268: Strategies for Surpassing “The Magic Number” of Book Sales with Todd Sattersten

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back free Timers. You're in for a special treat today that I already know. I'm going to have a vulnerability hangover from publishing live on the pod. This is actually part one of a two part favor that my new friend Todd Saturston is doing for me to help revive free time book sales and try to reach the magic number. What is the magic number you ask? Well, Todd Saturson is the publisher and owner of Bard Press, which is a very specialized book publisher that works with authors to create best selling books in business, personal development and technology. They only work with one author every year. That's how intense his process is because they want to make sure that they can hit a grand slam with every single book that they publish. Speaking of one thing, that's one of their most popular and best selling books that they've published. The one thing I'll put it in the Show Notes. Highly recommend. Todd wrote this really in depth article that I'll link to in the show notes on his research. He did this fascinating experiment taking 6,775 titles in business and self help published between 2012 and 2015. And he looked at the data. He chose those years because they were relatively stable in those categories and he could have at least five years of lifetime sales data at the time that he wrote this post. And he looked and said okay, what does it really take for a book to gain traction to really get out there become a bestseller? And the magic number is that his data showed if you can get into the 10,000 to 25,000 copies sold range in your first year of sales, you have a 42% chance of selling more than 25,000 copies in lifetime sales. If you can get past that 10k mark, there is a 4 in 10 chance of getting beyond 25,000 copies sold. So this was part of his effort to say, do book launches matter? That burst of enthusiasm at the beginning. Now Todd has kind of granted me a permission slip that okay, it still can work if you hit 10,000 copies sold in the first two years. And as we approach Freetime's two year bookiversary coming up on March 22nd of 2024, Todd was very gracious to sit down with me and really unpack. How is it going so far? At the time that we recorded this in late October, it had sold maybe six or seven thousand copies across all formats. That includes hardcover ebook promo copies that I sent out and audiobook sales as well as free audiobooks that I gave as part of the Bogogo campaign. Buy one, get one, Give one. Todd had so many great suggestions, so I asked him if we could record this friend tour call in case I ever had the courage to release it live on the podcast. And part two, he's gonna do a live follow up to check in on some of the things we talked about in late October and paying FreeTime subscribers are invited to attend that and ask any questions that you might have of Todd and the types of topics and suggestions that we talked about in this conversation, as well as check in on my, you know, reluctant updates and fixes. Because sometimes I find these things really frustrating, especially dealing with Amazon bureaucracy and silliness. Make sure you join as a paying free time subscriber@itsfreetime substack.com and then you can always scroll to the very bottom of the Time well spent newsletter that I send out on Fridays to get the registration links. For bonus workshops like this conversation, follow up with Todd. That's itsfreetime.substack.com and there's always goodies below the paywall, including some of my favorite memes, but also links to register for things like our quarterly free time office hours where you can ask me anything, all kinds of bonus content, including almost 100 BFF bonus episodes from the last few years. And again, if you want to join us live with Todd, I would absolutely love to have you. That's itsfreetime.substack.com and of course, if you don't already have your copy of FreeTime, there is no better time than now to grab one. You can visit itsfreetime.combook and as a special thank you for being here, I'm happy to reopen the Bogogogo campaign. So if you buy one, you can get the audiobook for free via private podcast feed and gift audiobook access to a friend. Just submit your proof of purchase@itsfreetime.com Bogogo that's itsfreetime.com Bogogo last but not least, one of the most helpful things you can do is leave a rating or review that would mean the absolute world to me and really help us try to hit that magic number by the time freetime turns two. Thanks so much for being here. And now onto part one of my conversation with Todd Satter.

Todd, thanks for being here.

It's so great. Like, aren't there movies where there's all these people that keep passing each other over and over again and that at some point it finally connects? And so I guess Atlanta was. It was that point. And I love that this is the next one.

So that's really great in a way. Yes, we have sliding publishing doors and another fun, serendipitous thing was that when we, all 40 of us, introduced ourselves very quickly in the opening circle and the person next to me said his name, he said, I'm Jay Papazon, author of the One Thing. And I almost fainted because I loved the One Thing. And I had my fangirl moment right before I did my intro. And of course you and Bard Press published the One Thing. So when the next morning. Oh, we had the fire alarm. I was getting dressed to go to the opening event and the fire alarm rang. So you and Jay were downstairs. Sean came down, Shawn was one of the organizers, and I had scrambled, threw some clothes on, no makeup. Encounter you all, we share a ride over. And then I ended up having breakfast with you the next morning where we actually got to dive in and talk. So it seems as though the universe finally said, okay, you two, it's time to connect.

It's time. And bringing Jay along, Jay was a last minute add to that event as well. Like he was kind of serendipitous. So like I 100% agree. Yeah, I love it. I love all of it.

Tim Grohl told us about the magic number and I found the article at Bard Press and put it in the show notes. It's fascinating the research you did. So you looked at data from over 6,000 books and I will let you say it because you'll do it better than me. But you were trying to look at does it matter how many books? Does it matter if you hit the 10,000 books in the first year milestone? So can you tell us a little bit about the research and what you.

