What One Year of Publishing MARK! The Herald Angel Has Taught Me
- Glenn Fletcher
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦
A couple years ago, I handed something I'd spent years making to the first readers who weren't my family.
I remember the specific feeling of that. The slight nausea. The particular vulnerability of having worked on something long enough and carefully enough that it had become genuinely personal — and then releasing it into the world where other people would have opinions about it.
Looking back, I want to share what I've learned in that first year. Not as an expert on publishing — I'm not — but as a writer who made a book, put it into the world, and paid close attention to what happened next.
The Surprise: How Slowly Word Travels
The first thing that surprised me was how slowly word of mouth moves, even for a book that people respond to enthusiastically.
When someone reads MARK! The Herald Angel and loves it — and many people have, in ways that I find both humbling and deeply encouraging — there tends to be a genuine impulse to share it. They want to give it to someone. They want to tell a friend. They want to pass it along.
But the distance between that impulse and the action is longer than you'd think. People mean to recommend it and forget. They plan to order it as a gift and get distracted. They tell a friend about it in conversation and the friend doesn't write it down.
This is not a failure of enthusiasm. It's just how word of mouth works. It's slower and more friction-full than the enthusiasm it's built on would suggest. Which means that anything an author can do to reduce that friction — a website that's easy to navigate, a purchasing process that's simple, a reminder mechanism that keeps the book in front of people — has an outsized impact on whether the enthusiasm actually converts.
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The Lesson: Community Before Launch
If I could go back and do one thing differently, it would be to have built the community before I needed it.
The families and pastors and church leaders who have been most valuable to the growth of MARK! The Herald Angel are the ones I had genuine relationships with before the book launched. Not marketing relationships — actual relationships, built on genuine shared interests and mutual care and years of being in the same rooms and conversations.
Those people shared the book not because I asked them to but because they genuinely wanted the people they cared about to have it. That organic, relationship-based recommendation is the most powerful marketing that exists. And it can't be manufactured. It can only be built — slowly, genuinely, over time — before you need it.
If you're a first-time author reading this: start building the community now. Not the platform — the community. There's a difference. A platform is people who follow you. A community is people who would miss you if you stopped.
What Comes Next
After the first year, I'm more convinced than ever that MARK! The Herald Angel has not yet found its full audience. The story is good — I believed that when I finished it and I still believe it. The world of Paradise City is rich and specific and deserves to be explored further. Mark himself is the kind of character who has more stories in him.
And the dream — which I hold with an open hand, but which I hold genuinely — is that this story becomes an animated special someday. That families gather around a television on Christmas Eve and watch Mark's tiny wings carry him aloft over the fields of Bethlehem, and hear the song come out of him, and feel whatever it is that this story produces in people who give it a fair hearing.
Another year is already underway. And I think it's going to be something.
Fair dinkum. Fair dinkum, indeed.
✦ Read the book that started this journey. MARK! The Herald Angel is available at MarkTheHerald.com. And if you've already read it — a review on Amazon is the single most helpful thing you can do.
Thank you.
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