: Re: Is it true that good novels will automatically sell themselves on Amazon (and so on) and there is no need for one to waste time promoting? This is what Dean Wesley Smith teaches in his articles

It is most likely anecdotal evidence. There are always breakout successes where this worked - people published their story somewhere and it got big.

50 Shades of Grey comes to mind, which came out of a fanfic community and was already successful in that community and had a following before the marketing was cranked up. It's also a good example why I doubt the relation between "quality" and "success" that is made in your quote. It is objectively not a "good" book. It scratched a specific itch that had nothing to do with quality.

And I think that's the real lesson - if you happen to write about something that hits the zeitgeist in some way, then you will likely find success even without marketing. But what about that weird fantasy book that's really high quality, but only caters to a niche market? For word-of-mouth, you need a critical mass. This will not work for every book without marketing.

I don't know who this guy is, but I wouldn't listen to him, especially if he himself had success by publishing without marketing, but had not done any studies on it. It's a typical human problem that we cannot differentiate between having been lucky and having found a secret lifehack. In general you shouldn't listen to advice of famous people; they are famous to 99% because they were lucky on top of being talented (and hard-working).

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: Re: Is it true that good novels will automatically sell themselves on Amazon (and so on) and there is no need for one to waste time promoting? This is what Dean Wesley Smith teaches in his articles

More posts by @Kaufman555

: Does it really serve a main character to give them one driving want? I often feel that we fall into a trap of believing that we must provide a driving goal for a main character at the outset.

: Should I signal completion of a decision point in an interactive novel? In my visual novel (an interactive, narrative-based video-game), I have a detective character who decides whether he believes

: What is the structure of a paranormal horror story? Building on the definition of a Paranormal Story (as opposed to Dark Fantasy) described in the answers here: What are most common tropes of

: I think Secespitus hits the nail on the head by saying: People will rarely look at the letter of a word means. They know what "tiptoeing" implies and that is all they need to imagine

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