Found one step back from that is I get asked a lot by authors. What should be my goal? What should be my goal? How many copies should I sell and lifetime, what should I expect? And that's a really difficult question to answer. And I spent years thinking about it. Like, really years. Because books are not. They don't work like a lot of things in the world. It's not like there's an average for number of books sold. Averages don't really work in publishing. There's either books that do really, really well. Harry Potter, the Bible, you know, Atomic Habits. Right now, there's those kind of books. And then there's a lot of books that never really reach a large audience. It's a power law distribution for the nerds out there. Right. It's not a normal distribution. So averages don't work very well. At the same time, in being a publisher that only publishes one book a year, I want to put a goal out in front of my authors. I want to give them something that they need to head towards so that they understand how much effort and energy needs to be put in. So for a long time, there's been this number floating around that almost is like urban legend in publishing that, like, hey, if you can sell 10,000 copies, that is a good benchmark. And after that point, either the book's going to work or it's not going to work. And I'd heard it forever. And I thought that's a really interesting goal for people to give them. So I thought, let's go dig into the data to really see if, like 10,000 copies, what kind of difference it makes. So what I did is I took these 6,700 titles. They were titles that had been in the market for at least five years, some longevity to them. And what I did is I compared two things. I compared the number of copies that the book sold in the first year, roughly year, probably more like 18 months, plus or minus six months. And then the second thing I did is I said, let's compare that to the number of copies that those books sold in their lifetime. And the first thing that I found that was really interesting was that if you cannot sell 10,000 copies in the first year, that the book's on sale again, maybe two years. We'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. In connection with your book, that the probability of you ever selling more than 10,000 copies of your book is only about 1 in 10. So you've only got about a 10% chance that if in that first year you can't get past 10,000 copies of ever getting out of that. So that's that power law curve. It's the gravity of garnering enough attention and interest in the work that you're in. What's equally interesting, because I don't want to go too long on the soliloquy here, but let me just quickly say what was equally interesting about the data was that if you could exceed the 10,000 copies, the probability of you getting to next milestones in the success of your book in connection with lifetime sales improved dramatically. So for example, if you could get past 10,000 copies sold, you had a 40ish percent chance of getting to 25,000 copies. So let's just think about that for a second. What places in business are there opportunities where you can get yourself to a 1 in 2 chance that if you just push to the next point that you can get to the next level of success and it turns out 25 to 50, 50 to 100 similar things each time getting a little bit better. It was like 42% and it was like 48%. It was like 52%. So like a 1 and 2 chance for you to get to that next level. So to me that's absolutely fascinating data that when I'm trying to convince somebody do the work at the launch to get past those 10,000 copies and then listen, if you invest into the continued success of your book, the chance of the return on that investment is really, really high. And so that's really the two pieces of it. You've got to get escape at velocity, but once you do, you've got really good chances of you getting really good success on those additional efforts.

It's so fascinating. I do remember the 10,000 being the target when my first book launched in 2011. So we can say it's been around at least that long. And you also point out that you don't just look at a big launch burst. Either that it is ultimately more important that there be consistent sales over time because that's also speaking to the quality of the book, not just the author's elbow grease during a big launch window because people need to put it down and tell a friend and or ideally both one of someone made a point that it's helpful if, if you're a really serious author to build it into the business. There should be systems and Josh Kaufman's really good at that. Or a team member whose sole focus is thinking about how do we continually sell this book and it's not a one week thing and it's not a one year thing. It's a, I mean in my case, five year thing at least. And I think what the reason that I'm finding this so helpful to get into today is that I don't have to tell you, 2020 was a really strange year for publishing. I feel so sad. For the first time, authors whose books launched into a void in April, May of that year. No book tour, no signings, nothing. I know Bard Press took a couple years off. FreeTime launched in 2022 because I really did want to ride the trend wave of what was happening. And I published with Idea Press, but it hasn't sold as well as my first two books. So I know it's a weird market. There's no excuses though. I still feel like I did the best book I could. But I'm a year and a half in. We're six months from the two year mark, so you could tell us if and when there is an extension. And I know that aiming for 10,000 books precisely is not really the point. It's about the solutions to get there are what give the book longevity. But I'm stalling out, Todd. I'm stalling out. My morale is down. This is secretly a therapy call. And I just have tried a lot of things, but Life After College has probably sold 35,000, if not more. It's hard to know because there were so many acquisitions from Running Press to Hachette to who knows what it become and then pivot, I want to say 60k across all formats.

Yeah.

So those cleared certain milestones that did exactly as you're pointing out, they cleared 10k and then they went on to do very well in the publishing world. Whereas Free time, it's not bad. It's maybe 7,500 across all formats. You have access to BookScan, which isn't all sales, but I'm having a hard time even getting a total sales number and I'm having a hard time getting it to that threshold of where I want to get it, just to give it a chance. I'm all for the Jim Carrey. So you're saying there's a chance.

Right. What I tell folks is always that we've got to prove value to the reader and we've got to find a way to find the readers themselves. Right. So it's. There's always a value hypothesis and there's a growth hypothesis. So one of the first pieces I want to talk about is there's some opportunities to expose more of the utility that I think is hiding in the book that than maybe what I see in some of the marketing pieces and the way it's promoted. But before we go there, I think I got three ideas for you today. The first idea is I think we should try to go find out and for some reason I feel like there's a follow up to this. It's like you're going to go do some stuff in like six months from now. Maybe we're going to talk again and be like, here's what I found out and this is what happened.

