Stop Wasting Time Self-Publishing — Do This Instead

About this video

Dale argues that self-publishing itself is not a waste of time; most authors simply leak their hours into busywork that feels like progress. His named time-wasters include refreshing sales reports and product pages throughout the day, arguing in KDP community forums, checking email constantly (he says he once checked 50 times a day in his old job), and obsessing over social media as if it were a sales channel rather than a community builder. His fixes are structural: treat sales monitoring as a weekly audit, check email only once in the morning and once in the evening, unsubscribe from any sender whose message he has opened three times without acting, archive or delete anything sitting in the inbox longer than 5 days, and keep notifications off entirely. He credits outlining with making him roughly 10 times more efficient — his first un-outlined book took over a year, while he now claims to write books in as little as 1 to 7 days — using detailed outlines for non-fiction and broad beats for fiction. He also recounts losing hours of work when Word crashed after he disabled autosave, contrasting it with Dibbly Create’s constant background backups, and closes on the 80/20 rule: his own highest-impact 20% is publishing books and videos, illustrated by a single video call to action that he says brought over 60 email signups in a day versus a usual 3 to 5.

Key takeaways

• Audit where the hours actually go: refreshing sales dashboards, forum arguments, and vanity searches feel like work but cannot change the numbers being watched.
• Batch email to twice a day, unsubscribe after opening the same sender three times without acting, and clear anything older than 5 days; keep phone notifications off during work.
• Outline before drafting: Dale says outlining made him about 10 times more efficient, with precise layered outlines for non-fiction and loose emotional beats for fiction.
• Never disable autosave to gain speed: one Word crash cost him an entire session’s work, while tools with continuous background backup recovered everything after a freeze.
• Find your personal 20% of activities that produce 80% of results — for Dale, publishing books and videos — and cut or automate the rest, using tools like MailerLite, Content Studio, and SimplyBook.me.

Episode details: published May 27, 2025 · 17:41 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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