In December of 2018 I pushed a publish button and thought the hard part was over.

I had written the book. I had formatted it. I had a cover. I had a title that felt right. I had done the thing that most people who say they want to write a book never actually do — I had finished it and put it in the world. That felt like the finish line.

It was the starting line.

What I did not understand in 2018 was that a book without a platform is a message in a bottle thrown into an ocean with no current. It might reach someone. It probably will not reach many someones. Not because the message is bad. Because there is no infrastructure to carry it from where you are to where your reader is.

Platform is everything in self publishing. Not the most important thing — the story is still the most important thing — but everything else. Your email list. Your social media presence. Your author website. The relationships you have built with readers before you ever publish. The reputation that precedes the book and gives a stranger a reason to take a chance on something you made.

I had none of that in 2018. I had a book and a prayer and the naive confidence of a first-time author who had not yet learned that the publishing is only the beginning of the work.

Black Water’s first version had the same problem. The story was better than SEER. The readers who found it were hooked. But the editing was not where it needed to be and the platform to support it was not fully in place. The reviews said the story was compelling and the editing needed work. Both of those things were true.

So I took it off the shelf. Reedited it. Built the platform more intentionally. And I am releasing it again — this time with the infrastructure that should have been there the first time.

Here is what I know now. The book is the product. Everything else is the business. If you are going to self publish you have to understand both sides of that equation before you hit the button. The writing is your craft. The marketing, the platform, the visibility — that is your business. Both matter. Neither one replaces the other.

I am a better writer now than I was in 2018. I am also a better publisher. Those two things together are what give Black Water’s re-release a different chance than the first version had.

The education cost me years and two book launches. I would not trade it. You cannot learn what I learned any other way. But I would rather you learn some of it from reading this than by making all the same mistakes I made.

Build the platform before you publish the book. Write something worth reading. Then make sure the people who need to read it can actually find it.

In that order.

Stephon Rudd