Very Gimlet media startup. But for an author Vibes, the first.

Thing I want you to do is I want you to send a survey out to your followers in all shapes and forms, all the places and basically the call to action is going to be, Listen, I need 90 seconds of your time. I want to ask you about free time. I'm only going to ask you three questions. Would you take the time to give me some feedback? And my experience is that we normally do this on our Bard Press books in that window that's 90 to 120 days after the books come out. So that what you talked about a little bit ago, it's really when all that effort of all the work you've done in the pre launch and all the effort that you could possibly muster has kind of come to fruition, we usually like asking at the end of that, where do we stand? Which else we should find out. I think there's a similar opportunity for you at this point to be able to go out and say let me ask some questions. There's only three questions we're going to ask. For people listening, this is like just go to Google forms, don't do anything complicated here and you're going to ask three questions. So the first question I want you to ask is did you get a copy of the book? And the really important word in here is get. I don't care if they bought it, I don't care if you gave it to them, I don't care if someone else gave it to them. I don't care. I just want to know if in your core fans who literally end up spending time to fill out this survey, I want to know what percentage of them got a copy of this book because that's going to tell us all sorts of stuff, right? So tell us, did they perceive the value on some level, did they perceive the value of this thing? Fits for me. So that's question number one. So the language really matters, People listening and Jenny, the language matters. Did you get a copy here's? Question number two. Did you read it? Come on. Jenny and I were talking about this when we were together. Like if there was a camera and I could show you all the books, piles of books lying around me that are waiting to be read. And me worse than almost anybody, I want to know, did they read the book? And then the third question is, would you recommend it? Would you recommend it to a friend or colleague? And again, for the business nerds, this is net Promoter Score. This is Fred Reicheld's work. And you want to use a scale from 0 to 10. And the reminder being promoters are nines and tens. They're the people who, when you say, hey, where should I go to lunch? They say, oh, my God, I just went to. And they can't help themselves but tell you the place they just went. Those are promoters. Neutrals are sevens and eights. And those are the people who say, hey, where should I go to lunch? And they respond back to you, I can't think of any place. And then you've got the detractors who are the zeros to sixes. And those are the folks who will say, you know what? I don't have any great ideas for you, but whatever you do, don't go to fill in the blank like we.

Did with the hotel. They have plastic cups for the coffee in the morning. That gave us all the detractor score.

The high detractor score. That's true. And I would have it be a branched survey. Jenny, if they literally say, no, they didn't read it, kick them out of the survey right there. Or if they didn't get it, kick them out of the survey. And here's what I think is clever about using a brain survey with this is, is that if they say, no, I didn't get a copy, good marketers, what would they do? They would say, can I get you a copy? Could I send you a coupon? Can I give you the first five chapters of an excerpt? Whatever you think best fits your audience and where you're at in your cycle. But there's so many ways to try to activate those hooks. Use the opportunity for them to say they didn't get it to be, oh, my gosh, you should get it. And can I give you some way to sample it? Because the adoption research that goes all the way back to diffusion of innovation and Everett Rogers, it's very clear trialability is the most important thing for the adoption of any product. So I'm always thinking about when I'm launching books, how can I give people A way to trial it. If we kick them out at the have you read it? They got it, but they haven't read it. I always ask them, can I write you in a couple weeks and see if the book would be helpful to you? And my experience is 30% of folks will actually give you their email address and give you permission to be an accountability partner for them to actually have them read the book and you come back and ask them what they think. So again, another opportunity to build audience and build connection and for the good marketer for if people get all the way to the end and then they answer that net promoter score question, there's one more branch and and the most important branch in there is for the promoters. And what I do is I ask them how would you describe the book to someone else? If you're a promoter of the book, how would you describe the book to someone else? I have found some of the best consumer product marketing insights from the answer to that question from people, from people who love the book. Why wouldn't I update my book description to match the word of mouth language that they want to use to describe your product? Why should I be above that and think, well you know what, my book description is better because I'm a publisher and I do this for a living. No, I try to take as much of that feedback and feed it back into where are the places I can use that if I'm going to try to do a new promotion for the book, let's use their language. I don't care if the book description on the back of the book's different. Let's update the Amazon description to better reflect what's going on. So first thing I would do is like what could we do at this point in the cycle with free time to try to go gather some information. So give me your take to that kind of idea and what we just talked about there.

Well, I love a good survey and I love setting up the branching. I love surprising people when they finish the survey with giving something away. So count me in. I'm going to do this. This seems like a no brainer and is super easy to do.

We'll be right back just after this.

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We should also say, for the record, that in preparation for this meeting, you went to my Amazon page and discovered the ebook is no longer linked. There is a forged paperback book. I mean, some glaring problems. And then I went today and I used to have almost 150 reviews and today it's 91. It's like, where did all those go? So there are very weird things happening that I didn't even notice. And no one wrote to me. It's not like anybody wrote in and said, hey, where'd the Kindle edition go? Not that everybody buys off of the everything store, but a lot of people do. And so that's been hurting me. Who even knows for how long? And it wasn't on my radar. So that's mortifying that we're fixing. That's in progress.

