There’s a moment in Amazon’s history that most people overlook.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the company was being called “amazon.bomb.” The stock was cratering. Analysts were furious. Jeff Bezos was pouring money into infrastructure and customer experience, things that wouldn’t pay off for years. Wall Street called it foolish.
And Bezos just kept going.
He understood something simple but hard to hold onto: a stock price is the market’s mood today. It is not what the company actually is. He refused to let the mood become the mission. While everyone panicked over the ticker, he watched customers. He asked what they needed that nobody was giving them. He played the long game.
We know how that ended.
But here’s the part of that story that matters for your publishing business: eventually Bezos stepped back. New leadership came in. The North Star slowly shifted from customer experience to marketplace revenue, advertising, and third-party seller fees. Search results got noisier. The experience changed.
What changed wasn’t the company overnight. What changed was what they measured. And when you change what you measure, you change what you build.
The Potluck Problem
There’s a philosopher named René Girard who wrote about something called mimetic desire. The simple version: we don’t just want things because we want them. We want what we see other people wanting. And the closer we are to those people, the stronger that pull becomes.
Here’s how it shows up in author communities.
You’ve been writing in your genre for years. You know your readers. You have a process that works. Then you open a Facebook group and see someone’s launch numbers. Someone else’s ad strategy. A thread about whatever genre is blowing up this quarter. Suddenly your own work feels less certain. Less right.
Your writing didn’t change. Your readers didn’t leave. What changed is that you now have a new reference point, and that reference point is making you measure your work against other authors instead of against your readers’ needs.
This is the potluck problem at scale. You show up confident with your potato salad, see someone’s elaborate charcuterie board, and suddenly question a recipe that people have loved for years.
It doesn’t feel like insecurity. It feels like strategy. It feels like market research. But a lot of the time, what you’re actually doing is installing someone else’s North Star into your business without realizing it.
Research vs. Mimicry
There’s a real difference between understanding your market and being consumed by it. Between knowing what readers want and chasing what you think other authors are giving them.
One is research. The other is mimicry. And mimicry dressed up as strategy is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a publishing business.
Here’s the practical reality: trends move faster than authors can execute. By the time you spot a hot trend, write to it, edit, produce, and launch, the peak has likely passed. Meanwhile, audiences don’t build fast. It takes years to earn enough reader trust to trigger the kind of loyalty that outlasts algorithm changes and trend cycles.
Those two timelines don’t match. Chasing trends almost never works.
The authors who build durable businesses go deeper into their own lane, not wider into other people’s. They become the most specific, most reliable, most authentically themselves version they can be for their readers. And those readers reward that with loyalty that no trend can replicate.
Two Tools That Actually Help
First: a North Star document. One page. Three questions. Before you open any group, dashboard, or sales report, you read it.
- Who am I writing for? (A specific person if you can picture one.)
- What do I want them to feel when they finish the book?
- What does success look like in three years, not three weeks?
That’s it. That’s the thing you read when the market gets loud. And it will get loud. You’ll need something to pull you back to your real job.
Second: an information audit. For one week, track every social media group, newsletter, podcast, post, and dashboard you interact with. Note how each one makes you feel after. At the end of the week, ask one question about each: is this helping me run my business, or is it just noise about someone else’s business, or other people’s feelings about the market?
You’ll be surprised how much of what you’re consuming is other people’s ticker symbols. Cut it. Make room to hear your own signal again.
The Question That Actually Matters
Should you write romantasy? LitRPG? Whatever genre is trending this month? Maybe. But ask yourself honestly: is that your vision for your business? Are those the readers you set out to serve?
Or is it the new hotness, and you’re just feeling the pull?
Your publishing business is not its stock price. It’s not your sales rank this week or what someone else launched last month. It’s the underlying reality you’re building toward, and the question that matters is not what’s working for someone else right now.
It’s what you need to do today to get your business to where you want it to go.