What About When Sales Just Won't Grow In One Format?

I just had one realization that solves MOST of my current business challenges heading into 2026 with a newer Airbnb and relaunching writing career both based on Lake Michigan. It's all about distribution.

I discovered that several issues I'm working on related to marketing and visibility might be solved by me focusing on social content and visibility where I'm gaining traction rather than pushing myself to keep up with the slog of book marketing activities that take years to show results. At first I rearranged the sales funnel and put books on the back end, which still makes sense. But then I realized it wasn't just a funnel issue: it was about the distribution networks I have open to me so I'm not trying to do everything myself.

More or less, the problem that crops up boils down to this: I think distribution channels available for marketing media content is much more important than format, or whether I consider myself an author or a content creator on social media as a short film maker or nature writer.

So, since the response was so positive on all my content recently, but particularly the easier to prepare nature video shorts on Youtube and socials, I started thinking: what if this perennial challenge of building a remote business while managing limited work hours and energy is pushing me toward a type of media or content that isn't so time intensive but is just as fulfilling? What if I was just expecting to find it in a certain place that's out of date, at least for my circumstances?

What if my success can be found in industries like content creation, nature photography, and so on rather than just calling myself an author and journalist and editor since that's what I've always expected to be in order to do this work of sharing my love of words and the beauty of the natural world?

Potato potahto, which makes me feel like I actually have a shot here to not slide into the abyss with yet another disrupted industry but to grow with, say, the Youtuber crowd or the social media wildlife/nature influencer folks. I had to ask myself what would Jane Goodall do? :) Go with modern media distribution, of course, if the goal is to reach more people.

Challenges Addressed By New Distribution Networks:

1. The format of some writing makes it hard to sell without visibility. I realized I spend lots of time -- the majority sometimes -- on traditional activities and new ones to market books and longform content like list building, but these are the end product of my social content and Amazon can take 5-15 years to get traction just to be visible, while Tiktok took off with thousands of views and likes after just 25 posts in a couple of months. See the opportunity? In the last month or two I have gone from slow or nonexistent response to marketing on the book content side of the business, to lots of interest and engagement with my content without the "buy my stuff" needing to be in the middle of the interaction. Social media in video format has a unique ability to bring the viewer right into an experience without having to sell it first, you know what I mean? I think that helps me skip several steps building platform. Sorry if this all sounds like I just discovered modern social media platforms a little late: I knew all these options existed. What I'm saying is there seemed to be a mental block in the form of expectations. Maybe you have something similar? Maybe you're just smarter than me, nevermind.
2. Time spent on marketing funnels that are indirect and convoluted in a hybrid business between publishing and hospitality has been driving me a bit batty as I try to narrow down and streamline a sales funnel and get profitable on the Airbnb side while jumpstarting book sales as content marketing. Instead, I have started testing spending less time on newsletters, blogging, and other older digital outreach techniques, and more on Youtube shorts, IG reels and Tiktok that have lots of engagement, and slowly building content into long form books I can market online to skip the stress of getting book signings and blurbs and reviews. Those things will still happen at some point, but I will have to market them remotely anyway for the most part due to health issues, and that will be easier when I have more platform growth under me. Finally, I went from that anxious feeling like I was pushing against circumstances in a way I deep down knew wouldn't work, to feeling myself relax into a real solution. A growth space. Maybe even a blue ocean new niche. I love win-win solutions where I can focus on building creative projects rather than competing with others.
3. I spent years testing working with different forms of media in my career and enjoying most all of it, not least the variety. But in recent years I had this nagging awareness that the format of book and blog publishing creates a marketing challenge bigger than what the media industry has been able to address in the last decade or two since I was in and out of the game while raising a kid during digital disruption. If I switch distribution to the less restricted or easier to use newer social media algorithms for my type of content, I can literally skip all those legacy industry problems and keep my content apace with technology, which is where the distribution and visibility now come from. Now my only question is why I didn't see this sooner?