On the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Joe Solari draws a lesson from Jeff Bezos's early years at Amazon — when Wall Street was calling it amazon.bomb and Bezos kept building anyway — to make a case for why indie authors need to stop watching their competitors and start watching their readers. Using the philosopher René Girard's concept of mimetic desire, Joe explains how author communities, for all their value, can quietly install somebody else's North Star in your publishing business without you even noticing. He offers two practical tools to counter this: a one-page North Star document that anchors your publishing vision before you open any dashboard or social media group, and a one-week information audit that helps you identify how much of what you're consuming is signal and how much is just other people's noise.
Listen to the Podcast: Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market's Mood and Focus on Their Mission
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About the Host
Joe Solari assists authors in developing successful businesses as the managing partner of Author Ventures LLC. In his role as a business manager, he supports his private clients, who collectively achieved gross royalties of twenty-two million in 2023, with an average pre-tax profit of 44%. This remarkable success results from implementing disciplined business strategies and maintaining an unwavering dedication to enhancing the customer experience.
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Read the Transcript
Joe Solari: This is the ALLi Publishing for Profit podcast, and I'm your host, Joe Solari. Today I want to talk to you about Amazon. This isn't about rank or recommendations — some of the usual stuff I tend to cover — but about the CEO and his strategy. The Amazon that almost didn't survive. That early Amazon, the one that Wall Street hated. And specifically about why the CEO ignored the market.
Here's something a lot of people forget. In the late '90s and early 2000s, Amazon was getting destroyed in the press. Analysts were calling it amazon.bomb. The stock was cratering, investors were furious, and Jeff Bezos was pouring money into infrastructure, into customer experience, into things that wouldn't pay off for years. The market was looking at this as being foolish — comparing it to quarterly numbers and saying the company was a total disaster. And Bezos just kept going. He knew the difference between what a stock price was saying and what the company was actually doing. They are two completely different things. The stock price is the market's current mood. The company is the underlying reality, and that's what he was focused on. He refused to let the mood become his mission.
So while everybody else was watching the ticker and panicking, he was watching what customers were doing, what they needed, what he thought nobody else was giving them, and how he could do something different and make the experience so easy and so reliable that Amazon became the obvious choice. That was the whole strategy: customers first, ignore the noise, play the long game. And we now know it worked — in ways that only he really imagined, and the market was wrong about.
But here's the part of the story that doesn't get talked about all that much. Eventually Bezos stepped back, new leadership came in, and slowly — not all at once, not instantly — their North Star shifted. The focus moved to marketplace revenue, advertising, third-party seller fees. The customer experience started to get noisier, a little more cluttered. You search for something specific and you're pounded with sponsored results. There are lots of knockoff products. While you may get what you wanted, you don't necessarily get the experience you had in the past. I'm not saying that's wrong or right. What I'm saying is that something changed, and what changed was who was reading the numbers and how they interpreted them. The original vision got subordinated to a different set of metrics, and when you change what you measure, you change what you build.
Mimetic Desire and the Author Community Problem
What does this have to do with your publishing business specifically? Everything. Because here's what I see happening in author communities constantly — and I mean constantly. I love our communities, don't get me wrong. ALLi and AuthorNation and all these other communities really do deliver value. But there's something that happens when creative people get together and everyone can see everybody else's numbers in real time that isn't great.
There's a philosopher named René Girard who had a concept called mimetic desire. I'm not going to turn this into a philosophy lecture, but the simple version is this: we don't want things just because we want them. We want the things we see other people wanting or having, and the closer we are to those people, the stronger that pull becomes.
Think about it this way. You're invited to a block party and asked to bring your potato salad. You've been making this potato salad for 15 years. You're famous for it — people specifically ask you to bring it, and you know this dish. You've been confidently making it by hand for years. Then you walk in and you see someone's charcuterie board that looks like it should be on Instagram, and people are talking about it. Suddenly your potato salad doesn't feel right. It almost feels wrong. Not bad, not inedible — just not as desired. Like maybe you misread the assignment or it's just not the thing anymore.
