How to Write a Book No One Will Ever Buy

Last Updated on February 27, 2026 by Michael

So you want to be an author. That’s beautiful. That’s brave. That’s also statistically one of the worst financial decisions a person can make, right up there with buying a timeshare or trusting a guy named Crypto Steve.

But who cares about statistics when there’s a story that needs to be told?

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about: writing a book that sells is really, really hard. Writing one that doesn’t? Embarrassingly easy. You barely have to try. In fact, trying is kind of the problem.

So if the goal is to guarantee that a manuscript collects digital dust for all of eternity — that it sits on Amazon’s servers like a forgotten leftovers container in the back of the fridge — this guide has you covered. Every step. Every mistake. Every beautifully avoidable disaster.

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Choose a Title That Means Nothing to Anyone

The title is your book’s first impression. It’s the pickup line of the publishing world. And just like pickup lines, most of them are so bad they should come with an apology attached.

You want something vague. Something that sounds profound but communicates absolutely zero information about what the book is actually about. Think less “catchy hook” and more “fortune cookie that got run through Google Translate four times and came back as a threat.”

Titles that will guarantee nobody ever clicks:

• “Whispers of the Forgotten Echo” — What does this mean? Nobody knows. Nobody will ever find out because nobody will open it.
• “The Last Thread” — About sewing? Existential dread? A really bad sweater? The mystery dies on the shelf, unsolved and unbothered.
• “Beneath, Between, Beyond” — Prepositions are not a genre. They never have been. Please stop.
• “Untethered” — Every self-published book on Amazon is already called Untethered. Yours will blend in like a beige wall at a beige convention hosted by beige people.
• “Chapter One” — Bold. Lazy. Kind of iconic, actually.

The test is simple: read your title out loud to someone. If they respond with “…okay?” and then change the subject, you’ve struck gold.

Step 2: Pick a Genre, Then Betray It Completely

Genres exist so readers can find books they actually want to read.

Which means if the goal is total invisibility, you need to make your book impossible to categorize. Unclassifiable. The literary equivalent of whatever a platypus is.

Start writing a romance. Hard pivot to sci-fi around chapter four. Throw in a courtroom drama by chapter seven for absolutely no reason. End the whole thing with a cookbook section. Nobody asked for the recipes. That’s what makes it art.

There’s a difference between “innovative cross-genre fiction” and “this person clearly had no plan and just kept typing until the document was long enough.” You want to be the second one. Lean into it. The chaos is the brand now.

Step 3: Develop Characters Nobody on Earth Can Root For

Every writing guide says the protagonist needs to be “relatable.”

Sure. That’s fine. If you want people to care. But caring leads to reading, reading leads to recommending, recommending leads to sales, and suddenly the whole plan falls apart like a wet paper plate at a barbecue.

So here’s what you do instead.

Make the main character someone who complains constantly but never does a single thing about any of it. Give them no flaws at the start and somehow fewer flaws by the end, like they reverse-engineered character development. Have them deliver monologues that sound like rejected TED Talks about “living authentically” while doing nothing authentic whatsoever.

The real power move? Have them fall in love for no reason in chapter three, fall out of love for no reason in chapter five, and then adopt a golden retriever in chapter nine that is never — and this is important — never mentioned again. The dog vanishes. Gone. Raptured. Readers will lose actual sleep over this dog. They’ll send emails demanding to know what happened to the dog.

Do not respond to the emails.

Now. Side characters. Don’t give them last names. They’re furniture. Their only job is to say things like “Wow, you’re so brave” and “Tell me more about your childhood” before disappearing from the story mid-sentence like witnesses in a mob movie.

Better yet — give every single side character the same name. Four guys named Dave. Let the reader figure out which Dave is the love interest and which Dave is the murderer. Maybe they’re the same Dave. Maybe all four Daves are the same Dave. You don’t know. You wrote the book and you don’t know. That’s the energy.

Step 4: The Writing Process (Suffering, but Make It Inefficient)

Do not outline.

Outlines are for people who want their books to make sense, and that’s not what’s happening here. The move is to open a blank document, type whatever comes to mind, and hope the story reveals itself like a Magic Eye poster.