Right. So actually that's the lead into my second part, which is doing work around what I would call conversion. It's really like, marketers. I know you're right there. Like, let's think about the places where people are going to go buy the book and are there things we can do to help with conversion in those places? So you pointed out a number of them. Are all the formats available that people are going to want it in? I didn't search super far, Jenny, but if it's not available on Amazon, my bet is that it's not feeding out to any place. My bet would be you'd be having problems with the ebook at other retailers as well. It could be a specific problem at the everything store, but I would point to, gosh, is this actually a problem in a wider set of places? I noticed the reviews and I noticed a lot of starred reviews, but I didn't notice a lot of written reviews. And I wonder if that's part of the problem that you just pointed out of. Like, is there something missing? Is there some data?

Oh my Gosh, it says zero reviews.

Like written reviews?

Yes, there was 150 written reviews.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. Where did they go?

Well, and Amazon. Don't worry, Amazon's really good at this and they didn't lose them. It just sounds like there's a little tech support needed to go in and just ask some questions of the Amazon folks and usually they could pull out of that stuff back. Something got unlinked and it could be that the ebook got unlinked and maybe that separated a bunch of stuff out. But yeah, that was the other thing I noticed. I was like there's no written reviews. If I was going to try to go top to bottom and I'm going to use Amazon, an example, but I think this applies at other e commerce retailers as well is what do I want? I want a good cover. I want a clear high cover image. I want search inside turned on and that's probably connected to the fact that the ebook's not there because usually Amazon will use the ebook as the content to make the search inside function work. So my guess is that's probably not working for your book right now because the ebook isn't linked.

Right.

Which is fine. But I would go one step further and I would check with your publisher to see if they could upload the actual laid out pages of your book and let that be what's the search inside? I know you put a lot of work into the book and the interior and seeing just the ebook version, kind of the HTML version isn't as exciting and isn't as good of conversion mechanism as the actual PDF version of the book. And this is something they can do. And I think it's not working right now because there's no ebook. But let's see if we could even level it up one from there and get the manuscript version of the book. Like someone would see it in the print version, load it up. I would also potentially add some additional images which you can do underneath there to show even. Even before someone clicks on the search inside, show them some pages of what it looks like to read the book.

I did add some of those. I put some thought into that. Inspired by of course. What else? Atomic habits. I thought James Clear did a really great job of those simple diagrams, simple overview pages.

Yes. So same thing there. When I get to the book description, I would get rid of the endorsements at the top and I would go right to that bolded line that you have on the page. I forget what the bolded line is.

Time is not money, time is life force.

Yes, that's the first thing I see at the top, rather than someone else recommending the book. There's tons of research that says conversion improves something like 20% on a page just by having a bolded line at the top of your book description. It's probably the most important thing you could do.

And quick question for you. The book has won six awards since it came out. So I actually had just emailed the team to update the description to feature the key awards that it won and basically put award winning some kind of social proof thing.

Yes.

I was going to put that before that first line. Time is not money, Time is life force. But you think, no, but should it still go toward the top of that description?

I would actually end the review with that. In this point in the cycle of your book, I think what we need to focus on is what do people get from reading the book. I really want to like, lean into that. I think that awards can be really good and it can be social proof, but I think it matters to people very early in the cycle, not people later in the cycle. If you think of like early adopters and early innovators, they love hearing that kind of stuff, that kind of social proof piece. When we get into like, early majority, they're just like, what's this going to do for me? I want someone to tell me what this is going to do for me. And so leaning into that utility of this is what this book is. This is the problem I'm trying to solve. And here's the kind of things you'll learn from reading it. I think it's funny, sometimes people don't think enough that maybe your marketing message should change over the age of the book as well. The kinds of people that are finding their way to the book two years after it came out are very different than the people who found their way to the book three months after the book came out. And so I agree that acknowledging that it won awards. Yes, do that. Make sure it's in there. But I would highlight the book description and then I would list those things towards the end of the review.

Super helpful.

Here's what else I would do in the same way I've been kind of describing it in other senses. I love your eBay plus content. I love that you're using it. A plus content. For those who are listening. You'll see this on a lot of pages now. It's kind of graphical banners and sort of social blocks that you could put further down on the page. And there's two things that happen. Amazon loves them because they know it converts the page better. And if you put Amazon A plus content on your page, it improves your search results in Amazon. So there's a lot of positive flywheel kinds of things by having this content. Same thing that I've been saying before. I would pull some of these endorsement kind of reviews and I would build some blocks that really got me to a concept that I'm going to learn. Keep some, keep some. But I would make four or five of those blocks be a key point in the book rather than someone saying, hey, this is a book you should read. And it may be that the survey points to some things. So I'm not suggesting, I don't want to just suggest it in the abstract. I want to suggest it from the standpoint of what could I put in there that might match some of the needs that I'm hearing from people sometimes? Like in the back to the survey, if they say they didn't get a copy of it, I might put an additional question of their was it time? Was it money? Was it not the right topic? Give them one more thing so they could tell me why they didn't give it. Sometimes I'll do something similar as why didn't you read it? Why didn't you pick it up? Too many other books, blah blah, blah blah blah. I don't like going too far with that. I'd prefer that it's just like you didn't read it. Great. Let me give you something else to do instead. So if I can extract some of the utility that people are getting from reading the book and I could put that onto the page, I'd love to test to see if that would help with conversions.

