No One Knows How to Sell Books and There's No Money in Writing | Ep 68
Amran Gowani got a six-figure Big 5 deal, a People magazine feature, stellar reviews—and his publisher ghosted him. The brutal economics of traditional publishing, and why he still believes in it:
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00:00 Introduction / Do You Even Lift?
Sophia Chang (00:00)
Welcome back to the Sophia Chang Show. We have our first male guest. We'll see how this goes — and we'll see if we have more on.
Amran Gowani is a former organic chemist and financial analyst who lives in Chicago with his wife and two children. His first novel, Leverage — which was hilarious, everybody go and read it, I actually listened to it and I recommend it that way — was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2025. He also writes a cult favorite email newsletter, which is how I was drawn into his web.
Learn more at amrangowani.com. Thank you so much for coming on. I wanted you on because I know you are going to bring the No BS.
Amran:
I appreciate being the official first man on your podcast. I like to be the DEI candidate whenever possible.
Sophia:
I love that. Yeah. I was looking at all my guests and somebody was like, "All white ladies." And I was like, shoot, let me get some color. So you absolutely are my token.
Amran:
I'm checking many boxes. It didn't work out for Kamala Harris. Maybe it'll work out for me.
Sophia:
Starting on that really sad note — I ask this of all my guests: do you even lift, bro?
Amran:
Oh yes, I used to, and I've evolved my thinking. I was a big lifter. I played football in high school and I lifted weights basically from the time I was about 15 or 16, all the way until my early 30s. And I used to be pretty strong — I could rep 225 on the bench and leg press five plates on each side.
Sophia:
Are you a big guy?
Amran:
Not really. I'm a stocky guy, about 5'8", 185–190 pounds. I was a pretty dense guy. As I got older, I said, I don't really know why I'm bench pressing — I don't need anything in my life that requires bench pressing anymore. So I started doing bodyweight exercises. I got into pushups and pull-ups — at my heyday I'd do 70 to 80 pull-ups in a session. Then my wife and I started indoor bouldering, which we've been doing on and off for about 12 years. But it's very intense and hard on your body, so we've had to throttle back. Now we climb more for the fun of it. I'm actually thinking about getting back into some free weight lifting to keep my anaerobic exercise and body strength up as I descend into middle age.
Sophia:
Yes, the middle age is coming for us. I say women have to do it for bone density, but I guess you guys should too.
Amran:
I say old age isn't a battle, it's a slaughter. Men lose their muscle mass as they head into middle age too. I'm not one of these lunatics pumping supplements — I just eat real food.
One thing I've heard, it might be an old wives' tale, but: if you can still squat, you're healthy. The people who really struggle as they age are the ones who can't squat, can't get out of a chair, can't pick things up. If you're not doing it to get jacked, do it to stay healthy.
00:03:12 Asian Identity & Amran's Background
Sophia:
I think Asians should be healthy because we have the Asian squat to begin with. You were raised with a white mom — do you feel like you were raised white?
Amran:
I'm not familiar with the Asian squat. Yes — to the extent that's possible looking the way I look, yeah, that's definitely a big part of my identity. I joke that it was like the Obama story, but I didn't become the president. I just became a nobody. I grew up in a white family — very modest, lower to lower middle class, good people, but not wealthy, not highly educated. So it's a really weird experience. I grew up in what you'd consider a Southern family, but I looked like this. I've always had to navigate the world with a really interesting lens, which I think is a good thing.
Sophia:
I agree. And that really comes through in your book. For me — I don't know how many of you following me know this, but when I was doing my graduate studies in San Francisco, I was going to this super woo-woo school during the day and at night I'd rush over to the financial district and work as an assistant at Bear Stearns. And before you think I was making bank — "assistant" meant I was spending more on my dinner than I was making an hour. That's how I got myself through grad school. So when I was reading your book, I was like, San Francisco — why did you pick San Francisco?
00:04:46 West Coast Finance & Writing Leverage
Amran:
I worked out there. After I did chemistry and got my MBA, I found myself working in an investment bank in San Francisco — waking up at three or four in the morning to be ready for the stock market open at 6:30 AM Pacific. I covered a sector called specialty pharmaceuticals, which was the wild west of the drug industry — lots of accounting fraud, companies illegally marketing opioids, perpetuating the opioid crisis. I saw a lot of crazy stuff.
