Become a Bestseller With This Book Launch Formula

People talk about there's no such thing as real passive income. They've not heard of books, and then they keep selling. It takes zero work.

If you want your book to become a bestseller, you might be wondering what actually goes into engineering a successful book launch. There's no better person on the planet to answer this question than Tim Grahl. I want to sell 100,000 copies of this book.

If I can get 10,000 people to read the book in the first 2 years, that is my best shot at going on to sell 100,000 or more copies over the next 10 years.

He's the mastermind behind BookLaunch.com, where he teaches authors how to market books effectively.

So one of the biggest triggers to get people to buy something is scarcity. We don't care how they buy it, where they buy it, when they buy it. We just want them to buy and read the book and tell somebody else. And that's how 10 years from now, you've not just sold 100,000, you've sold a million copies.

And he shares the math and research on your exact chance of selling 10,000 copies, 100,000, A million and beyond.

Everything I do when it comes to launching a book can fit into one of three categories. The first one is to get influencers to promote. The second is get fans to buy. And then the third, when we say how to engineer a bestselling book launch, that's what we're talking about.

All right, Tim, we're here to talk today about how to engineer a bestselling book launch. This is personal for me because I have a book coming out next year and I would like it to be a bestselling book.

Okay, so these words can mean different things. So when you say bestselling book launch, what do you mean? Like, do you have like a goal in mind?

I want to sell 100,000 copies of this book.

Okay, 100,000 copies. Let me borrow that marker. All right, so your goal is to have 100,000 sales, right? That's right. Okay, okay. So we're going to come back to this and talk about if that's the right goal or not, but let's first talk about what this means. So when you think book launch, what comes to mind?

I'm thinking about the week of sales and leading up to that, right? Of the launch itself.

So like pre-orders?

Pre-orders, the partnerships, the podcasts that we're doing. Yeah, everything else. I think about lists. Like, are we trying to hit a bestseller list?

Are we? Yeah.

What's the longevity of the book? There's so many things in that.

Yeah. So a lot of times when people are thinking about the book launch, they're thinking specifically about that first week, right? So much pressure, especially if you're with like a traditional publisher. They're really looking at that first week. So they're looking at all of the pre-orders that lead up to that first week of sales, because any pre-orders count towards that first week of sales. So that's really where people are looking at. But what I've found practically for 99.9% of books, you should extend that book launch window beyond a week.

Okay.

You should extend it to 2 years.

Okay. So this launch, if we're talking about that, you're saying 2 years.

2 years. And now we're getting into like cliché analogies, right? So it's like, it's the difference of a sprint versus a marathon, right? So if I feel like, okay, I gotta make everything happened in a week, well, I might like throw everything, like, you know, shut down everything in my life and just focus on it for a week, right? Versus if I'm looking at 2 years, I have to do something that I can sustain for a very long period of time. So that's the first thing is I want people to expand out their view because too many authors come out with their book, try to sell it, it doesn't sell very well in the first week, the first month, and they literally just stop and move on because they're like, well, that one didn't work.

And that one being that book, that book didn't work or whatever.

And then they're just kind of like, they just move on instead of like, no, like it takes longer than that. And, and also you have to understand, like, books take a long time to consume. You know, I can watch a movie in 2 hours. I can listen to a new music album in an hour or less. Or a book, you're talking multiple hours for most books, and so they take a long time to consume, and so what I've found is you don't really see the, and we're gonna get into what it takes to launch the book, but you don't really see real fruits of your labor for about a year. So you have to like keep going without seeing a lot of impact for a year before you see a really big impact. So just in general, when we say book launch, we don't mean the first week your book comes out. We're talking the first 2 years your book comes out, and Dan Pink was the first one to teach me this, He's like big-time New York Times bestselling author. And he's like, when I come out with a new book, that's the next 2 years of my life is promoting that book.

Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And then let's get into the definition of bestselling.

Yeah.

Because this is something else where, like, what are we going for here?

Well, that's a question for you because I feel like there's kind of 2 things here. So a lot of times when people say bestselling, first of all, I don't think most people even understand that there's a very wide, vague definition of what a bestseller is.

So we talking like a New York Times bestselling book or a category bestseller on Amazon?

Yeah. Or category bestseller, which you sometimes you can hit by selling 3 copies in an hour. And so when you think about like 10 years from now, you look back on this book launch, how are you gonna judge success of the book? Because you're saying 100,000 sales. So like, Do you, if all, let's say all those sales came in the first week and then you didn't sell anymore. Like, is that success? Like when you think about looking back 10 years from now, what do you want for your book?

I'm looking for a book that has a big impact primarily and then a big impact on a lot of people.

Yeah.

And so I want it to sell well and then keep selling for a very long time.

Right. That's what most authors would like, but it, now that starts to change what you're focused on, right? So there are a lot of books that hit the New York Times bestseller list, or when there was a Wall Street Journal bestseller list, hit that bestseller list, or hit the USA Today or LA Times bestseller list, and then never sell another 1,000 copies ever again.

So they have a, a graph that looks like that.

Yep. And so they put a lot of effort, a lot of time, into engine, and there's all kinds of ways that's a deep dark hole of engineering a New York Times bestselling book. So let's say you do that and you sell your 10,000 copies, 12,000 copies. That's about what it takes. Because remember, the New York Times list and all of these lists, they, they go from Sunday to Saturday. So it's how many sales you get in a week, which is kind of a weird thing to do. Like, If you go back to why are there bestseller lists, it's, well, so that I as a reader will know what I should read because that's the most popular book, right? This is why we look at Rotten Tomatoes for movies. Like, well, how many a book sells in a week doesn't really matter, I don't think, right? So we have a mutual friend, Josh Kaufman, right? His book, The Personal MBA, has sold over 2 million copies since it came out. It has never once hit the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, any of the major lists. And yet it has sold whatever that X is between 10,000 and 2 million more than many, many, many New York Times bestsellers.

