The Sunk Cost Fallacy

It's okay to pivot your marketing strategy when you need to

My third child was born five weeks ago. When I found out I was pregnant, I created certain family “goals” I wanted accomplished before the baby arrived. Some expectant moms plan entire home remodels during their pregnancy. My needs were much more realistic: I just wanted my middle child out of diapers before the new baby arrived. Changing one shitty bum at a time was as much as I wanted to do!

For months, I pushed through the pregnancy fatigue to work on potty training my toddler. It was exhausting. And frustrating. And messy. There was a lot of bribing and encouraging and laundry washing. But in the end, I succeeded—with a lot of time to spare before Baby’s arrival, too!

But then, about two weeks before the new baby arrived, my toddler had a regression. She wet the bed Every. Single. Night. This continued even after the new baby came, too.

At first, I kept my toddler in underwear at night, determined to let her wake up and experience the wetness, as many “Internet Experts” believe this helps kids get trained faster. But eventually my husband and I had enough. The new baby was already waking us up throughout the night—we didn’t need to be getting up to help our toddler, too. Sleep became more important. So my husband put pull ups/training pants back on our toddler at night.

What does this have to do with marketing?!

It was frustrating to realize the months of effort and struggle to get my daughter potty trained by Baby’s arrival was lost. Going back to pull ups felt like admitting that all my work had been wasted.

But I pushed down those understandable-but-untrue feelings. Because I am familiar with something called the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The WHAT Fallacy?!

It is understandably human to believe that because we have spent so much effort (or money or time) going down one path, we absolutely must stay the course. That changing our direction or closing a door renders all our past effort worthless.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy reminds us that this thinking is, in fact, a fallacy. Meaning it is an illogical argument.

If something isn’t working, the answer is not to keep doing it. (We have all heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results…)

And yet, I hear this fallacy used by authors all the time.

I have spent so much money learning Amazon ads, I want to keep trying to get them to convert…

I’ve spent years attempting to gain traction on Instagram, I can’t switch to a new platform now…

I already devoted all my time to getting my book distributed “wide,” I can’t pull those opportunities to try the Amazon exclusive option…

I often speak cautiously about trying too many new marketing paths. It is true that consistency matters and you should never just ping pong your marketing strategy around willy-nilly. But it is time for me to address the opposite extreme: authors who NEVER try anything new.

It is important to realistically assess your book marketing strategy. If something isn’t working, don’t stick with it just because you have already sunk so much effort into that lane. Be open to trying a new marketing path—or at least taking a short break.

My toddler will be potty trained eventually. Somehow, every kid does figure it out. So my “sunk cost” I know I will eventually recoup. That may or may not be true for you and a marketing strategy you have to pivot from. Maybe you return to your original strategy some day and it finally works for you. Or maybe it never does. That strategy may just not be a good fit for your book, your genre, your personality, or the level of name recognition you have. That’s okay—just make sure to stay flexible enough to pivot and let go of those “sunk costs” when you need to.

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