embarking on a new crusade: SELLING MORE BOOKS