Great idea. And I love the idea of asking one more question, kind of what stopped you from getting the book? Or why didn't you get it in terms of the quotes instead of blurbs, instead of endorsements and putting actual either concepts from the book or the kind of pull quotes, could that come from the formerly existing reviews that have since disappeared? But do you think that reviews can also be a good source of what people get out of the book and what to pull through in the highlights? Or should it more come from the survey?

I think you just brought up a good point before they get to that part of the page, even having one of the blocks saying 150 five star reviews and having one of the blocks be what you think is the best articulation that the value, blah blah blah blah blah, Amazon reviewer or whatever the right positioning is for that. Let's talk about Endorsements, just for a second. Because I have very particular views on endorsements. I believe that endorsements, most importantly, should triangulate the reader into thinking that this book is for them. So there's a lot of ways you can triangulate it for them. It could be the person themselves who gave you the review. If you like this person, then you're probably going to like my book. That's kind of what you're saying. In that scenario, it could be that you want someone who is like your core customer. So not like a famous author, but somebody who's like small business owner, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah, that's me. Oh, I see. And they really like the book. That could mean that I like the book. So a lot of times when I try to like build a kind of a triangle of endorsements for my books, it's usually who's the highest author I can get, who's a comp found for the book. So someone can say, oh, I read this book, so I should read this book. I'm usually looking for a practitioner, someone who's doing the work. And if it can't be somebody who I know by name, like if I can't get Mark Cuban because he's like the small business entrepreneur guy on Shark Tank, then maybe I'm going to get somebody whose company I might recognize. In your space you can go Nichier, I think than a lot of other people have the opportunity to like, can you go Get Nathan and ConvertKit? Can you go get the folks at Notion? Can you go get a tool or a place that really matches your core demographic and psychographic of people? Think about how the endorsements themselves help that reader go, oh, this book's for me. Not just Jenny got five famous authors to do the book which listen, yes, it's good getting those. And can we level it up even more? Again, I'm trying to dial that utility even further so that reader's like, I see myself in this book. I see myself. What I'm going to get. Oh, gosh, like your Amazon review idea. Oh, someone beneath here in these reviews down here said this about this book. Oh, my gosh. How great's that? The little asterisk I'm going to put is. I feel like you got to watch the Can I use review from below in your content? I can't remember if you. If there's a content ownership piece, I would just like, I can't remember the answer to that piece. If I can just pull that up or if I have to reach Out.

First of all, I will be devastated if those reviews don't come back. That's, like, more important to me than the books.

They're coming back. I promise.

They better come back. And then secondly, yes, I have some really nice emails that have come in, even from author types with their words about free time. And so that's a great idea to just even go to some software company leaders or triangulating, to use your phrase.

Yes. So all those pieces that we're talking about, and the last thing I had my list was I was going like, hey, what happened to the reviews? We already talked about that. What we're trying to do, like, super nerdy. We're trying to improve the conversion rate on this page. And I think your publisher in particular, because they're distributed by the same folks that distribute me, can go get conversion rates for the page. They can get glance views and they can get. How often is this page converting? So it'd be interesting to have some data to be like, how's it doing now? If you made some of these changes, what sort of improvement can we get? We're nerds. Let's go do some work and, like, let's see what we can do to actually improve performance.

Let's say I have 3,000 books at least, but minimum 3,000 sitting in the warehouse. It would not fix the conversion problem of the page itself and the value positioning of the book. That definitely needs work. And I can't wait to do the survey to really dial into what anecdotally, readers have been telling me for a year and a half. Do you also see any value in just giving away the next thousand books? It's hard to do. I don't even think it's easy to give books away.

I think it is. Yeah.

Is there value in making a push to get more out there even if they aren't official sales?