So his graph, maybe there's a little launch, right? But his graph looks like some, some version of that.

Yeah. Of like this slow burn. And so, I mean, there were two books that came out at the beginning of this year. One of them sold 10,000 to 12,000 copies, hit the New York Times bestseller list. Hasn't sold 1 to 2,000 since then. Okay. There was another book that came out about the same time in a similar category, did not hit the New York Times list, didn't sell very well that first week, but it started finding an audience. And now 6 months later, it sold over 60,000 copies. Oh, wow. So who do you want to be? Do you want to be the one that hit the New York Times list but didn't sell a bunch of copies long term? Or what we're talking about here, which is a perennial bestseller, which is a, a term that I don't know, I don't think he coined it, but Ryan Holiday's book, perennial bestseller, is a great book on this topic of creating something that lasts a really long time. And that's kind of where I'm guessing you want to lean.

Yeah. So what I'm going for is maybe, uh, a third graph in here that spikes at launch, dips somewhat as that market—

we can talk about that—

and then just continues to grow and build from there.

Yeah.

Uh, I mean, it's the biggest cliché in publishing, but I think about Atomic Habits. In this case where James put an insane amount into the launch and he had a big launch. He hit the New York Times list, but I think within a couple weeks he was off the list.

Yeah.

I think it, it fell off pretty quickly. And then 2 weeks later he was number 1 on the—

2 weeks?

Sorry.

2 years.

2 years later.

Yeah.

He was number 1 on the New York Times list as it built up and then became this incredible—

Well, and like, um, Jay Papasan co-wrote, you know, we know Jay co-wrote the book, The One Thing with, um, Gary Keller. Gary Keller. And they had a really big platform. That book came out, did really well. I don't know if it hit the list the first week. It might have. I need to find out.

Probably based on the size of their platform.

Yeah, like it sold really well. I know it sold really well that first week or two, and then Jay and Gary were out promoting the book, promoting the book, and over that year sales kept ticking down, right? Ticking down, ticking down.

Which has to be so demoralizing.

Yeah, and then right at a year, it ticked up and then started taking off and then the book still sells really well.

Yeah. And there are millions of copies sold at this point.

Yes. Yeah. And so then you're looking at like, okay, so this is where you can, here's how I think about it is like if I have some version of an existing platform and a platform can be lots of different things. And the way I think of a platform is just a way I know I can sell books. Right. Right. Like I know when I come out with my book, I can sell a certain amount of copies. Because of the direct connections I have. So that gets you that first spike. But then you have to keep going and doing things so that you get that long tail effect of the book continuing to sell. And that's where we can start looking at 100,000 sales and what that means. Yeah. When we're looking at this, so what we mean now is bestselling doesn't mean it sold a bunch of copies in a week. It means it's a book that finds an audience and keeps selling for a long period of time. So 10 years from now, your book is still selling really well. That's That's the goal. So whether it hits a list or not, that's what we want.

Yeah. And that's something that I wrestle with a little bit because on one hand, the driven person in me who wants to get the book in front of as many people as possible is like, okay, I do want to hit the list. I want that level of goal. I want a big spike so it's in a lot of people's hands. But having watched a bunch of these launches firsthand, like have a front row seat to them, it's like, I They're terrible.

They're just terrible.

I don't, like, I don't want, if you put these truly at odds with each other, I don't want a New York Times bestseller over a perennial seller.

It's not always either or, but a lot of times it is. Because you have to do things a certain way to get books to count for the New York Times list, right? So for instance, if all of your sales are through Amazon, you have a much less likelihood of hitting the New York Times bestseller list than if they got bought at Powell's in Portland.

Right.

And we could go deep into that hole again. That's a whole nother hole. So you start end up having to play games that hurt your overall sales to make sure you get the right sales, hit the New York Times list. So what I want to do, just knowing you, knowing what you're trying to accomplish, I want to set that to the side. We do want to get as many people to read the book and buy the book as possible. But we don't care how they buy it, where they buy it, when they buy it. We just want them to buy and read the book and tell somebody else, right? Because that's how we start to grow. That's best-selling is a book that has sold really well and is still selling 10 years from now. That's the goal. And the launch doesn't mean you just throw a lot at the book when it comes out and then move on with your life. It's like, I'm going to keep promoting this book for 2 years. So when we say how to engineer a best-selling book launch, that's what we're talking about.

I like that.

Do you agree with that?

Yes.

Okay. So we'll now spend the rest of this time probably talking about the word engineer, right? How do you do this?

Sounds good.

So, um, we can kind of come at this from two ways. We can talk about my overall framework for how I think about launches, or we can start with your goal of $100,000. What do you wanna do?

Uh, let's go to the framework first. Okay. And then, and then we'll break down the goal.

So everything I do when it comes to launching a book can fit into one of three categories. Okay. Okay. So the first is get influencers to promote the book.

Okay.

All right. So there's basically two groups of people I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about fans and I'm thinking about influencers. And this is how I define those terms. Fans are people who will buy your book. So they're people you're directly connected to. So like your mom's your fan. She's going to go buy a copy of your book and like, I'm a fan. I'm going to go buy a copy of the book. Right? Uh, people on your newsletter are fans of yours. They're gonna go buy a copy of your book. People that follow you on social media, they're gonna go buy a copy. So fans are people who will buy your book. Influencers are people who get other people to buy your book.

Okay.

Right? So all of their fans to go buy your book, right? So this is your friends that have podcasts, your friends that have newsletters that will help you. They'll take your book and promote it to their list. So The first one is get influencers to promote. The second is get fans to buy. And then the third is get fans to share.

Okay.

So literally anything I do to promote a book is going to fall into one of those categories.

Okay.

And you're always thinking about, because the other thing I think people forget about is you just, you have limited amount of time. You have 2 years. Right? But in any given day, you can't do everything.

Right?

So, so we start looking at like, okay, leading up to the book, the first day the book is out, right? That first week, we do want to do as much as we can. And so, so here's an example. I was working with this author and he was like, I want to go on 100 podcasts to promote my book. I'm like, okay. So I was like, have you made a list of these podcasts? He's like, yeah. I was like, all right, show them to me. So I'm going through it and like number Like 82 was the Joe Rogan Experience. And I was like, can you get on Joe Rogan's podcast? And he's like, oh yeah, he's a good buddy. He said he'd have me on any time. I go, okay, well, you're going to get 10 times more reach off of that one than the other 99 of these combined.

Right?

So let's move him to the top, make sure we nail that one, and then we can start working. If you really want to do 100 just to do 100 podcasts, that's fine. But let's nail that one and then worry about the others after that, because that's where you get the biggest bang for your buck. And what I found in book marketing is it's not the 80/20 principle, it's the 95/5 principle. It's like there's usually like 5% of things compared to everything you could possibly do that will get the biggest bang for your buck, right? So if when I talk to an author and they have a really big email list, so they have an email list of 100,000, 500,000, a million people, there is nothing else they can do besides like, I don't know, get on Joe Rogan's podcast than just getting all those people on their email list to buy the book. So we put a lot of time and effort into number 2, which would be get fans to buy the book because that's going to be their biggest lever. With you, your overall platform is relatively small comparatively. And so, but you have a lot of really big connections in the creator world. You're friends with Ryan Holiday, who has a huge email list of people that love to buy books.

His entire thing is around, around books.

Yeah. And we could name a bunch of creators that have really big platforms. So it's like, oh, well, if I'm looking at Nathan's, Nathan's platform, this is what a platform is. His biggest lever is sitting right here is getting influencers to promote. So we need to make sure We nail this one and this will be like a secondary thing because this is not gonna sell as many copies as one email. Like getting really hammering your whole platform probably won't sell as many copies as one email to Ryan Hollidays.

So yeah, the example here, I might be trying to do everything. Yes. And like, how do I, you know, I have 60,000 customers of Kit. How do I get all of them to promote The Ladders of Wealth?

Yeah.

When it comes out. But what I hear you saying is, is my Joe Rogan experience example is Ryan Holiday, James Clear, and Sahil Bloom.

There you go.

Combined, they have 6 million subscribers on their 3 newsletters. James makes up the bulk of that. But how can I engineer the—

Because yeah, because it's like if every single Kit customer buys a copy, it won't sell as well as getting the book promoted to 6 million people. Right?

Yeah.

Because if you convert 1% of that, is that $60,000?

Yeah, it'd be $60,000.

So that's how you've got to think about it. So I like, you know, years ago I was watching Dave Ramsey and he was talking about how to do a budget if you have variable income, right? So if you're a salesperson or something like that. Yeah. He's like, so top is your mortgage. You got to pay your mortgage first, then you got to pay your light bill and you just put everything in order of importance. And then you just every month get as far down that list as possible. Right?

Okay.

So I think of this that way is we're going to take everything you could do in all of these categories that you think would be interesting. So you might come up with an idea of like, I'm going to like read a page of my book every day as a short on Instagram and I'm going to do that. Great. Write it down. But it's going to be so far down the list, you're never going to get to it because that's not going to sell that many books. Social media does not sell books at any kind of like normal scale, right? So if some viral something happens, sure. And if you know how to engineer it, congratulations. But social media is the 95% of work that gets the 5% of results. So that's always at the bottom. So if you run out of things to do above that that have higher leverage, sure, go ahead and do whatever you want. What I would do with you is— and we also do that same thing within these, right? So it's like, okay, well, you're connected to hundreds, maybe thousands of creators, right? So what I always say is like, who are the top 10, right? So where— and I always say like where if they said fly to Africa to meet with me and I'll interview you for my podcast, it's like I would fly to Africa to be on the most inconvenient place. Yeah. Because it's such a big impact. It's worth that much work. Right? So we want to identify those top-tier people, and there's some— there's nuance here, right? So there's a lever of like, that would be really amazing, but I don't know Oprah, so I'm probably not going to get her to promote my book. And hey, I'm actually good friends with this person, but they're not as big as Oprah, but they'll do whatever. That's a much higher level.

Their audience might be highly relevant.

That too. Yeah, because I've had authors that get on the Today Show and we see no bump in sales, right? But if you have like a recipe book and get on the Today Show, you're gonna see a bump in sales. So it just, yeah, it's audience and, uh, and topic of book match as well. Yeah. Which yours, yours is such a broad Ladders of Wealth. Like that's a really great category. I know James talks a lot about this of like money's just a really great category cuz everybody worries about money.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So influencers promoting, that is, we're talking newsletters, podcasts.

Yeah. It's also, this is the thing, influencers promoting takes the longer amount of time because it's herding cats, right? You're trying to get 50 different people to all promote your book at basically the same time.

Yeah.

