Paula Rizzo and book-marketing expert Rob Eger break down how bestseller lists actually work and what sales numbers you need. They cover five buckets of book sales, why email lists matter more than social followers, and which media channels like podcasts actually move copies.
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Hey there, welcome to Inside Scoop. I'm Paula Rizzo. There's a difference between being an author and being a bestselling author. There is a big difference, but what is that difference? What does that mean exactly? How do you make the distinction? What does the New York Times bestseller list look like? How do you get on it? There are so many things that Authors strive to achieve, yet no one really knows how you're supposed to get there, but we're going to figure it all out today. I have an amazing expert who I'm going to bring on in just a moment, who is a book marketing expert who I actually have hired myself to help me with some of my book stuff. And we're going to ask all those questions that you want to know as an author or as a potential author. And as I mentioned, I'm an author too. So I have two books about productivity, Listful Thinking and Listful Living. And I also am at work on a fiction book, which is totally different. It's a different animal. The whole thing. You have to relearn everything all over again. But it's fun to be able to do this. As an author myself and as someone who media trains authors to speak about what they do in the media and talk about their books, there's one thing that I know for sure, media makes a big difference. If you are especially a nonfiction author and you're looking to get yourself out in the world and get noticed for your book, media is a really great way to do that. And so I have a freebie that I want to share with you. It's my checklist to become a go-to media expert. And these days media does not only mean traditional media, but we're talking about videos like this, podcasts, anything that you can do to get your expertise out into the world. If you go to paularizzo.com/checklist, you can check it out. I want to hear from you throughout the show. This is here, we're here for you if you're joining us live or you're here on the replay. So tag a friend below if you have someone who you know has been thinking about writing a book or is very curious about the New York Times bestseller list or any bestseller list, tag them below and ask your questions, you know, throughout the broadcast. We're going to take those questions at the end. And without further ado, I would love to bring on my guest, Rob Eger, who is a book marketing expert. He has worked with thousands and thousands of fiction and nonfiction authors through the years to help them to get their books out there, myself included. So welcome.
Thanks for having me on the program, Paula. It's great to be here.
Of course. Of course. OK, so let's get down to the what does this even mean, right? How many books do you have to sell to be a bestseller? Let me hear it.
Well, imagine, imagine the frustration of trying to hit a moving target. That's what the bestseller lists are. And when we use the word, the term bestseller list during our conversation today, it can mean more than just one entity. Typically, and for the purposes of our conversation today, the New York Times, you know, that's the gold standard. That's the most popular and most influential bestseller list in the world. You've also got the USA Today bestseller list, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly. There's a lot of them out there. Certainly the New York Times is the one that has the greatest panache.
For sure.
It is a moving target, though. In fact, it is not even based on statistical data. You know, here's, here's a quick misconception we can remove right now for those, maybe if you're first time intrigued, understanding how does the bestseller list work. Well, yes, it's based on sales, but not completely on sales. The short answer is typically if you can sell between 5,000 to 15,000 copies in one week, that should position you to be enabled to hit the New York Times bestseller list.
Mm-hmm.
However, there's a huge catch. The bestseller list people get to decide which books are on and which ones they don't want to have on the list.
Ah, so it's not enough to just get those numbers. You also have to get the blessing of whoever it is that's going to pick the list.
That's right. I forget the actual date. It was many, many years ago, but an author actually sued the New York Times a long time ago because he had sold enough books that he thought he should be on the bestseller list, but he didn't show up. So he took The New York Times to court. However, the judge ruled in favor of The New York Times lawyers who argued that the bestseller list is editorial opinion, not statistical content. Ah, therefore it enables The New York Times to really do whatever they want to. Sure. And I see this on a weekly basis. I track the list. I look at the list week in, week out. And just even in the past 6 months, I've seen books that sold 20,000 to 30,000 copies in one week or with preorders included. And they didn't show up on the bestseller list. And I've seen books that sold as little as 5,000 copies be on the New York Times list. And likewise, simultaneously seeing other books that were selling more but were not on the list. So that's what I mean. It's a moving target. It's editorial opinion. And you have to understand that going in, that no matter how hard you try to hit the bestseller list, you still may not get on there. Sure. That's why I encourage any author that I work with, just see it as gravy, see it as a bonus. Rather than something that dictates whether you're successful or not.
What does it really mean, though? You know, I think that, of course, there's, you know, the cachet and all of that. But like, what does it actually really do for you? I mean, I'm sure if you're going to go on to write other books, it's very nice for the publisher to see that your first book was on the New York Times bestseller list. But what are the real benefits?