Yeah. So one would be. Go back to our survey. What's the percentage on that? First question, do you have a copy of the book? Maybe the first hundred people who say, no, I don't have a copy, you're just like, can I send you one? If you put your address in here right now, I would love to get you a copy. And maybe you just try that and see what happens and follow up with those a hundred people. Just do a little bit of experiment. Does getting this book into more people's hands generate that next level of what you want to have happen? Right. The next thing I would think about is, and you keep leading right into the next thing I was going to talk about, which is let's survey and let's find out what's going on, what's the current state, let's do some optimization so that when we do this next part, we're ready. The next part was I was like, I think there's a push in a month or two and maybe it's really, frankly I would have this be a January project for you. It's a good time for the book. It's a good message time for the book. People are trying to get reoriented. There's a push point, there's a push that we should do. And I think there's two or three routes to that. So one route could be, and you could totally work with your publisher on this is go to retailers and offer them additional discount on the book and Amazon will let you those promotions where you can buy discount. You could say I'll put $5 on every book. And so you probably won't make any money on that promotion and your publisher might make a little bit less and even distributor may make a little bit less. Forget how that all works. But take the book from today. Right now it is a $19 and 49 cent book. It's discounted 39%. It's a $32 book. So it's a little bit on the pricey side. So what would happen if I could push that down to 15? We've done tons and tons and tons of pricing experiments. Lower prices, sell more books. It's just true. So there could be a giveaway route. There could be a. Do I want to experiment with pushing more books through traditional retail with additional discount? The third one I would say is because it's the easiest and it has almost the least risk to it is I would build an ebook campaign and there's an arc to that campaign that kind of goes in two or three different steps. The first one is it's ebook driven. So what you want to do is lower the price of the ebook and you could. I don't know what exactly the right price point is but. But I would be tempted to go lower rather than higher. But three might be an interesting point to try. $0.99 199 to 99. That's usually the realm that you want to kind of experiment in. If I were to guess on yearbook I'd probably do it at 99 cents. I'd make it really easy for somebody to buy the E book. So first thing that you do is lower the price. You plan to do that for probably about a week. Maybe 10 days. Let it be at that price for three or four days. And then what you should do is start buying traffic. And what I mean by that is you should consider Amazon ads to be pointing people at the page. There's a bunch of automated services that can do that. There's automated pieces inside of Amazon that can make that easy. You can also give it a set of comps where you're like, I think these are the books that are exactly perfect, that if people love these books, they're going to love this book. So there's some things you could do there. There's a number of places that run email. Email offer newsletters. The biggest one is Bookbub. I think we talked about them very briefly. It's interesting. Bookbub gets cheaper the lower you have your offer price. The point here on the ebook thing isn't necessarily to make money, but it's to get the algorithms really generating in the right direction for you to really improve conversions on the page. It drives you up in organic search against terms. Before I did all this, I would do a little scrub on my metadata with my publisher. What are the terms that are in my metadata file? It's nerdy, but go ask them. What did you put in if you worked with them on it? Are there some ones we should change? So improve all that stuff, Drive traffic to the page. BookBub's great. I'm a big fan of Fussy Librarian. If you're in the business self help space, these are ones that we've tested business and self help.

You know how I feel about self help.

I do. You're after the time is not money, time is life force. It's pretty lofty goal. And then the next bolded line is literally a more joyful business is within reach. Yeah, it's sounding a little self helpy. So I'm going to like nudge you back a little bit and be like, maybe you need to lean into like. No, this is about building some systems to actually get better management over your business, which in turn actually gets you.

Yeah.

The control you want back in your life and that those things work better in sync again. We could probably like work that a little bit more. But if you're like, I'm think people think it's this thing. Well, I think you're maybe accidentally pushing them in that direction with some of.

This language and there's no reason not to try it. In a way I feel like I have nothing to lose because sales have plateaued, probably because the ebook is missing, as are every single review, right? But if I don't even make excuses on that, if sales are at a plateau, in a way, there's nothing to lose. It does annoy me how difficult it is to change things. Like even the Amazon description. It takes weeks to reflect. But I won't go down that vent rant right now. I love your idea that if I feel strongly that it's being misinterpreted as self help, that's my problem of the positioning. And the reason I'm totally down to do some of these e book discounting experiments is that so many people say I've bought this for everybody on my team and that was my intention for the business owner, that they would read it, they would see how helpful it was, they would wish that their team members operated this way and that secretly it was the manual they didn't have to write. So I know that if I get the next wave of readers, even free ones, I do feel, even though it's not quantitative data, that the word of mouth viral coefficient on the book is strong. Now it's obviously not strong enough that this became a viral sensation. So I have to also temper that statement. But so many people, one person told me who was at the meetup said I've bought 22 copies already for everyone I know and my entire team and that's how I gauge a good book and that's how I gauge success is that when a person puts it down, they become a 9 or a 10. They tell at least one person.

We'Ll.

Be right back just after this.

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You mentioned formats, but I feel like you have strong thoughts on this too. Is there any value to putting out a paperback edition? I don't really feel like doing that, but it's an option when one is independent like I am with the project.

Let me start by saying after this push and there's a variety of opportunities around discounting the hardcover around ebook sales push, people to ebook while it's discounted. There's also some opportunities after that that you can actually get Amazon to price match on price. So you can actually lower your price at one retailer and they'll match the lower discount, but still they'll pay you the full margin. So that's another little piece to this. It's like a two to three week campaign around what you do with ebooks to get the full benefit of trying to leverage that. We're doing it with the one thing right now. As a matter of fact, it's 199 right now. And we're kind of in that process of trying to work all the angles to try to get things working in our favor. What you just said a second ago needs to be just highlighted really quick. Is there is a strategy of thinking about how to sell. Is there a bulk buy move here? And maybe you did it at launch, but maybe there's a different move in that space. I would think really hard about how many books are there in a box and find out what the carton quantity is. My guess is it may be bigger than what a team 24. 24. So it's close. Chances are, you know, it might be that you want it to be more like a 10 copy promotion, but I'm just trying to think about cost and how do I make it one price so it's super easy for someone to buy it.