When it came time to write Leverage, I felt like I had a unique lens on the West Coast financial scene. A lot of people have written about the East Coast, but the West Coast was underexplored. Because of its adjacency to Silicon Valley, I could explore both finance and tech.
Sophia:
I don't think people realize how much money there is on the West Coast.
Amran:
California, as a standalone country, would be the seventh or eighth biggest economy in the world. Forty million people, the biggest state by population, a bunch of huge companies. New York is number two, then Illinois. California is definitely the apex of the American economy.
Sophia:
I moved here because it was cheaper and now I can never leave because I'll never be able to afford to come back.
I was gushing about your book, but some things struck me — you were using terms I thought I came up with. Like "tomfuckery." And then I saw it in your book and I thought, now people think I'm a hack. And calling the white guy "Yosemite Sam" — I did that in my book too, the one that got me my agent. And then your character's name — when he says, "I have two names from Aladdin" — Ali Jafar. Did you do that on purpose?
Amran:
Yeah, I did. I'm a reasonably funny guy — I've always had a sharp, biting sense of humor, especially on the page. A lot of the jokes in Leverage are recurring bits I've been doing verbally for years. I just brought that sensibility to the page.
And the more you read and follow other authors in your space, you'll see a lot of people making the same jokes, using the same turns of phrase. There's nothing wrong with that — it means you're doing it right. Good language and high style only have so many permutations. When you start reading other people and seeing something like what you wrote, that's a good thing. It means you're writing the way published authors write.
00:08:21 Welcome to the High-Achieving Losers Club
Sophia:
I'm almost loathe to bring this up because it's been so depressing for me, but I'm happy because it's been depressing for you too. That sounds so mean — but misery loves company. We've been high achievers our whole lives and we came swinging out of the gate. We were like Dogecoin — we're going to the moon! And then the crash came so badly.
So please tell me about your crash. Because I asked how sales were, and you said —
Amran:
Dismal. A few caveats — I'm happy to be a fellow failure here. The data transparency on your sales is really difficult to parse, even though it's my book Simon & Schuster is selling, and I don't have a royalty statement yet because the book's only been out for a couple months.
However, I do have access to BookScan data. And even if you tripled it, the numbers would be pretty catastrophic.
To give you a sense of scale: my advance was six figures — what Publishers Marketplace would consider a good deal. That set an expectation in my mind. The publisher threw a decent chunk of money at me, so they must want to sell this book and will pull all the levers. The editorial process, the revision process, the design — all great. But when it came time to get the book to market, it was a very "womp womp" scenario.
Napkin math: about two dollars per unit sold. If you have a $100,000 advance, you need to sell 50,000 units. I'm oversimplifying, but basically — there's almost zero chance I earn back my advance. It would probably take me 200 years at the current rate. That's demoralizing, but also baffling. Simon & Schuster threw a halfway decent chunk of money at me and then basically lost money on the book.
Now, the book business is weird — some influencer on TikTok could go crazy about my book tomorrow and it could sell 50,000 copies. It could get a movie adaptation. There are completely exogenous factors that could change the trajectory. But coming out of the gate, it's pretty poor.
What happens subsequently is my book is a loser on Simon & Schuster's income statement, at least at the outset. So they don't acquire my second book. Not only did the sales come out really low, they came out particularly low relative to the advance expectations. And then your career stalls.
Simon & Schuster basically ghosted me — they didn't even give feedback on the partial draft I had submitted. Didn't even tell my agent. They just ignored it. The exclusive option expired. I can see the writing on the wall: they don't want this book.
Three months ago I was thinking: this book is going to do halfway decent, I did a lot of self-promotion, built an online following, that's going to move the needle, get me a second deal, and I'm going to be working as a real bona fide professional author. Instead, a few weeks after launch, you can pretty quickly figure out that none of that is going to happen. The only thing that's going to turn my book sales around now is luck — something I have no control over.
So now I'm basically back to square one. I have to finish a book, submit it to my agent, and start over.
I don't want to sound negative — these are just facts. I kind of won the game of publishing: nice six-figure advance, big five imprint, nice publicity. And I still feel like a loser. That's the magic of publishing — no matter how well you do, you always feel like you've failed.
I'm not the only person this has happened to. What I've heard anecdotally is that debut flops are kind of the norm now. It's actually common for an imprint to throw $50,000 to $150,000 at a debut novel, earn none of that back, lose money, dump the author, and then the author is demoralized and maybe doesn't even write another book.
And frankly, as a quantitative guy, as a scientist by training, I'm asking myself: does it even make sense to try to write another book? I'm basically playing from behind the eight ball. Whoever I pitch to next is going to look at my BookScan numbers and say, "We saw your book — it sold fuck all copies." So you're already starting from a losing position.
It's a tough and humbling business. I never even thought I was going to be a New York Times bestseller. I had pretty modest expectations. And even those were shattered.
That said — the library distribution is actually pretty solid. Most major public libraries around the nation are carrying Leverage, and in a lot of places it has a decent wait list. There's demand for the book. But if you're looking to make money as the author, library sales don't help you that much. I need consumers to want to put Leverage on their shelf or in their Audible library. And that just hasn't happened yet.
00:16:20 How the Crash Affects Your Writing
Sophia:
I'm glad you shared all that so candidly. How does that affect your writing of the next book? Because at some point the first book is — you're so free, you throw everything in. But the further you get at the professional level, I know I think more and more about what's going to help break me out, what's going to make an editor take a chance. Does that cross your mind?
Amran:
It does. And what I'm really trying to do right now is fight that instinct.
The partial draft I had submitted — Simon & Schuster had a right of first refusal on it — they didn't make an offer. So now I have to look at that book objectively and ask: is this the best project I could come up with?
In some ways, I had fallen into an inverse trap. I was creating a book I thought would be a good follow-up to Leverage that Atria would want. I liked the story concept and the characters — I didn't write something bad just to get a second deal. But I think subconsciously I was building for this imprint, thinking: this makes sense as a logical follow-on, this is the Amran Gowani brand. And all of that has fallen by the wayside.
What I really need to do is get back to basics. What's the best idea I have? What's the funniest thing I can write? What's the sharpest cultural observation I can make? That's what got me into the mindset that made Leverage what it is.
If you fall into the trap of writing for what you think the market wants, or what you think Big Five editors want, or what you think will hook an agent — you end up doing yourself a disservice. Because those people don't even know what they want. And what you think they want, you don't know either. All you can do is write the best thing you can write. I know that's a little cliché, but it's the only thing you can actually control.
Sophia:
I'll try to remember that — in between bouts of pure desperation. You described publishing making you feel like a constant failure no matter what you achieve. That is the Chinese American experience to a T. No matter what I achieve, it's just not good enough.
Amran:
Big Five publishing is basically just one big tiger mom.
00:19:37 Why Still Believe in Traditional Publishing?
Sophia:
I love that. That's going to be the new branding. Here's what's interesting — when I first spoke with you, I was on the ledge. People kept saying: if you feel like traditional publishing is ignoring you, you should self-publish, that's where it's at. And you walked me back. You were like, no, I really still believe in traditional publishing. Is that still true — even with everything that's happened?
Amran:
I think traditional publishing still has certain intangible benefits that will pay dividends in the long term. And I want to caveat that the ecosystem is in such a state of flux that what I'm saying now could be irrelevant a year from now.
That said, a couple things the traditional publishing apparatus still offers. One is prestige — and that's unfortunate, but it's true. Any industry based on prestige pays really poorly because they're paying you in prestige. Celebrity chefs pay their staff poorly because it's prestigious to work with a celebrity chef. Supply and demand. I don't think prestige is a good motivator, but it's part of the equation.
More importantly: a traditional book contract opens up a lot of downstream doors. Film and screen adaptations — there are cases of self-published books getting adapted, but they're still few and far between. All of media is still ultimately an elitist industry. If you have the prestigious achievement of publishing with a Big Five imprint, that's going to help get eyeballs on your work for adaptations.
