The Book Won’t Sell Itself: What Warren Rankin Taught Me About Memoir, Vulnerability and the Hustle

✍️ New on the Substack: I've turned my conversation with Warren Rankine into a full written piece — for anyone who'd rather read than listen (or wants to come back to the parts worth underlining).

Warren is the author of Fifteen Feet Tall, and our chat covered two threads I keep circling back to as a memoirist and an indie author.
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The first is the unsettling gap between memory and fact. Warren accessed his childhood welfare file through Freedom of Information, and what he found didn't always match the story he'd been told — or the way he remembered feeling. When it came time to write the book, he had to catalogue that entire file and calibrate, line by line, between what he recalled and what the records proved. It's the quiet, uncomfortable discipline at the heart of memoir.

The second is the business of being an author *after* the book is done. Warren has run his own business for 21 years, and he doesn't sugarcoat it: the launch isn't the finish line — it's the starting line. A brand image, however polished, doesn't make a single sale on its own. The work that matters comes next: showing up, connecting, and (his words) never sitting down doing Sudoku at your book-fair table.

I've pulled all of it together — the memory work, the marketing truths, the book-fair rules — into one piece.

📖 Read it now (link in bio). And if it resonates, I'd love for you to share it with a writer who needs to hear that the book won't sell itself. 💛

https://amrasarmchairanecdotes.substack.com/p/af54e27c-a009-42cb-a393-60eafc0f8c6f?postPreview=free&updated=2026-06-21T05%3A01%3A42.468Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true