But they have schedules and you gotta fly here to do this one and you've gotta, you know, set up a Zoom call and they're in Singapore, so you gotta figure out the time. Like each one is very unique and so most of the time I encourage an author, if they have a lot of influencers they want to promote, they need to have an assistant that's helping them manage that, get it all planned out. And I like to start like 9 months before planning all of this stuff out.

Okay.

So if we go to— let me just talk a little bit more about this. So influencers promote. So this is basically— I mean, we talked about like newsletters, podcasts, you know, if blogging is still a thing, you know, getting interviewed on their YouTube channel or having them promote your book on— it's like anywhere where they have a reach that if they talk about your book, you're going to sell books, right, to, to their audience. Yeah. So I really like to stay broad because like one time I was working with this author and she had written this book about how the brain learns and she got connected to this network of email newsletters for homeschooling parents and she sold thousands of copies and most people have never heard because it's this kind of underground thing. But man, that was a huge influence.

When homeschoolers are always buying curriculum, trying to get the right thing in front of their kids.

And so, and I have a good friend who's sold over a million copies of his middle grade series, and it was all through homeschool, stay-at-home mom influencers on Instagram. Right. And he just did lots of promotion to those influencers because he knew that's where he could find his audience. So I really want people, because so many people are like, if I could get on the Tim Ferriss podcast, you know, and it's like, sure, and probably not going to happen, but there's probably places that are more likely that will have a huge impact on sales.

Okay. Going to fan— getting fans to buy.

Yeah, this is, this is the most straightforward. Okay. So one of the downsells of launching a book is so, okay, so one of the biggest triggers to get people to buy something is scarcity, right? Like there's only 100 or the price is going up or, you know, whatever. And one thing books don't have is scarcity, right? I know when your book comes out, it's going to be out forever.

I can buy it today or 5 years from now.

And it'll probably— I can get it used in like 6 months for $4, right? Right. So it's like, why should I buy your book now? So this is where we do like a bonus campaign. Like if you preorder the book by the day it comes out, you send me your receipt, I'm going to give you all of these extra bonuses. And again, this is much easier to manage because you control everything. It's your platform, it's your email list, your YouTube channel, your podcast. So you can plan ahead, you can get everything ready. Where like you can't do that on the influencer promotion because it's so— every single influencer is unique in the way that you're going to have to approach them. This is why you have to put everything in order of most importance, right? Because again, if you can get those top 10 people on the list, that's going to get 10 times more people than the other 90, right? Here, it's like, well, how do I incentivize people, create scarcity around my book launch? Well, the only way to get these bonuses for the book are if you buy the book now, not later. And you set that deadline of the day the book comes out.

Okay.

And then it becomes a pretty standard online promotion that a lot of your audience is already— and it's like, hey, we're gonna send a lot of emails, we're gonna do promotion.

Is there anything that you see work particularly well with bonuses where you're like, these are a huge amount of either cost or time and don't move the needle? Like what's the 95/5 or 80/20 bonuses?

So I got a good story on this. So Um, when we were doing— I was working with Dan Pink on his launch of To Sell Is Human, and he was like, okay, you know, the one thing I've never seen anybody do— now, a lot of people have done this since, but at the time this was pretty unique— was, um, nobody— you never get something in the mail, right? It's always like digital stuff, right? So we're going to print off, uh, he partnered, I think it was with Field Notes, and did like a custom to sell his human little notebook. He's like, people are gonna love it. They're gonna get this thing in the mail. And it was a logistical nightmare, right? And like, he, I remember he sent me a picture of like his kids like packing envelopes at his kitchen table, like trying to get these out. And then people couldn't buy it. We could only do it if you were in the US. And it was like, it was a legit, but we're like, this is gonna really move the needle. So along with that, we did like a PDF workbook. We did some extra interviews with like some people that he had interviewed the book, we did the audio interview, and I'll come back to that in a second. So after the launch, a few months after the launch, I go back to everybody that had pre-ordered the book and sent in their receipt. We had 'em on a list and we're like, hey, which of these like were the most important to you to get you to buy the book? Across the board, the PDF workbook, right? The easiest thing. The bottom tier was the thing, the physical, the notebook, the physical notebook. And so I like reached out to a few people that said that and they're, and The basic idea was people are not like, you know what I need, I'm running out of, is more paper to write on. You know, it was like, oh, the best thing we can do is give them things that will help them get the most out of the book.

Right.

Right. So they love the workbook because then they were able to read the book, then fill out the workbook and get the most out of the book. So what I think about is what other content, what other tools, if we think your book by definition is words written on a page, right? What other mediums could we use and provide to people that buy the book to get even more out of the book? So some of my favorite things are a PDF workbook.

Mm-hmm.

It's so easy and it seems so ridiculously simple and, but it works. The other thing I've seen, uh, and I've liked this for a couple reasons, is doing like a 4-week book club the month after the book comes out. So hey, you got the book, right? You pre-ordered it. We're gonna read, you know, the first 3 chapters the first week. Then I'm gonna come on and do a little bit of training and Q&A to make sure, like answer your questions about the book, make sure you get the most out of it. 'Cause then you're helping them get more out of the book and they read the book.

Right?

And that's really important that we'll come back to. But so I like book clubs to read the book. I like if you interviewed people for the book. So a lot of people you'll interview like experts and only like little pieces get into the actual book. Well, what if you released the whole like hour-long interview with this PhD from Stanford and only like 4 lines made it in the book, but people would be interested in that. So that's a different medium too. It could be audio or video, right? So anything like that, the mistake I see people make is just throwing a bunch of bonuses. Like they just pour—

more is not better.

