"Why can't you just tell me what to do?" and the impossibility of certainty in book publishing

I can't tell you what to do because books are like doo-doo. This is a metaphor. You'll see.

“What should I do?”

This is another question I hear a lot from authors. They want to know how specifically to build their platform. Where specifically to land media hits so that their book pops in the national conversation. How specifically to make the maximum number of editors and readers start waving their money. And after fifteen years of work in thi…