Well, it— in many cases, especially if you are a business author or, you know, you're working in the nonfiction space, you're doing a lot of consulting, training, things like that. You can pretty much double, if not triple, your speaking fee overnight once you become a New York Times bestseller or a Wall Street Journal bestseller. You can, you know, you can raise your fees for consulting or training, things like that. Typically, your phone will ring a whole lot more with people wanting to, you know, to have you come in and speak at their event or train their employees, you know, if you're a consultant with companies. So that's where the payoff is really seen, is that it's not that you make any money by being on the list itself. It's that you're able to make more money down the road because your brand is solidified as kind of being hyper-special because your book showed up on the uber list that everyone looks at. And for those who, you know, if you want to go down this road, I do have a free gift that I put together for everyone listening just to show my appreciation for having me on your program. It's called An Insider's Guide to Becoming a New York Times Bestseller. It's totally free. All I ask, join my author email list where I send out free articles and free advice on a regular basis. But you join my list, you can have this ebook for free and go into a whole lot more detail than the time we have today. Sure. Go for the bestseller list if you want to, but just know you're pursuing a moving target.
Yeah. And I just want to— that was a QR code there. So if you're interested in checking out that freebie, you would screenshot that QR code and go right directly to Rob's page, which I have to say, I've been on your email list for a really long time and that's how I got to know you and to find out a lot of great information. For me, when my first book was coming out, I was thinking a lot about the pre-orders because this is something that gets a lot of attention when it comes to bestseller lists and how well your book is doing and all of that because those pre-orders are really important since they all go through on day one. So you want to try and get as many pre-orders as you can so that when your book comes out on that Tuesday or whatever day the book comes out, uh, they're all generated on the same day. So what are some of the strategies that you tell people to think about when it comes to pre-orders and generating those?
Well, I've had the great fortune of helping both fiction and non-fiction authors hit the New York Times bestseller list along with the USA Today and Wall Street Journal. I had a client just about 120 days ago, she was on all of those. And I've also had the great fortune of helping a book that was 23 years old finally become a New York Times bestseller after already being in print for over 2 decades. So I've been very fortunate to be a part of projects to help them achieve, you know, that ultimate level of success. And to your question, one of the secrets and one of the little-known techniques that authors can use, and it is ethical and it's totally okay, if you want to hit the bestseller list, you want to accrue as many pre-orders as you possibly can. Pre-orders are— it's like getting a head start to hitting the bestseller list because what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the USA Today do is they look at sales week to week except for preorders. Preorders kind of go into this account and they accrue and add up until your very first week of sales. So that means you can start asking readers to buy your book, you know, 3, 6, 9 months ahead of time, as long as it's available on the retailers to purchase, they can buy early. And that goes into your account and begins to add up, and then it counts towards your first week of sales. So I mentioned earlier, you know, let's just using round numbers, if you need to sell 10,000 copies in one week to hit the bestseller list, well, maybe you only need to sell 5,000 copies your first official week of sales because you got 5,000 pre-orders.
Sure.
That's what a lot of really savvy authors will do. That's what I teach my clients how to do is Encourage your readers to buy early, give them incentives, give them goodies, give them freebies so that they want to buy early. That's how you can get hundreds, if not thousands of people to buy during that preorder phase and get thousands of copies to add up. Now you've got a great head start to hitting the bestseller list.
Yeah, it's really smart to start it early. We see, we see some people over there on LinkedIn. Hello, I see you. Good afternoon, Dean. I see you're saying hello. If anybody has any questions over there on LinkedIn or any of the platforms, please leave them below and we'll be happy to answer them for you. One of the things I was going to say too about pre-orders, you know, media, of course, you know, as you know, I'm a media trainer. And so I help a lot of authors who are looking to talk about their books in the media. And the disconnect here sometimes is that the publisher doesn't really want them to talk about the book until the book is out, right? And so this happens often where then authors say, well, I'll just wait. And I'm always like, no, no, let's start doing this now. Let's start giving you a, course, first you want to be able to practice and, you know, talk about what you know and all of that. But the pre-orders are really important too. You know, people will be able to find your book. Uh, so what about the role of, of media in launching the book, whether it be beforehand or, you know, during the actual launch to get on some of these bestseller lists?