More is not better. And unrelated content is, is not helpful. So what I think of is like 3 to 5 things that you can promote as, hey, you're going to get the book, but you're also going to get these things that make sure you get the most out of this book. That's kind of the framework I come with this.

And how do you think about numbers of copies that you're trying to get people to buy, right? Like some of this, the PDF might be buy 1 copy by this date. Cause we're really trying to get, you know, urgency for sales now versus the buy 5 copies, buy 10, or we've seen some people do these launches where it's like buy 100 copies or 500 copies and get access in some way.

Yeah. In most cases when people are doing that, they're shooting for the New York Times bestseller list because they're trying to cram as many sales through and we can—

And they don't care that the book might sitting in a warehouse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, how are those 1,000 books going to get out into the world if they're just a pallet of books in somebody's, you know, um, I mean, this is what Alex Hormozy did is he sold this many books, but most of those books will never end up in anybody's hands because of the way that he did it. And so, um, which, you know, not knocking what he did, just saying like those books are not going to end up being read, most of them. So you wanna make sure, like, my goal is I want people to actually read the book. Also, you have to think about the one sale, three sale, five sale. That's still like, I might buy five copies and give 'em to friends for Christmas or something. It also greatly increases the complexity, right? So if I know everybody that sends me a receipt, I'm gonna give 'em these bonuses, that's really easy. But now if I'm keeping track of— Exactly.

Okay. Automation.

Like what's up? Yeah, yeah. But now I'm keeping track of, well, did you sell one? Did you sell Did you buy 3? Did you buy 5? Did you buy 10? Am I confirming that before I send you the other bonuses? Now I'm having to keep track of all that and it can get super con— So now we're getting back into that. Where is your time best spent?

You have the team, the time, we're doing the hacking the field notes at the kitchen table version again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the 100 podcasts, right? And so are you going, do you have a big enough reach, a big enough impact? And you're also creating another decision point. Right? The difference of clicking the button and clicking buy now on Amazon, we now have 2 clicks. But now if I look, it's like, well, do I want 1 copy? Do I want 3 copies? And then your wife calls you or your, you know, your friend asks you something and then you're gone and you've lost it.

I got it. Ended with 0 copies.

Yeah. And so I really like the whole, like, just buy a copy. That's all I want you to do is buy a copy and read a copy. That's the main thing.

Okay. Let's talk about fans, getting fans to share.

Yeah. And so what's nice about, so I put it number 3 'cause it's the third most important, right? We don't want to try to get fans to share the book before they bought a copy, right? But once they've bought a copy, I would like them to share the book. And I added this one because of the way that we run these campaigns is, well, in order for us to confirm they bought and send them their bonuses, they have to send me their receipt, which means I now have their email address.

Right.

So I remove them off the, hey, go buy my book email list or segment. And I put them on the "they've already bought" segment, and now I start saying like, hey, here's 3 things to post on Twitter or X about my book. Here's, you know, 3 images. Can you share this on Instagram? Or hey, here's an email you could send your friends to tell them, you know, they can get these bonuses if they buy the book right now. And this is by far the least impact. So don't overthink this. Don't push too hard on this.

Get something in place.

Get something in place. I like putting up a page on my website that's like click, because you can create, you know, click to, click to post to X buttons. Do like that. Do something for Instagram, Facebook, whatever, and then just leave it there and then send people there. But don't overthink it because the other thing is like we forget that most people don't know how to promote anything, right? They never had to promote something. So because one time I tried to help an author build a like a launch team. And I found all these people with platforms to join the launch team, but then they didn't know how to promote anything. So then I'm like teaching them marketing and I ended up writing emails for like all of their email lists for them. And it was again, a logistical nightmare that didn't end up in that many sales. So, so I just don't overthink this. But hey, if I can make it really easy for my fans to share the book, let's do it.

So what I love about this is that it's simple. Right?

Yep.

This is the clear things that I, we can do. I can organize everything by our 95/5. What's actually gonna move the needle. I also feel like in this book launch, you gave me permission to just focus on the most important things.

Yes.

And not try to maximize.

Yeah.

So if I do this, is it, is this how I'm gonna drive $100,000 sales?

Well, okay, so here's the thing about the $100,000 sales thing. Okay. Okay. So unless you are independently famous, even if you're independently famous, right? And you come to me and you're like, Tim, I want to sell 100,000 copies when my book comes out. How do I do that? My answer would be, I don't know. You know? And now again, like, I'm one of the best people in the world at book marketing and book launches. I have a long track record on this, and I have no idea. Because here's the thing about books. So the difference between books and maybe another type of product is that books have such a low margin, it's almost impossible to spend money to sell books. Okay? Unless you're willing to take like a 10 to 1 loss. Right?

So if I come in and say, uh, look, getting 10,000 or 100,000 sales is wildly important to me. I'm willing to spend money to make it happen.

Yeah.

Surely we can make a funnel of some kind around that. And so that I can spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on meta ads.

Yes.

You're like, it can't be done except at an extreme loss.

Yeah. Like, cuz, um, the typical author with a traditional publishing deal is gonna make about $2 per book sale. Um, if you're self-publishing, it's gonna be like $5 to $7, right? So how do you spend, um, $5 to make a $10 sale? —of which you now have to, you have to get 50% of people that click an ad, right? To, you know, 50% to buy, right? I can spend $5. I can spend up to $5 to make a $10 sale, right? So it's like, I, that, that's a lot of money and you can't do it profitably. It's just—

well, and the, the, a lot of people will come back and say like, yes, but that's where you have to have a full funnel and you'll make money on the upsell or something like that. Yeah. And I was talking to some people last week. Yeah. Who have, were basically saying, these are people who are some of the best in the world at making these funnels. And they're like, look, ad costs are so high. Yep. That we're no longer making money on the initial sale. We haven't done that in forever.