It won’t. But you’ll be 40,000 words deep before figuring that out, and by then, sunk cost fallacy is doing all the heavy lifting.

Do not edit as you go. Every clunky sentence, every paragraph that openly contradicts the one before it, every scene where the writing clearly paused because someone got hungry and started describing pasta for 600 words — leave it all in. First draft energy is sacred. Those inconsistencies add texture.

Your ideal weekly writing schedule:

• Monday: Stare at the document for 45 minutes. Write one sentence. Hate it. Delete it. Close the laptop like it insulted your mother.
• Tuesday: Skip writing entirely. Spend four hours researching fonts for the book cover. Settle on Garamond. Immediately second-guess it. Open seventeen browser tabs about typography. Spiral.
• Wednesday: Write 3,000 words in a caffeine-fueled frenzy. None of them are usable. Several aren’t even real words. One paragraph is just the word “anyway” repeated nine times.
• Thursday: Reread Wednesday’s output. Quietly google “plumber salary by state.” Plumbers don’t worry about character arcs. Plumbers have health insurance.
• Friday: Write a tweet about how hard writing is. It gets more engagement than the book ever will. Consider pivoting to a full-time career in tweets.
• Saturday: Reorganize the desk. Buy a new candle. The candle is essential to the creative process and absolutely not a procrastination tactic.
• Sunday: Panic.

Repeat for eight to fourteen months until the document is technically long enough to qualify as a book, even if 30% of it is just the same argument between two Daves rewritten from slightly different angles.

Step 5: Choose a Cover That Makes People Physically Flinch

You know that saying — “don’t judge a book by its cover”?

Every human being alive ignores that advice. Every single one. It might be the most universally disregarded wisdom in history, right behind “get eight hours of sleep” and “don’t text your ex.”

So if the goal is zero sales, you need a cover that doesn’t just fail to attract attention — it actively repels it. The cover should function as a visual restraining order.

Think MS Paint energy. Think “a nephew who just discovered Canva and has opinions.” Think WordArt on a sunset gradient with a stock photo of a handshake even though the book is about grief.

• Use Papyrus or Comic Sans for the title. Both of these fonts scream “this was not a serious endeavor” louder than words ever could. Papyrus especially — it says “this project was also briefly going to be a yoga studio.”
• Pick a color scheme that clashes so hard it registers on a seismograph. Neon yellow on hot pink. Burnt orange and lavender. The cover should look like a highlighter had a meltdown.
• Put your face on the cover even though the book is fiction. Nothing communicates “psychological thriller” quite like a poorly lit selfie taken in a bathroom mirror with the flash on.
• Make the title text so tiny it’s unreadable at thumbnail size. Chef’s kiss. 90% of book browsing happens online, and if nobody can read the title, nobody is clicking. The book becomes functionally invisible. The perfect crime.

Step 6: Price It Like Money Is a Concept You’ve Only Heard About Secondhand

The sweet spot for maximum failure is either so expensive it feels like a scam, or so cheap it trips the “this must be garbage” reflex. Pick your lane and floor it.

Also — and this is critical — change the price randomly every two weeks. No pattern. No logic. No explanation. Let the Amazon algorithm try to figure you out. It can’t. You’ve transcended the algorithm. You are the algorithm’s sleep paralysis demon now.

Step 7: Marketing (Simply Don’t)

Here’s where a lot of aspiring unselling authors accidentally mess up.

They tell people about the book.

Massive mistake. Career-ending levels of competence right there. The number one rule of selling zero books: do not, under any circumstances, make it easy for anyone to find, learn about, or purchase the thing.