Well, anytime an author comes to me who's new, you know, first-time author, or they're just not very familiar with marketing and how book marketing works, I always try to break it down into very simple steps, right? I call it the 5 buckets of book sales. The first bucket is your own audience, you know, your own followers, whether that's email or social media. The second bucket is other people's audiences, someone else who has a big social media following or their own podcast or a big email list. Then you have traditional media, which is like radio, TV, things like you mentioned. The fourth bucket is advertising, where you can buy ads on Amazon or Facebook to reach other readers that you may not have been to reach, you know, with your own audience. And then the fifth bucket is retail. That's people walking into bookstores and actually seeing your book and serendipitously deciding to buy it. So those are the five buckets. And as you mentioned, media is certainly one of those key buckets because the way I encourage authors to think about it is the bigger your own bucket can be, the more in control you are over your own success. However, a lot of authors are just starting out, or, you know, they may only have 1,000 followers. You know, they're not going to have a huge bucket—
sure—
of readers that they can go to and encourage them to buy whenever they want to. If you don't have that, if you have a small bucket number 1, you've got to really rely even more on going to buckets 2 and 3, which is other people's big audiences or media, because media represents a big audience that will give you access to thousands, if not millions, of people that you can tell them about your book. And essentially, that's what book marketing is. To boil it down, it's a game of numbers. If you want to sell thousands of books, you need to get in front of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. And if you want to hit the bestseller list, you know, being selling, you know, selling tens of thousands of books, you're definitely going to have to be getting in front of millions of people to do that.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, those of you watching, I mean, you saw Rob and I just do it. You know, we're talking about bucket number one, getting people on our own lists. In our own bucket. That's why we give our freebies away. That's why we say, "Hey, here's what we, we have this free thing for you. Come over to our website. We'll stay in touch with you." And that's a way to build our own audiences and be able to have a conversation with you. Media, of course, is another piece. And this is something that I teach all of my clients as well. Doing certain types of media will be better for book sales than others. So for instance, podcasts. If you want to sell books, you should be on podcasts because podcast listeners, podcasts podcast listeners are buyers. They will do basically whatever it is that the podcast host tells them to do. They will download whatever, they will buy this, they will buy that. It is great. I was on many, many, many podcasts when both of my books launched and that was very, very good. Traditional TV, you would think, oh, if you're on the Today Show, you're on the Early Show, you're on whatever, it's going to equal book sales. It actually does not. It does not. And I did a little test just the other day, Rob, because you and I had been talking about this. I gave away my freebie on a TV appearance I did here in New York City. And I want you to guess how many people actually opted in.
Like less than 5%.
I did it twice. I did it once on like a Monday and then 3 weeks later, just to see, let's see what was going. I got 1 person, 1 after a television appearance in New York City. City for a major TV outlet.
Yeah.
And I wasn't even asking them to buy anything. I was just asking them, saying, "I have something free to give you." So that is the difference. People who are watching TV are not conditioned to be doing this. They're not also going to be going on their computer and saying, "Oh, what was that website again? Let me just..." But people who are watching on the web, people who are listening in the radio is a little bit better, but definitely podcasts. So it does make a difference which medium, and I think it's important for people to be realistic about what they will what they will achieve by doing these things, because a lot of times, you know, they'll think, oh, that, that would be the best. I'm going to sell a zillion copies. And then it doesn't happen. They feel like a failure.
If I can share one of my own war stories, Paula Rizzo, I've been on the CBS Early Show myself many, many years ago. I'm an author. I've written and published 6 books. So I know the pain and the frustration that anyone listening is either going through or thinking about going through. But my very first book back in 2003, I got to appear on the CBS Early Show. I thought I had struck gold. Yeah, I'm thinking I'm going to be famous. Yeah, I'm going to be a bestseller. This is going to change my life. Was on the show, actually had anywhere from about probably 3 to 5 minutes of airtime. I could not account for one book sale out of that interview. My phone didn't ring. I kept checking my Amazon ranking. It never improved. Just, you know, a— just a complete blow to my author ego, thinking, oh my gosh, what I thought was going to work didn't work at all. Which is one reason why I got in deep into book marketing. And now I like to help other authors avoid the mistakes that I make.
Totally.
Because you're right, a lot of times we think the things that, you know, logically you would think being on national TV would help sell a lot of books, but it's counterintuitive. People are so distracted, they're busy, they're just not in the mood. Fortunately, there are lots of other ways that are way more productive. You don't— there are many of them are free. And they can get you to your goals and even get you to the bestseller list without having to make those types of mistakes.
