People who believe they have gained some expertise in a subject, whether through knowledge, experience, or intuition, often feel compelled to write about their expertise. The goal is sometimes to earn money, sometimes to helpfully inform others on the subject, sometimes both.

I fell into the trap of believing my so-called expertise in two subjects qualified me to write and publish books about them. First, I assumed having written a dissertation, earned a PhD, and edited academic papers for a decade magically made me an expert on conducting academic research. I wrote some books, thinking my paltry experience conferred upon me the authority to claim my suggestions were worth following. Naturally, I tried to build a business around my claims. Writing and publishing was fun, but the upshot of my effort was to display my ignorance for the world to see, if the world had cared to look.

I will say all that experience led me to my current part-time, sadly underpaid job as an expendable adjunct faculty member at an online for-profit college. So maybe it wasn’t a total waste.

My second attempt to leverage my knowledge and experience happened recently, when I decided I was more of an artist than an academic. I figured my art background and my thin PhD in marketing gave me the authority to tell artists how to market and sell their art. I served as a mentor for a nonprofit organization whose mission was to help small businesses. I was the artist whisperer. After five years, I hit my limit on cajoling artists into believing they could actually make money selling their art. Futile endeavor.

However, it seemed to me the right next thing to do was to leverage my art background, education, and years of mentoring by writing a book about it–hence the book I published in 2024 with the shameless title Make Money Selling Your Art. I thought because I was an artist who had spent lots of money on books like that over the years, hoping someone would inspire me to take the terrifying actions the authors suggested, that similarly, artists struggling in the current art market would be willing to buy my book to help them sell their art.

I was wrong.

First off, artists don’t want to do what it takes to sell their work. See my rant about that topic here.

Second, a lot of the information in the book was obsolete the moment I wrote it. I tried to explain that conundrum in the book, but knowing artists (a) they didn’t read the book, and (b) they would never have applied my tips anyway.

Third, and this has nothing to do with artists, in the current political and economic climate, I prefer not to support Amazon through the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. KDP has made it easy for authors to be their own publishers, which is wonderful. Unfortunately, in recent years, I have come to learn that Amazon treats its vendor like trash. It treats its employees even worse. The books I published on KDP are still out there in the world, but now they are “out of print,” a status I can invoke by clicking a button.

I moved my books to a less-reprehensible platform called Draft2Digital, formerly Smashwords. Publishing ebooks there is as easy as it was to publish Kindle books on KDP. Publishing print books is not as easy, but eventually I figured out how to comply with D2D’s requirements for my fiction. However, when I tried to publish the book for artists, the platform rejected the book, saying its print partners (the other channels that might sell the print book) would not accept content that wasn’t unique. In other words, the market for marketing books is so saturated, there was no point in printing another one, even if it was aimed specifically at artists.

The bar for ebooks is a lot lower than the bar for print books. That is why there is an ebook version but not a print version for sale on this website.

So now you know the story.