Yeah.

We're no longer making money on the upsell. We're actually only barely touching break even on the upsell to the upsell over a 6-month period. And even then it's really, really hard to do.

And you're talking about a very savvy business person that has a book that's plugged into an entire company. Yeah. Like Wealth Ladder, Ladders of Wealth is not plugged into some backend that's gonna like, you're trying to sell like big masterminds and conferences. It's like, it's your book. The book is the thing. The book is the thing. So if you wanna sell 100,000 copies of a book and not take a 7-figure loss, we, this is not the goal. Advertise. Okay. Okay. So I'm gonna, okay. I'm gonna cross this out. Okay. Okay. And I'm gonna put 10,000. Okay. Okay. Now there's a really interesting thing about this 10,000 number. Okay. So this is a pretty well known, um, and I'm gonna change this word sales now to readers.

Okay. Okay. You're just redefining all aspects of my goal.

Yes. Yes. Your goal is not 10,000, 100,000 sales is 10,000 readers. Okay. And I'm gonna talk about why. So first of all, 10,000 is doable. Okay? When we're talking about your platform, and your platform is not just your email list and Twitter following or X following, it's also all your influencers. Yeah. This is doable. Right. Okay? Also, you have 2 years to sell 10,000 copies. That's also doable, right? It's really hard to sell books. Mm-hmm. Like people, like famous people that come out with books sell 20,000 copies. When the book comes out, right? So here's what's interesting about the 10,000 number. So a mutual friend of ours, Todd Satterston, um, went and did like all this research and looked at the numbers. And what he found is if you sell 10,000 copies of your book in the first 100 weeks that it's out, 2 years, okay, you have basically— it's like between a 48% and 52% chance. So let's just say 50/50 chance that your book will go on to sell 25,000 copies. Okay. If your book sells 25,000 copies, it's roughly a 50/50 chance that your book will go on to sell 50,000 copies. And then if you sell 50,000 copies, the odds of your book going on to sell 100,000 copies is 50/50. Okay. So what that means is you have a 1 in 8 chance, which is pretty good. Yeah. Of selling 100,000 copies, if you just sell 10,000 and stop, the book will go on to sell this by itself. Okay?

That's this type of graph that Josh Kaufman, plenty of other author friends of ours have hit.

And then the other thing is, because if you can't buy your way to 100,000, the only thing we're worried about now is word of mouth. Okay. Okay? So I want to pause here and talk about The quality of the book. Okay. So a lot of people over the years wanted me to take their kind of shitty book and turn it into like this huge bestseller. Now, if I have a big enough platform, I can shove out a bunch of books into the marketplace, but it's gonna drop off and never sell because when people read it, if they read it, they never told anybody about it. Right. Or they were selling 100 copies at a time and they're just sitting in boxes in somebody's closet. Right. This is why you want readers, mm-hmm. Not sales.

Okay. I got it. Because if you sell, I'm gonna underline this. Yeah.

Readers is what you're going for. Mm-hmm. So the way my partner Sean Coyne at StoryGrid, he's been in publishing forever. He's the one I first heard this 10,000 rule. And his rule is I just need 10,000 people to read the first page of the book. Okay, that's all I care about. Okay, 10,000 people to read the first page of the book. So with the quality of the book, whenever I come in as like the marketing guy or people, we're talking about your book, I have to kind of take this stance that your book's a great book and you worked really hard to make it a great book because without word of mouth, a book is going to fall off a cliff even if it sells a ton at the beginning. It's gonna fall off a cliff 'cause word of mouth is the only way a book spreads. This is why Jay Papasan and Gary Keller's book, The ONE Thing, had a big launch in the beginning, fell off, but then kept selling because as people finally got around to reading this book they bought during the launch, 6 months later, like one time for my book, Running Down a Dream, all of a sudden, 6 months after it came out, all these books started selling and I'm like, what is going on? Well, come to find out, my buddy John Acuff, was like, he was reading it and like live tweeting it, right? Of how much he loved it. And then I like was texting him and I was like giving him shit 'cause I was like, I gave you that book like 9 months ago. He's like, man, I just got around to reading it. You know, and that's what happens with books, right? And so you gotta like keep going. This is that whole like keep going for 1 to 2 years, seeding, getting books out into the marketplace. So what I'm focused on for your book is I need to get 10,000 people to read the book. Because I think if they read your book, they're gonna love it so much, they're gonna tell 2, 3, 10 other people about the book. Right. They're gonna post about it on social media like, this book's amazing, you gotta read it. And that's how 10 years from now, you've not just sold 100,000, you've sold a million copies. Right. Right? So it doesn't matter. Like, um, the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, in the whole first year it was out, it only sold like 9,000 copies. Okay. And then since then it has sold more copies every year than the year before. And this is like, I think it's approaching 20 years that book has been out there.

So you're saying like 9,000 copies and then the next year it sold, I think like 20,000 copies.

