Julie BroadYour Non-Fiction Sidekick for Writing, Publishing & Marketing a Book That Builds Your Brand and Grows Your Biz

Selling Books Isn’t the Goal (Here’s What Is)

7 May 2026 · 2 min

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1:30

In this segment, Julie Broad emphasizes that authors must first define the primary purpose of their book—whether it’s maximizing sales, generating business leads, or earning media coverage. She urges creators to probe the underlying “why” behind that top goal, as this insight shapes the entire strategy and infrastructure they’ll build. Broad cautions that relying solely on book sales to make a living is rare, typically limited to prolific fiction writers who release a book each month, a model most authors don’t want to adopt. She explains that if sales are the main objective, the author’s system must support high‑volume publishing and a sales engine. When the goal is earned media, the author must clarify what that media will achieve (e.g., brand awareness, credibility) to design appropriate tactics. Overall, the advice stresses aligning every aspect of the author’s plan—from production to marketing—to the true, deeper purpose of the book.

Chapters

It's really important to think about what your primary goal is. Everybody has multiple goals. I definitely have multiple goals myself, but when you're creating your book, what is that first and most important goal? And it might be to sell as many books as possible. It might be to get leads into your business. Whatever that primary goal is, you wanna think about that. But then I always kind of push a little further and go, okay, but why? Like, understand not just what that first goal is, but why is that your first goal? And I do that especially when somebody says book sales is their primary goal, because usually, you know, that's fine. Some people do have the goal of simply being an author and they want to make their living from books. I'll tell you that it's a very rare bird that makes their living solely from books and they write a lot of them. They don't just write one book or two books. In the author world, the authors that are making a living from books only, they're usually fiction and they're usually putting about a book a month, which I do not wanna sign up for. But I mean, if selling books, making money from solely book sales is your goal, You wanna know that because that's how you're going to build all your infrastructure is around that. And you're gonna have to build an engine that produces a lot of books. Eventually you'll probably have one that sells decently well and it can build on the other ones and go from there. Earned media is another one. So again, go to that next step and understand the why, because that helps you really get clear on what you're building because earned media is one thing, but what is that earned media going to do for you? Now you're digging in a little bit deeper and it's more important for that.