I was even thinking offer up 10 keynotes. Like I pick a number. I wouldn't have done this in the past. I would have been earning more from keynotes anyway, which I'm not right now. And so I'm not that busy not traveling. And part of me was wondering if I should just say, okay, I have five or 10 keynotes if you buy 100 books or figure out the right number. I wouldn't want to price it too high, but as in like make it uber accessible to move these boxes of books.

Absolutely.

Or a Fireside Chat, Q and A, et cetera.

And what happens with that is you get two things that happen with that. One, you're putting the book in front of a bunch of people, whether it's live or virtual, like you said. And then the second part to that is you literally then get to deliver the core message of the book to that person live. You're not going to produce a higher felt need moment than I just told you. Why this book could really, really help you and the book is on your chair. How much better is that? So I think there is something there. I think there's a keynote route to it that could move books. And I would also think about is there a 10 copy version that you sell for $199 and includes shipping and tax and everything. And the books just show up and they get a three minute personalized video from you introducing. You're just like hey, thank you X for doing the, for buying this. From what I understand. I think the way this is going to really help your team is why I'm really excited that y' all are going to check this out. You've got other stuff reach out to me and it's recorded, it's scalable. You could just send that to someone they could play at the beginning of their next meeting as they hand out the books. That always feels like a really great kind of add on promo. It makes the buyer feel a lot better and you're thanking them personally and you're introducing the book to them directly. I think you're already on the right route. There should be a bulk piece. Okay, let me go back to your original question which was should you do a paperback?

Great branching memory.

You should do a paperback. And let me tell you why you should do a paperback. In particular, I think $32, it's a tough price point. It's a little high. And the question would be if you could do a paperback and do it as print on demand. Jenny, don't do another print run or do a small print run to start to. Maybe there's a set of people that you get excited about in this next six months of activity and promotion but turn it into pod. Get rid of some of your financial risk. It's going to cost a little bit more and you're only going to print them as you need them. That's talking to your publisher about potentially that opportunity. There are some books in our even in our stable that are POD books now because it just makes sense.

Yeah, I love that. I hadn't even considered. I kept resisting the paperback because it's a lot of work. I have to generate all this money again, which I don't really have just sitting there unused a bunch of cash to fund a print run at the right quantities and then you're paying for storage at the warehouse and shipping and everything. I did not even think about a POD version. That in a way if I could just get over my design sensibilities which I was able to express with a hardcover. So I did do that as I wanted to do once in my life of book vision, fully realized then I love that idea of making an accessible Paperback print on demand. So it's accessible for me too to make it. There's not as much downside other than just my design side. The beauty side will just have to compromise a little bit. But it might be worth it.

It might be worth it from the standpoint of price matters. Price really matters.

Especially now more than even when the book launched in March 2022. I think I was even much more optimistic in March 2022 and now people are saying survive till 25 and it's no better. It's just only getting worse. Like people are more afraid, more strapped. At least the ones I'm which who this audience is for, which is for small business owners.

And what happens when that price goes from 32 to 24 and Amazon discounts it to 17 and maybe even more. They might even take it further. And even though it's price similar, maybe a little higher, but you're just printing them when you need them. It just really changes the whole dynamic of that. Yeah transaction. And here's what I do. I would put some new content in it. Maybe all this stuff that you're going to do over these six months of finding out where did it really land with people, what really worked for them. Maybe that subtitle shifts a little bit. Maybe the COVID shifts a touch. Maybe there's some things that if your gut is right about, hey, this is really a book about systems. This is a book about tactics that's going to get you where you want to go. This book is more like Traction by Gina Wickman than a book by Chris Gilliboot. Like A hundred dollar startup. I don't know if that's the full spectrum.

No, it makes sense and that is my intention. It's not the high level. It really is meant to be how to think in systems, do small steps now that sets your time free far into the future. It's meant to be very hands on, nitty gritty. It is much more like traction. It's not the overall rocks and team meeting structure. This is almost the capillaries or the fascia. If traction are the bones of the business systems, this is the fascia. It's like what needs to happen to make all that happen. I don't know how else to say that, but that'll need to be its own separate brain fascia.

We'll work that word a little bit. It will workshop another word.

Can we massage it into the correct metaphor?

I don't want that necessarily in new book but.

This is the micro actions. This is literally 5, 10, 15, 20 minute actions that I'm taking to be successful is what I hear you saying, versus, here's your structure for your team meeting. Here's your structure for your monthly quarterly cycle. And so I think the opportunity that you get with the paperback is you could revisit how you frame up the book a little bit that leans into that a little bit more. And I think you've got an opportunity to add content to the book, which is always another value add. I don't think people take advantage sometimes of the opportunity that a paperback has that you can really bring stuff to that conversation.

It could be like, afterward, business has declined. That's the crazy thing. What's happening right now, because I invested so much in this book, in this process, in this new part of my business, that right now. And that's kind of scary because I would love to do an afterward. The way I did for Pivot was just one year later. But it's almost like I'm still in the roller coaster of it.