But here's the thing: your potato salad didn't change. The recipe is the same. The ingredients are the same. People are still going to love it. What changed is that you now have a new reference point that you didn't have before, and that reference point is making you measure your dish against somebody else's dish instead of against people's hunger for potato salad. That's exactly what happens in author communities, and it's a really insidious thing. It doesn't feel like insecurity. In fact, it feels like strategy. It feels like market research. It feels like you're doing the responsible thing. And I've heard this exact sentence more than once: ‘I'm just studying what's working.' Maybe that was your initial intent. But a lot of the time what you're actually doing is installing somebody else's North Star in your business without realizing it. You're handing over the CEO spot to the marketplace.
Bezos Looked Outward, Not Sideways
Let's get back to Bezos for a second, because this is where it becomes useful to you as an author. Bezos didn't look sideways. The thing people miss is that he wasn't trying to one-up Barnes and Noble. He was trying to deliver a different experience to the marketplace. He was watching customers. He was asking what they needed that nobody else was giving them. His attention pointed outward toward the reader, not sideways toward the competition. That's the distinction I want you to really sit with.
There's a difference between understanding your market and being consumed by the market. There's a difference between knowing what readers want and chasing what you think other authors are giving them. One of those is research. The other is mimicry. And mimicry dressed up as strategy is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in your publishing business.
Here's the reality, and this is where I want to get practical. Trends in publishing move faster than authors can execute. By the time you identify a hot trend, write to it, edit, produce, and launch, the trend has peaked. It's very hard to catch a wave, and most of the time the person who created that wave didn't intentionally set out to do it — it had more to do with market dynamics than anything they orchestrated. Conversely, audiences don't get built around an author's brand fast. It takes years to build trust and collect enough readers to trigger cumulative advantage. So those two things are in stark contrast: the speed at which a trend moves and the time it takes to build an audience.
The authors who build durable publishing businesses — the ones still standing five, ten, fifteen years out — almost universally did it by going deeper into their own lane, not by widening into other people's lanes. They became the most reliable, most specific, most authentically themselves version they could be for their readers, and their readers rewarded that with loyalty that outlasts any algorithm change or trend cycle or whatever you might read next Tuesday on Facebook.
Two Tactical Tools: The North Star Document and the Information Audit
So let me give you two tactical things you can do. The first is what I call a North Star document, or a one-page business plan. It's something simple that always reminds you what's non-negotiable in your publishing business — and it will keep you from reacting to others' comments, ideas, and things you see when you're out in the social media world.
Before you open any group, any dashboard, or any sales report, you look at that single page and answer three questions. Who am I writing for? I mean specifically — a person if you know one, the reader you picture when you're writing. What do you want them to feel when they finish that book? And what does your success look like in three years, not three weeks from now? That's your Bezos memo. That's the thing you read when the market gets too loud. And because the market will always get loud, you're going to need something like this to get you back to your real job. It will help you differentiate the signal from the noise.
The second is what I call an information audit. For one week, track all the social media you interact with — every Facebook group, newsletter, post, podcast, Substack, everything you look at, including your sales dashboards — and note how each one makes you feel. At the end of that week, look at that list and ask yourself one question: is that piece of information helping me with my business, or is it just noise about somebody else's business, about the market, or — even worse — about other people's feelings about the market? Does it change how I should run my business, or is it just feelings?
You'll be shocked at how much of what you're consuming is other people's ticker symbols. It has nothing to do with your underlying business. I suggest you just cut it. Get it out. That way you can hear your own signal over the noise again.
Closing: Your Company Is Not Its Stock Price
So when you're thinking about what you should stop doing and what you should be doing — should you go out and start writing romantasy or LitRPG? Ask yourself: is that your vision for what your business was supposed to be? Are those the readers you want to serve, or is that just the new hotness you're chasing? Because if it is, it's probably mimetic desire. That's the potluck problem at scale. That's what happens when a community of creative people have access to each other's numbers and feelings in real time, with no filter and no North Star. It's not intentional. It's just the psychology of a community like this.
Bezos was able to ignore what the stock price said because he understood something simple and hard at the same time: the stock price is how the market feels about your company today. It's not what your company is. And sometimes your company isn't what you want it to be today — but it is what it's supposed to be today, on its way to becoming what it could be.
The question for your publishing business — the question that actually matters when the noise gets loud — is not what's working for someone else right now. It's what you need to be doing today to take your business to where you want it to go.
I'm Joe Solari, and this is the Publishing for Profit podcast. See you next time.
