Dean Graziosi explains a practical, event-centered strategy to sell books: run a one-day themed launch event with aligned guest speakers who provide stacked bonuses, promote the event omnipresently (podcasts, ads, social, email) during a concentrated 7–10 day push, and offer a low-cost VIP upgrade to monetize attendees and offset ad spend. He emphasizes ownership of marketing, cautions against relying on virality, and gives brief numeric examples (attendance/uptake rates and pricing) to illustrate returns.
Chapters
That's how you sell a book. It took me 27 years to figure that out. Amazing. You're welcome. Thank you very much. 80% of all books in Barnes and Noble sell less than 500 copies. And out of the 20% that sell over 500 copies, 80% of them sell less than 5,000 copies. I always, I use this silly analogy, like this is all the work. It takes like the length of my arm here to write a book. You have to put the same exact amount of energy, time and effort on figuring out the marketing plan that you're gonna, that's gonna sell the book. No one's gonna sell it for you. And here's something I know, all of you deep down think this, that your book's gonna be so good, it's gonna go viral. So let's just say you're gonna do a one day event, okay. And it's gonna be, let's say, three to four hours. Let's just say that's the three to four hours. And there's say, 20 minute chunks to make up the time. And you're in every other one. Could you come up with three or four other people that are in your world that you admire that could talk about a similar topic? Yes. Okay. That you would like to have as guests. Yes. So invite these guests. But remember what I said yesterday. There's a through line invite. If at the end result, you want to go after people who want to be high performers but they haven't been able to achieve it, and your book is the solution for that, then all of these guests in between, you have to be talking about that. Not their own thing. Don't talk about, I'm an author and I have my own book. None of that. It is all about you. You get people who are selfless and they're coming that day to support you or they don't come. Okay. And what I would say is, this is the quick, down and dirty formula. Go about six, do about 80 minutes of nothing, but value. You for 20, someone else for 20, someone else for 20,. Maybe 60 to 80 minutes. And then at the end of that, in about an hour, hour and 10, hour and 20, you say, that's why I wrote this book. And after this next guest, after every guest, you do a short cta and you also ask each guest to give a bonus. Wow. Okay, so now you just stack the bonuses. John comes on or anybody, Maurizio comes on or whoever. When Maurizio gets done, he's like, hey, I did this training on how to do leadership it's one of my best trainings in the world. I love her book so much that if you go right now and get it, I'll throw that in as a bonus. And then you say, thank you, that's so kind, and you do another thing and you bring on the next guest and then Lori comes on and Lori rocks it for you. Lori gets done and goes, I teach people how to speak better. I love this book so much that if you get the book today, you can have my training on how to be a better speaker. And you stack it all day. Make sense? Yes. Okay. Amazing. That's the event. Okay, but then the seven, if this is your reg page, I make that bigger. This is your reg page for the event. Okay? Then you have to do something over a 10 day period to register people for this event. You have to go. We've been saying it for years. You have to go omnipresent. You have to do everything in your power. Ask the people in this room, ask every friend you know. So if you got friends, it's only a book. Will you promote for me? Will you send your audience right? You, you have your list, right? You have a list? Yeah, Right? You promote your list, right? You do ads, you do LinkedIn, social media, Facebook, Instagram. Everything you could possibly do over a one week, 10 day period, you do. So no matter where somebody goes, they're like, wow, this is this incredible event. Talking about how to live into your full potential. I would name the event, like something around that. Not the name of your book, it's like an event about it. You're just releasing your book during the event. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. So you go omnipresent and get on it. Get a podcast. Get on as many podcasts as you can for three months prior. Record them, but ask them. The only time you can release is in this week. So go burn out 20 different podcasts and they release them all, all in the same week. Do your ads in the same week, do your emails in the same week, your friends are promoting the same week, your social media is promoting, all in the same week, the same time. And all of a sudden each thing gets the next thing a lift. I've been doing this omnipresent thing for so long because I used to do events in cities around the country, and if we just ran an infomercial, say the infomercial got a 2% response rate. But if we ran the infomercial and we sent direct mail, both of them would go up. This would go to 2.5 and the direct mail from 1% would go to 1.2. If we did outbound phone calls, we did radio, we did text messaging, all of a sudden every time we added a new element, all of them got a lift. Something. I've been sharing this forever. Nobody does it. And I'm glad because that's why we do the biggest shit out there. Because people don't listen. It is. There is something about doing it all in this hard ratio because you go, wow, I saw her online, I saw her on my email, I got a voice memo from and I just heard her on the radio. Oh, my God, I got a register. Right. So one other thing, and if you want to spend money on ads, then I would consider doing what we do. And in between, I would, I would do a VIP upgrade. Why? For like 27 bucks. And I would just say, I would, I would do what we do. You can model it. You come in, you say, hey, this is a one day event. It's going to be amazing. You're in, you can watch on YouTube. But if you're like me and you like to upgrade to vip, not only do you get to be on Zoom, not only will we, I'll stay on longer. At the end, when the event's over after three hours, I'll stay on for another hour and a half with you guys and answer your questions. I'll give you the replay because I'm going to take it offline, but I'll give you the replay and I'll give you professional notes and I'll read the book with you for the three weeks after. It's just 27 bucks. You'll get 10% of the people that take that. That means you'll get $2.70 that you could put towards your ad spend. And the ads might cost you five, but you monetize half of it. So every dollar you spend, you get 50% back. You could spend twice the ad spend. That's how you sell a book. It took me 27 years to figure that out. Amazing. You're welcome. Thank.