The other thing is foreign rights and translations. Leverage has actually been acquired by a German publisher. And through my agent's foreign rights co-agent, we were trying to sell rights to other countries — Italian, Spanish, French. If your book does halfway decent, you can get translation deals on the backend, which can expand the reach of your work. That's very difficult to replicate as a self-published author, even if you plug it into Google Translate.
And library distribution — Leverage is in a lot of libraries. If you self-publish, getting into library systems is really, really difficult.
All of that said — self-publishing, you can do all those things. You just have to take control as the creator of all of them. And realistically, if you're not already famous, getting your book into libraries and independent bookstores nationwide is going to be extraordinarily difficult.
You also have to filter this through the lens of genre. I don't think a book like Leverage was ever going to do well as a self-published book — it needs more exposure via a traditional publishing house. But if you're the kind of author who can produce really good horror, romance, or spy thrillers every six to twelve months — genre fiction — you're going to have a much better opportunity to build a brand as a self-published author, building your fan base one book at a time.
Knowing myself, I can't write a book every six to twelve months. I might be a every-three-to-five-years kind of guy. I've written two books — one is in the drawer, I wrote that in about two years, and I wrote Leverage in about two years. Even if I finished a book next June, got a deal quickly like we did with Leverage, it still wouldn't come out until like 2028. And traditional publishers don't even want to publish an author more than once every two years anyway — they have too many other books in the pipeline.
So even with everything that happened with Leverage coming out of the gate, I would still want to go for a traditional publisher. Whether traditional publishing wants me — that's always the question. But I need to reset my expectations and just get back to writing exactly what I want to write that makes me feel excited.
00:25:26 There's No Money in Writing
Amran:
If that's the kind of book that can only get a small press contract for a $2,000 advance — so be it. You've got to write the art that compels you.
One other overarching thing: I always kind of knew there was no money in publishing. What happened to me is I fell into the trap of maybe possibly believing there was going to be some money in publishing after Leverage. After not getting the second contract, I've fully disabused myself of that notion. Now I'm just going to write whatever I want if I feel compelled.
There are about 100 authors in the world that make a ton of money — they have huge brands, or they write genre fiction. And then there are about 25,000 other authors that make no money. That's just how imbalanced the ecosystem is. I'm reminding myself I'm part of the 25,000. And anybody listening to this is frankly probably part of the 25,000.
It's good to have realistic expectations and know exactly what business you're in. Otherwise you can psych yourself out and end up asking, do I even do art at all? And that's a really unfortunate place to end up — because you should make art because you're an artist.
Sophia:
There's so much there. Our hopes and dreams weren't our fault — we were told we were promising. If they didn't think Leverage was going to be a big thing, they wouldn't have given you that advance. And they wouldn't have given me a Reese's Book Club backing if they didn't think I was going to be the next big thing. We had every reason to believe. And then something fell in the middle.
00:27:24 Writers Are the Biggest Narcissists
Amran:
I've been talking about expectations a lot, and I think that's really one of the fundamental tensions in this whole endeavor. If you're going to be arrogant enough to write a book, then by definition you believe you have something meaningful to say about the world and that you're a voice worth listening to. You have to have convinced yourself that what you're writing is good enough to be on a shelf in a library or a bookstore. That's intrinsically very megalomaniacal.
And then by definition, you're set up for disappointment — because you're very likely going to be one of the people who doesn't make any money. Then you feel like a failure.
The reality is you have to almost divorce the commercial aspect of the business from the creative side. If I just focus on the creative stuff — Leverage is an A-plus, home run, 1600 on the SATs. That went beyond my expectations. It's the commercial side where I'm like, I flunked out of 10th grade.
And the sad reality is — even though there are social media strategies out there and ways to try to build visibility — I'm more and more convinced there's really nothing you can do to sell your book. It's truly pretty much random. And a lot of it is luck.
Even celebrities write books and they don't sell. Traditional publishing houses have also learned this the hard way: some TikToker has 500,000 followers, they write a novel, the publisher is licking their lips thinking it'll easily sell 20–30,000 copies. Then it comes out and nobody buys it. Because the people following that creator on TikTok want to follow that creator on TikTok. They don't want to read their book.
