I’m constantly reminded of how hard successful people work to get their work out there. Last week, I met up with a NYT-bestselling author who took an interview with me, and told me he’d been cold emailing people on TikTok offering to send them copies of his book. Even with over a million copies sold, he kept knocking on doors.

Literally over a decade ago, Gary Vaynerchuk—who had launched Vaynermedia and was writing his second book—started doing an interview a day for people in his community in 2013:

(Here’s mine!)

This author and Gary Vaynerchuk both understood the importance of every single post. Your work is never too precious to be pounding the pavement for it. More importantly, nobody else can do the hard work of promoting for you; even if with a publicity team, distribution, and the rest of the infrastructure, it’s you that needs to lead and own the marketing and sales (Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller hits this home).

See also Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion.