How Johanna Vann Sold Her First Book Without Social Media
This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 99. You can listen in here!
When we launched Writing Off Social three years ago, we believed in our heart of hearts that it was possible to grow as a writer without social media. We just didn’t have the social proof yet. These days, we’re grateful to have story after story to point to, and this week’s is one of our favorites: award-winning novelist Johanna Vann, who sold her debut without a platform, a strategy, or even much of a following.
Meet Johanna
Johanna lives outside Nashville with her husband and three (soon to be four) small children, homeschooling her kindergartner while writing in whatever slivers of time she can find. She didn’t set out to be a novelist. It was motherhood, she told us, that opened the door to fiction. About three years ago, her debut novel, An American Immigrant* released with Waterbrook, the Christian imprint of Penguin Random House. Her second book, Where Wilted Flowers Bloom*, came out at the end of August.
No Connections, No Platform, No Problem
Johanna’s first novel, An American Immigrant, grew out of stories her mother shared about immigrating from Colombia, layered with Johanna’s own memories of straddling two worlds growing up. Her husband kept nudging her to write it down, and when their first son was born and started taking two naps a day, she finally did — 80,000 words in a few months.
From there, she took each step in faith. She hired a developmental editor she found through a book bio, who told her, kindly but plainly, that the story was excellent but that she’d made about 600 mistakes. That editor eventually connected her with an agent, and Johanna began cold-pitching alongside that one warm lead. Many rejections and a few maybes later, the agent who’d been recommended to her took the book on — and sold it to Waterbrook not long after.
Without a platform to lean on, Johanna got creative. She’d spent a few years working in Miami media after college, so she pulled together a list of contacts — producers, script writers, on-air friends — and included their names and roles right in her book proposal. One of those friends, a television host, ended up writing the endorsement that landed on her book’s cover.
Turning Connections Into Momentum
Johanna admitted she felt nervous asking friends for help, worried it would come across as using them. It was her husband who talked her through it, reminding her that people who love you want to see you succeed. That encouragement helped her lean into asking — and it paid off. An American Immigrant went on to win the Christy Award for Best Fiction Novel in 2023.
Awards, it turned out, became one of her most effective tools. A representative from the Latino Book Awards, which she hadn’t even known existed, emailed to ask if she’d consider submitting. She entered and won two honors there, then found the state of Tennessee had its own book award and became a finalist. Each new accolade became one more piece of proof she could point new readers to — on her website, her Amazon listing, even stickers for bookstore displays.
Reviews mattered just as much. Whenever a reader messaged to say the book made them feel seen, Johanna would thank them and ask them to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever they’d bought the book. It felt a little uncomfortable at first, she admitted, but remembering how much she loved the story made the ask feel less awkward.
Grassroots effort that actually moved the needle
Beyond awards and reviews, Johanna built momentum through a string of small, personal efforts:
- Speaking at a local library donor event after a librarian spotted her on the local news
- Calling high schools directly to offer copies of her book for students
- Writing a Substack called The Crunchy Convert, about low-tox living and cooking from scratch, where she occasionally mentions her books to an audience that overlaps with her ideal readers
- Giving books away generously — to libraries, bookstore staff, and new friends from church — after reading Ryan Holiday’s* advice on the power of generosity in marketing
That last point shifted something for her. She’d been guarding every copy, worried about profit, until she let go of the scarcity mindset and started handing books out freely. She’s convinced that generosity has come back to her many times over.
The One Investment That Actually Worked
Perhaps Johanna’s biggest lesson came down to money. She saved her entire advance rather than spending it, and once her first book was already out in the world selling a trickle of copies here and there, she hired a local digital ad agency run by a former coworker. She handed him her advance and asked him to make as much noise online as he could. Sales jumped from roughly ten books a week to a hundred.
With her second book, Where Wilted Flowers Bloom, she sensed early on that the same playbook wouldn’t work. Her debut had a clearly defined audience — second-generation immigrants with a specific story to recognize themselves in. Her second book, about grief, hope, and faith, felt too universal to target with a short ad. It needed a real conversation, not a scroll-past line of copy. So this time, after a chance run-in with a former colleague who’d become a publicist, Johanna hired her instead, again funding it entirely from her saved advance.
Along the way, she learned a harder truth: no one — not her publisher, not her agent — cares about her book as much as she does. Her publisher has more books and more authors than time or budget to give any one of them, herself included. Once she accepted that, she stopped waiting to be rescued and started doing the work herself, book by book.
Trusting God Over the Algorithm
When we asked what writers chasing followers might be overlooking, Johanna pointed us to Proverbs 3:5–6: trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding. She’s been sitting with that verse all summer, alongside a new book release, a fourth baby on the way, and a house full of littles. For her, trusting God with her writing means doing what he’s asked rather than what the algorithm rewards.
Johanna is candid that social media would have cost her the very margin she needed to write at all. If she’d fallen for the pressure to post several times a week, she wouldn’t have had the capacity for Substack, let alone two novels. Her encouragement to writers feeling that pressure is simple: you don’t have to chase what everyone else appears to be doing, because you don’t actually know what’s happening behind their closed doors.
Writing in the Margins of Motherhood
We loved hearing how deeply Johanna’s writing life is woven into her motherhood. With her first child, she wrote during naps. With her second, who slept less predictably, she started dropping the kids at the YMCA childcare a couple of mornings a week just to buy herself writing time. By her third baby, she’d leaned on teenage neighbors who watched her toddlers during that baby’s long afternoon nap so she could slip off to the library.
There was no formula, she told us — just persistent creativity. A rainy day and a movie for the kids might buy her thirty minutes, and thirty minutes is five hundred words. A week visiting her mother-in-law became a five-hour-a-day writing retreat. It simply took longer this time around — three years between books instead of one — and she’s made peace with that pace.
A Little Mystery Goes a Long Way
Johanna closed our conversation by circling back to something Sandy said early in the podcast’s run: there’s something freeing about being a little mysterious, about not sharing everything. That idea stuck with her, and she’s carried it into her own writing life ever since — content to come home from a trip with only two photos because she wasn’t busy documenting it for anyone else.
If you’re a writer wondering whether you can build a career without living online, let Johanna’s story be your proof. Trust the process, save your advance, ask your friends for help, and give yourself permission to be a little mysterious.
This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.
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