Okay. And it just kept going and they weren't promoting at all. Like it was Sean Coyne, my business partner at StoryGrid and Steven Pressfield. They created the book through Black Irish Publishing and put it out. They were, they're terrible at marketing. So they're like, I got this thing and then they just move on. And so they were able to sell 9,000 copies. And then the, but the book, everybody talks about The War of Art, right? So that's how you think about, like, I want to get 10,000 people to read the first page of my book within the first 2 years. You've now had a successful launch. And of course, if you can get to 10,000 before 2 years, even better. Keep going, keep promoting the book for 2 years, and then At that point, you've launched the book and it's kind of like your kid turning 18 and leaving the house. It's like at that point it's going to do what it's going to do. This is how Sean and I talk about it. It's like at that point it's up to the book what it wants to do, because no matter what we talk about here, there are books that just hit at the right book at the right time that find an audience and they go out into the world and there's other books that don't. And that's just how it works. So there is magic involved in it, but you have to do this. To me, it's like launching a rocket. No matter how big I push at the beginning, if I stop and it's only halfway out of the atmosphere, it's going to crash every time. But if I can get it all the way out of the atmosphere and into orbit, then it pretty much just goes on its own. And this is what's great about books is that once they start selling and then they keep selling, it takes zero work. Like, people talk about there's no such thing as real passive income. They've not heard of books then.

Because Josh Kaufman would strongly disagree with you saying that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the thing I always say is every time somebody buys a copy of The Lord of the Rings, his family makes money. Right. And they didn't do anything for that book, right? And the publisher, like, every 10 years slaps a new cover on it, and that's all the work they do besides printing enough copies to keep it in stock.

Madeline McIntosh, who's the CEO of Author's Equity, was telling me yesterday about a, like, deluxe edition of, uh, The Jane Austen books. Yeah. Right. You know, they, it's a new thing that came out. We were talking about COVID design and all this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you're like, wait a second, this is a, this is a public domain. Public domain. It's free.

Like, but they're, they're finding new ways to keep selling. Pride and Prejudice sells hundreds, sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Right. And it's been out for 200 years. Right. Okay. Like people don't understand. And there are books that you have. Okay. My book, your first 1,000 copies. Makes up over $1,000 a month. Mm-hmm. Okay. I wrote it in 2013. This is actually what I get excited about, right? We can talk about the Lord of the Rings and all the atomic habits, but to me, like, what if you write a book that sells like 100 copies a month? Mm-hmm. Right? You're now gonna pay your light bill, your water bill off this thing you created. Right. For many, many, many, many years. And then what if you write another one and another one and another one? Right? This is what's interesting about books is they take zero effort to keep on the market once they're out in the market. Right. So if you can write something and get it to this point where it starts selling on its own, so it's really how do we achieve escape velocity?

And the critical redefinition is that we're redefining sales as the goal for escape velocity to readers. Readers. Okay. So how do we engineer word of mouth?

So we just talked through like these 3 things and how do we do this, but let's, let's take a couple scenarios here. Let's say one, you did this for the launch, right? Or let's say you're like normal people and you don't have a platform, right? You don't have any fans, you're not connected to influencers. What do I do? So if I could boil this down to like the one thing when your book comes out that if you want, if you believe you wrote a great book, Mm-hmm. You truly believe that and you want your book to still be selling in 10 years, it's give away as many copies as possible.

Okay. So that's a critical redefinition, right? Yes. Because I'm like sales and you're like readers, right?

Because remember it was 10,000 people to read the first page of the book. Well, now according to that definition of success, I don't care if they paid money for it. I want them to read the book, and I trust my book to stand on its own. And I trust that if somebody— because the only way to sell 100,000 copies or more is to get 10,000 people to read the book and tell their friends. The barrier to getting people to read the book is often buying the book. So how do I get 10,000 people to read the book? I want to give away as many copies as possible. and I'm, I do not think there's a limit on this. Mm-hmm. I really think that like if I had a way to give away 100,000 copies of my book when it came out, I would do it because that would get me the next 900,000. Okay. Right. Because word of mouth will kick in. If you get 100,000 people to read your book and it's a great book, you're gonna sell another 900,000 copies. And so this is actually what we do at StoryGrid. Like we have a novel coming out. And I am in the midst of giving away as many copies as I possibly can. But when people sign up to get the free copy, I say you have to read the book and leave a review on the day that it comes out. I don't really care about the reviews. That's nice to launch with a bunch of Amazon and Goodreads reviews. What I care about is getting thousands of people to read the book before it comes out, because then they'll start telling their friends. I trust that our book is so good they'll tell people, other people about it.

So they're agreeing to read. What else matters? So if I were to waive a mat—

so this is really hard to get people to do, like, because they wanna sell books, right? They, especially if they're traditionally published or they have a publisher who doesn't make a lot of money when you're giving away books and publishers don't, they don't believe in their products. They're just throwing them out into the marketplace to see what happens. So they wanna sell, they don't wanna give away 10,000 cuz they don't even think it'll sell 10,000. So, but in a perfect world, I would get people to leverage this with their platform to give away as many copies as possible.

Oh, that's a tough thing to, like, that's a tough pill to swallow because you're like, wait, I have the, you know, my equivalent of the Joe Rogan Experience. Yeah. And you're saying I should go to those hundreds of thousands of people and say, here's a free copy of the book if you agree to read it.

I don't know. Do you think your book is good? I do. Do you think if people read it, they'll tell somebody else? Yes. Do you think they'll tell one person or multiple people? Multiple. Right.

And so, and the other question that I would say in that is like, what's your time horizon, right? Are you trying to pull off this? Are you trying to pull off this?