But if the guilt is eating at you — maybe mom keeps asking, maybe a coworker saw the launch day Instagram post (the one the sunglasses bot liked) — here’s how to promote the book as ineffectively as possible:

• Post about it exclusively on LinkedIn. Nothing screams “beach read” like a platform built for people pretending to enjoy synergy. Write a 400-word post about what the “writing journey” taught you about servant leadership. Hashtag blessed. Hashtag grateful. Hashtag nobody is buying this.
• Build an author website with zero buy links. Just a moody black-and-white headshot, a bio written in third person that uses the word “prolific,” and an inspirational quote attributed to yourself. No store page. No email list. Just vibes.
• Tweet “my book is available now” exactly once. No link. No cover image. No additional context whatsoever. Then never mention it again. Marketing: complete.
• Start a blog about “the writing journey” instead of promoting the actual book. Post seventeen essays about imposter syndrome. Your twelve followers will feel deeply seen. They will not buy the book. They don’t even realize there is a book.

Want to really lock in the obscurity? Skip Amazon entirely. Upload it to a platform nobody’s heard of that requires a fax number for registration and only accepts payment via Dogecoin or cashier’s check.

Step 8: Launch Day (A Tragedy in Three Acts)

Act One: Hope.

You hit publish. You refresh the sales dashboard seventeen times in the first hour. Nothing happens. You text three friends. One sends a thumbs up emoji. One leaves you on read. One asks if you can help them move a couch this weekend.

Act Two: Denial.

By noon, you’ve refreshed the dashboard forty-six more times. Amazon says the book’s sales rank is hovering around 4,200,000. There are four million books selling better right now. Four. Million. Somewhere on that list, a book about knitting sweaters for chickens is absolutely destroying you in the rankings.

Act Three: Oreos.

By evening, the sales count sits at a firm, unwavering zero. The author Instagram has gained one follower — a bot selling discount Ray-Bans. The Oreo sleeve is empty. The next book is already being mentally outlined because this one clearly just didn’t capture the true artistic vision.

This is the author experience. This is what the dream looks like from the inside. Welcome to the club. There are no perks.

Step 9: Handle All Criticism Like a Grenade With the Pin Already Pulled

Eventually, somebody might read the book. Could be an accident. Could be your mom’s coworker who felt trapped by social obligation. Either way — opinions are coming.

Those opinions will sting.

One-star review? Obviously the move is to write a 2,000-word public rebuttal defending every creative choice, including and especially the four Daves. Tag the reviewer. Tag their employer. Tag a local news affiliate. Burn every bridge in a 50-mile radius, salt the earth, and then post a cryptic quote on Instagram stories about “energy vampires.”

Constructive criticism? Ignore the “constructive” part. Zero in on the word “however.” That word is a weapon. It has always been a weapon. That reviewer knew exactly what they were doing.

Zero reviews? This is somehow the worst outcome. At least a one-star review proves someone opened the file. Total silence means the void swallowed the book whole, digested it, and didn’t even have the courtesy to burp.

Whatever happens: do NOT take the feedback, revise anything, or come back stronger. That’s how people accidentally develop skills and build writing careers. That is not the mission.

Step 10: Do It All Over Again (Because Of Course You Will)

Here’s the beautiful, devastating, cosmically hilarious truth about everything in this guide.

You’re going to do it again.

You’re going to finish this gorgeous train wreck of a book, swear on everything holy that the writing life is over, that the laptop is going in a drawer, that the next creative outlet is going to be something reasonable like pottery or sourdough or competitive birdwatching — literally anything that doesn’t involve staring at a blinking cursor while questioning every life decision that led to this moment.

And then three weeks later, an idea shows up in the shower. Uninvited. Fully formed. Annoyingly good. The kind of idea that won’t leave you alone, that follows you to the grocery store and whispers plot points while you’re picking out avocados.

Next thing you know, there’s a fresh document open. The cursor is blinking. The words “Chapter 1” are just sitting there like a dare.

Because here’s the thing nobody ever talks about. Writing was never really about selling books. Not at the core. It’s about the delusional, irrational, borderline unhinged belief that your words matter and somebody out there needs to read them. And every single author who ever published anything — from Pulitzer winners to people selling spiral-bound poetry out of their trunk at a farmers market — started with that exact same ridiculous, beautiful spark of pure audacity.

The world has enough bestsellers.

It could use a few more beautiful disasters.

So go write that unsellable book. Mean every word of it. Let the Daves run wild.

Just maybe keep it to three Daves this time.