All, right? And it might be that whatever it is, it's a year before the paperback comes out. I think you may want to tell that story. And what would provide even more utility to that reader now that you know, after the books come out, like, what's the top things that people have come and told you about of like New man, this was the thing. Here were the three things. And can you even lean into those even further in a further description? I'm a big fan of, frankly, of discussion guides at the end of paperbacks where if I'm trying to have a discussion with a group and if you really want to have business owners sort of discussions with their team, can you prompt them? And that could be even a giveaway.

And I do have that. It could probably improve it a lot based on everything we've talked about. And the survey response is, I know we're at time for this brainstorm. One question actually have two. We can make them quick because I always end with a permission slip. But before that, I'm noticing myself in this conversation. I'm simultaneously excited and my morale is low. Like, just so I'm wondering what pep talk you give your authors because, you know, you're so selective. You work with a small handful. You're very high touch. What is your pep talk? When their morale flags, their energy dips. The Amazon page is absolutely haywire. To do all this is a lot of effort, and I'm seeing a lot of reward. I don't want to be ungrateful for what has happened, and I'M not fretting over the number of sales. It's more just like these logistical things that are so out of my control and frustrating. How to just resuscitate my own energy to put into all this.

I find that that survey, because you suddenly get this burst of new information about what's this book done, how have people interacted with it? And sometimes just the information, even if it's like, not what you want it to be like to find out that maybe only 50% of your audience got a copy of the book. So that could be a demotivating thing. Like, what do you mean only 50% of you got a copy of the book? But what opportunity does that then create? My core audience. 50% don't have a copy of the book. Oh, my gosh, Now I know what to go talk about. Now I know what to go push on. And clearly there's something I missed when I went out with this. And so I just think isn't the part that paralyzes us is it's always either motivation or skill. Like, I don't know how to do it, or I can't find the reason to do it anymore. And so what I hope is that, like, hey, here's a small action. How long is it going to take you to do that survey, knowing you're like, gosh, I got to think it's 30 minutes. And then it's like, a little bit of planning. And a week from now, you could send that email out. So, like, small little thing that I'm hoping gives you a wealth of new information that suddenly we could point at the motivation side of that. Mm, right. That suddenly I know a whole bunch more about what going on. Now I point that back at, hey, what do I need to do? Oh, my gosh. Okay, now I know I can go back out to people. Maybe it's not people. Maybe I need to just connect with them to get to do the thing. Maybe I'm not describing the book right. I think what happens with books and the reason that it gets demotivating so quickly is that it's the information. Feedback loops are poor.

So poor, so horrible.

And it's difficult. And as a publisher, I'll stand in front of the buns and it can roll me over because we try to share as much as we can, and it's still not enough. Like, the minute that that book leaves the warehouse, I might know what store it went to, but then whose hands it got in. And did they read it? Did they not? Like, it's the nature of things. Like, we want to know exactly how what happened and did they like it and did they tell three other people? And. Yeah, we can't know that, but there are surrogates for that. And I'm hoping that maybe a couple of things we talked about today are surrogates to some of that information and that we can work that motivation and skill piece moving towards some actions that keep us there. It's one thing a week, Jenny. That's what I'll tell you. Can you do one thing a week? This is Tim Grohl's first thousand copies. Like I've just told you, the whole book in one sentence. Is there, like, one thing you could do a week that could lean into just doing something? Either find out more information about the book or find another buyer that you didn't know about.

I love that you also have the one thing right behind you in the video that I can see. So thank you, Jay. Thank you, Tim. I was encouraged, I have to say, when you both shared the magic number, something about that sparked in me because I felt like there's still hope. Even though. Did you say it can apply to two years out? Doesn't have to be all year one. Okay. So that gave me hope, too, that I always tell people and I learned in high school softball, sprint through the bases. Like, don't slow down before you hit home plate or you might get thrown and you gotta sprint through the base. It doesn't matter if you're close. You gotta sprint through the base. Okay. And I do feel like that about launches this one haven't. So in a way, I felt like I'm already lying on the other side of the base in a fetal position.

But you gave me a new base to aim for that. Why not try just rally a little bit? The very last question. If you could give other authors permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I want to give them permission to put their ego down. I've never worked with an author who doesn't want the people that they wrote the book for to be better. Like, I've never met an author who's, like, didn't have some altruistic reason of why they did the book that they did. I think what trips us up is that we get caught up in our own mind, trash about what happened with the book and why it didn't get to people. And, like, our job is just to find more people to help. And there's so many more still opportunities for that. In your case and probably lots of other People are listening to this case. One of the biggest laughs that we got in our talk that we did at the meetup was when I said, you don't actually have to stop promoting the book after it's launched. You don't have to stop. It turns out you can keep going if you want. There's nobody stopping you. Yes, you put a lot of effort into that launch, but, like, you're from the tech world. Tech world is very clear on this. There's a lot of vanity metrics, there's a lot of vanity activities that we do because we think we want to feel better about ourselves. Big launches, those aren't the things that normally what make companies, books, whatever, successful. It's that there's a very gradual drip by drip by drip that makes being successful. And the only thing that stops us from doing that is because we think it's not having an effect. You wrote this book for a reason, Right? You wrote the book because you really thought you wanted to help people in a particular way, that you saw this as a really particular problem.

Yes. And I know that it can. That's the other thing is I know that it can. So I love this permission slip.

Okay, good. So permission to help more people.

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