So the publishers have learned: you can have a huge following and not sell any books. You can have no following and your book can be a phenomenon. Ultimately, no one knows what they're doing, everyone's guessing, and mostly it's luck. Nobody wants to hear that because it feels helpless. But honestly, there's a liberation in capitulation. The idea that: all right, I can't influence any of this, so I might as well just make whatever I want.
00:29:46 The "1,000 True Fans" Myth
Sophia:
That's a nice spin. Funny you say that — to me, you ARE that TikTok guy. I would kill to have your newsletter following. There's always that thing about the "1,000 true fans" — you just need 1,000 true fans and you can make $100,000 a year. And I'm like, yeah, like Amran.
Amran:
I must have been selling you a false bill of goods, because — I have a really engaged newsletter audience and I think they were very supportive, many of them bought Leverage. But if I have, say, 900 true fans on my newsletter who really dig what I do — even if every single one of them bought Leverage (and they didn't), and I got two bucks per copy, that's $1,800. That's not even poverty-line money for one month, let alone one year.
So that's just not a serious formula for making money. And I did try to monetize my newsletter — learned the brutal way that about 2–3% of your subscribers are going to give you the $40 or $50 a year. So in order to get 1,000 true fans in that sense, you'd need about 500,000 subscribers. That's not realistic.
There's a lot of BS out there. And I know your podcast has "No BS" as the third thing — but man, this is all crap. You can't make money doing this stuff. We need to be honest about that.
Sophia:
I'm jealous of your daughters. I need somebody saying this to my face all the time. Though I might cry every week if I heard it.
00:31:25 Legacy Kids & Buying Your Own Bestseller
Amran:
Yeah, my kids are going to be hardcore. I tell them: you guys can be artists if you want, as long as you're okay living with your mom the rest of your life. As long as your mom pays for your meals and your electric bill.
Sophia:
That's why I bonded with you — when I saw you say that in your newsletter, I was like, thank you. Can we start saying the truth here? There are a lot of legacy kids who go into publishing, earn $30,000 a year in New York City — they can do it because grandpappy's name is on the library. So they go into publishing as a passion career.
Amran:
Right, because they have legacy wealth. And if you really want to be depressed — I've heard this anecdotally, so I can't prove it — but a lot of bestsellers, if they're by people who are already rich, the rich people are actually buying their own books. They're juicing the numbers. And I was thinking about that, because my wife makes a lot of money — I could go buy up my own book on Amazon and probably game the system. I could buy 1,000 copies of my book. That would cost a lot, but then I'd basically have a bestseller.
Sophia:
You should.
Amran:
See, I wouldn't do that, and that's what makes me me. I wouldn't do it because it feels wrong. But that's the reality of what some people are doing.
Sophia:
I don't have the money — otherwise I would. I always said if I had a billion, I'd just start my own imprint.
Amran:
If you had a billion, you'd be on a yacht. You wouldn't be writing at all. Anyone with that much money would definitely not be writing a book. There's some kind of weird psychosis that gets people to write books.
00:33:28 Own the Arrogance — Writers Are Megalomaniacs
Sophia:
I'm really happy you said that — we are the ultimate narcissists. Because the biggest disingenuous thing is those writers who are always like, "I think everything I write is terrible." No, you don't. No you don't. Because then why are you writing? You think you're awesome.
Amran:
Correct. I'm a scientist and a math guy by nature, so I don't relate to the flowery, self-deprecating artist thing. I love everything I write — that's why I wrote it. If I don't like it, I don't publish it. If I didn't like it, it wouldn't be in Leverage. I really do believe I have some talent. I don't think I'm the most talented writer, but I think I'm a pretty talented writer and I'm really proud of all the work I make.
I think most people feel that way, but we're conditioned — and I don't want to genderize this, but women in particular are conditioned not to be like douchebag men and say, "I'm so great." But that's its own problem, because then you get into this self-deprecating doubt spiral. If you wrote something and you think it's good, you should be proud to say: "I wrote this and I think it's good. You should check it out." There's nothing wrong with that.
What you end up doing instead is this passive-aggressive Jedi mind trick: "I'm not sure if anybody likes what I write." Dude, shut up. Nobody held a gun to your head and told you to write it. If you don't think it's good, don't publish it. If you think it's good, say so.