Yeah. Yeah. I don't care about this huge spike in the beginning and then I don't get any sales. This is the, this one where you have a huge spike in the beginning, so you get people to read the book and then they start telling their friends and you start selling lots of copies. So what I would do if I were— wait, and you know, James might get mad at me, your publisher might get mad at me. If I were running your launch and you gave me carte blanche, I could do whatever I wanted. I would put the book up for sale on Amazon and through all the normal things for normal price. But behind the scenes on every podcast interview I do, every email I send out, here's a link where you can get a copy of the book for free for ebook and at cost for print. So the publisher's not losing money. So $5 copy or $10 copy of the book and run that campaign as hard as you possibly can and see how many books you can give away as quickly as possible. So I want to tell a quick story that'll kind of bring this home, um, some of this. So because when I start talking about this, a lot of authors are like, well, where do I give copies away, right? So the obvious ones are your platform, your email list, social media influencers, that kind of thing. But like, there's this great story about The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. That book did not sell well when it came out. We kind of look at it as like, oh my gosh, this book, you know, it's incredible. Decades later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure he died and it was still not selling well. And here's what happened. The Army wanted to buy a bunch of books and put them on all the bases all over the world. So when they're sold, when the soldiers weren't killing people, they had something to do. And so one of those was The Great Gatsby. So all of a sudden, all these soldiers, hundreds of thousands of people, got exposed to this book for free, right? And now The Great Gatsby is still a huge bestseller. So Finding place. I had a friend who wrote a book about like surviving divorce. And so she thought, well, where do, where do women go? It was a book for women and it was like, where do women go to talk to their friends about divorce? Oh, they go to Starbucks. So she started going in a spiraling circle out from where she lived and would just drop 3, 4, 5 copies off at Starbucks and just lay them out on the tables. And she started seeing sales on Amazon go up. And that was pretty much the only marketing she was doing. And so it was getting the book into the hands of readers who will read the book and then tell their friends about it. Okay.

So what do I do? I'm thinking about giving away as many copies as possible and using The Ladder of Wealth as an example, right? Because this is a very broad appeal book. Yes. And so then we're thinking about, okay, how do we— we don't have the army saying we're going to, you know, it has to be something within our control. So the coffee shop example is great. What are other places? Of getting the book in, in the hands of potential readers?

Well, this is where I would come back and start talking about like, where are— so let's step outside of your friends, right? So you have your friends that are gonna promote the book, but most people don't have famous friends, right? It's like, okay, well, where are people talking about wealth and money and how to start businesses? Where can I go and say like, hey, I've got this really great book. I'm willing to give away a free copy to everybody on your list if you just send this out to them.

Well, so we're talking every business school, right? Of like, you know, if they're— if we're a marketing class, I will come speak to that class, give them, you know, give them all copies of the book. Yeah, there's so many. Yeah. So this is—

you would start brainstorming about like, okay, I just think of Venn diagrams. Here's what people are interested in that would be interested in my book. Where do those people show up? And I would go all the way back to Seth. I would go read Seth Godin's Tribes, right? So it's like you have the big idea, you have the big idea, the tribe leader, and the tribe members, right? So if you're interested in starting a small business like a laundromat, you have— who do you think of when I say that?

Starting a laundromat? Yeah. Like Cody Sanchez.

Cody Sanchez. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, so the idea of starting a small business like a laundromat doesn't belong to Cody Sanchez, but she is the tribe leader that has brought all these people together. So it's like you start thinking through where are tribes located? Oh man, I forgot what book it was, but one book blew up because he just started sending free copies to every CrossFit gym. Because he found that— was it? Oh, it was James. Yeah, he found CrossFit people loved his book Atomic Habits, and so he started promoting it specifically to CrossFit gyms and CrossFitters. Yeah. And he found this whole, like, infrastructure around it, right? So it's figuring out who likes your book when they read it. Where do those people congregate? How can I get—

you know what I'm thinking about is this might be people who are further on in their journey. But for a book like The Ladders of Wealth, I could go to every wealth manager, CFA, all of those people and say, hey, as a Christmas gift, I would love to give you free copies that you can give to your clients. Yeah. Here's the ebook version or here, you know, whatever.

And if you want to spend money, this is the way to spend money. Right. Buy copies of your own book. If you don't have a traditional publisher, you can usually get copies of your book for like $3 to $6, right? That's a good way to spend the money is $6,000 gets you 1,000 copies of a beautiful book that, yeah.

Yeah. I love that. Okay. This is amazing. This is a total reframe for me on how to think about it. And it really comes down to not just the 2-year, uh, time horizon around launch, but really then the 10-year time horizon around what is this book going to do? And not what am I optimizing for in the short term?

Well, the point— the biggest point is if I can get 10,000 people to read the book in the first 2 years, that is my best shot at going on to sell 100,000 or more copies over the next 10 years. Yeah, I love that.

Okay, this is amazing. Tim, you've shared so much. Yeah. The first thing is this is not what you do anymore.

Don't hire me. I don't do this anymore. Like, I only do it for my friends. So if you don't know me, I don't want to do it. Yeah, this is— so I mean, I have a website, booklaunch.com. I haven't updated in a while, but I got tons of free content there that people can buy a copy of your first 1,000 copies. Go to YouTube and look up your— or Amazon and look up Your First 1,000 Copies. Buy that book. It's a really great book, perennial bestseller. It's been selling for 12 years now.

So, and then also the other topic separate from this that you're obsessed with is how to write great books. And you cover that in detail at StoryGrid.com. That's amazing. Thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

If this conversation got you excited about writing a perennial seller and you want to learn what it actually takes to keep a book selling long after launch week, watch my conversation with Ryan Holiday. He breaks down how Daily Stoic became a global media engine and how to build systems that keep your ideas in front of readers for years. Be sure to like the video and subscribe, and I'll see you next week.