Sophia:
We often say, "I hate writing. I like having written." And I'm like — then don't be a writer. My friend always says: you're not in school anymore. You don't have homework. If you don't like writing, don't write.
Amran:
That gets back to the sadness we were talking about earlier — the expectations versus reality. Logically, I have to ask myself if it even makes sense to write something. And creatively, I say: but I like to. So I'm going to keep writing because I like to write. I know that's reductive, but if you don't even like to write, it's going to show and you're not going to get published. If you're orienting your mindset toward "I like having written" — I don't know what to tell you. You're already so far behind the eight ball. You have to like to write. If you don't, get the help that you need.
Sophia:
I asked a friend why she writes and she said: "I'm a masochist."
Amran:
I mean, we all have our issues. But if I were a masochist, I could find a lot more interesting ways to entertain my masochism than sitting down to write.
00:36:25 Write What Makes You Scared
Sophia:
I'm going to take what you said today to heart — I'm revising right now and there's a sloggy feeling to it. I feel like it's because I'm trying to reconcile the professional notes I have with: is it still a Sophia Chang book?
Amran:
It has to be in your voice and it has to be what you want. The only thing I can say for sure in this crazy, completely unpredictable business is: if you write the best thing you can write, you're giving yourself the best chance. And if you don't, you're not.
If you know you're not putting the best possible language on the page, not writing the most compelling thoughts you have — the thing that makes you the most uncomfortable, that scares you a little bit — then what are you doing? Why are you bothering? Artists are supposed to push the envelope, to creatively challenge people.
I remind myself of this when I see a really negative review of Leverage or someone viscerally reacting negatively to the book. A visceral negative reaction means I got a reaction. It means the art did something. Nobody wants a negative review, but I kind of have to remind myself: it's good. I got under that person's skin. Something about the work made them so mad or uncomfortable or revealed something to themselves that they didn't like — and that's what good art does. If you're writing the most compelling thing that comes into your mind with all the passion you want to bring to the page, you'll generate that for the reader.
00:37:45 Closing: The Straight-Talking Mr. Rogers
Sophia:
Man, I feel like you're our very, very straight-talking Mr. Rogers. You gave us dad advice — you made us laugh and then you touched us and inspired us to go on and be ourselves. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We could talk for hours. You've got so much good stuff to say.
Amran:
Thanks so much, Soph. I appreciate being able to bring the conversation back to a more positive place. A lot of times my battle is convincing myself to believe what I say. But I believe it because it came out of my mouth — it's just not always easy. This whole thing is an uphill battle. But you do it because you love it.
Sophia:
I love it. I need to have more dudes on the show too — because every time I talk to a dude, he's like, "Yeah, I rock." And I'm like, why can't we say this? We need more of this.
Amran:
That social conditioning is a bear, man. But you clearly have a lot of talent — you write all these books, you're a creator, you're ambitious and motivated and resilient, especially with your personal health history. You're doing it, man. You should be really proud of what you're doing. Just keep making it happen.
Sophia:
Thank you so much. Where else can we find you and how can we support you and find Leverage?
Amran Gowani (39:02)
I'm on a possibly permanent hiatus from social media, so the only place I exist online is my website — my newsletter is built right into it at amrangowani.com. You can sign up for free. I have about 200 short-form pieces of satire, humor, and personal essays — about 90% are free to read. And I'm on LinkedIn as a holdover from my previous lives.
If you really liked what you heard and want to help me out — go buy a copy of Leverage. It's a beautiful hardcover. It's a fun read and I'm very proud of it. That's definitely the best way to support any author — buy the book, because it's really hard to sell those units. Every little bit counts.
Sophia Chang (39:50)
You certainly got my endorsement. Thanks so much and we'll see you guys next time. Make sure you subscribe. Bye everyone!
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Sophia Chang is a Reese's Book Club LitUp fellow, disabled dancer, and extroverted writer. She hosts The Sophia Chang Show podcast where she shares No B.S. publishing stories and advice she wishes she'd known. Subscribe if you don't want to cry alone.