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it is important to share this information because, you know, people think like, oh, you know, the cachet of being on these shows. Yes, that's great. And you want to put it on your website and you want to say that you've done it. And that is probably all that will happen from that. You know, it's great. It's awesome. Your mom will be happy and, you know, you won't sell any more books, but that's okay. It serves a different purpose. Purpose. It, it brings up your authority level, you know, it really does. It's able to, to show you in a different light. Not everybody gets those opportunities, so you want to be able to have your book out there and, and have people remember your name and, and all of the above. Uh, Dean says this is interesting, he never considered the podcast connection, so that's a great tip. Yeah, podcasts are good for, for book sales for sure. And it could be, you know, someone you never even heard of, you could sell more books on their podcast than, you know, a very reputable TV show like we, like we just said. Um, what are some other mistakes, Rob, that people make when they're trying to do the bestseller list or get preorders or really get their book out there in the beginning?
There's a lot. I don't mean to sound negative. It's just that I've been doing this for 15 years. I've coached over 1,000 authors and have been a full-time book marketing consultant for 15 years. So I've seen a lot. So that's a great question. So there's a lot I can lean into to say, if you avoid this, you'll be in a much better position. You need to start building your own list, primarily an email list, as early and as fast as you possibly can. As I mentioned earlier, I've helped a lot of authors hit the New York Times bestseller list, and other authors will ask me, well, what did those writers have in common? Why did they achieve so much success versus other authors who have not? And that's one of the things that really stands out. The authors I've worked with who have hit the bestseller list typically have an email list with at least 50,000 subscribers. If not 100,000 subscribers or more. And it takes time to do that. So too many authors wait until maybe 6 months before their book launch to ever begin to think about the marketing process. That's way too late. You really need to be starting the process at least a year early, if, if not even 2 to 3 years early. And I know for some writers that sounds like a shock, but you can begin to give away parts of your content, whatever it's going to be, in future book form, you can go ahead and give it away for free to get people to want to join your email list so that then you can stay in touch with them as you go through the writing, the editing, and the publishing, and then the launch process.
Yeah, people love to hear that behind the scenes and know what's going on with the book and all of that. And, you know, I, I say a similar thing for, for media because a lot of times authors will say, oh, I'll wait to do media when the book comes out. And I'm always like, it is too late. You need to be building those relationships way before. I mean, I started doing media myself when I had a blog. I didn't even have a book. I, you know, I started a blog about list-making. And I knew as a TV producer, like, this is not going to be a real thing. People are not going to look at me as an authority until I have some media under my belt to show me as an expert because it really does help to build that personal brand. And so I started doing that. You know, this is an expertise that I had for a long time as a TV producer, being organized. And I said, I'm going to pitch myself out there and see what happens. And I'm so glad that I did because I was able to then hone my own message, be able to talk about things more clearly know what I'm saying. You don't want that to happen, you know, when the book first comes out and then maybe you're never asked on TV ever again. This is a relationship that you want to have for a long time. You know, I'm still doing media. My first book came out, I don't know, 8 years ago, 7 years ago. So it's something that it's a long game and not everybody's so interested in that long game, right? They want the quick, easy solution.
Authors, including myself, you know, we'd love things to be quick and easy. That's one reason why Online advertising has gotten so popular, you know, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, but that can also be— it's almost like a dangerous drug. It can suck you in and you can get dependent on it and either wind up having to spend way more money than you're comfortable to get any sort of measurable results, or it just doesn't work at all. What I encourage any author to be thinking about is you need to avoid marketing in isolation. That means marketing by yourself where you think, I'm just going to stay here in my writer's cave and do what I can do from my computer and hope that that's going to be enough. That's not going to be enough. You need to be thinking about how can I connect with any other audience where groups of large groups of readers for my book might exist and get my book in front of them. That's how I was successful when I first started out as an author way back in 2002, before social media, before Amazon was the giant that it is today. I had one book. I even self-published that first book, and I made a 6-figure living year after year for 7 years straight off of that one book. How did I do that? It's because I just— the time I spent here, my writer's cave, was beside— if I wasn't writing, I was thinking, where are large groups of readers for my book existing, and how can I get in front of them? Sometimes that was in, I need to go speak at a conference where they are. Maybe there was an email list where I could buy an ad to that email list. Maybe there was a radio or TV show that I could get on, you know, as technology began to grow, a podcast that I could get on where the listeners up to that podcast represented a large group of readers. And it's easier than you might think. There, as you mentioned, the ease of getting on podcasts, the ease of connecting with other authors in your genre who might have an audience, and you can trade favors and say, well, I'll promote your book to my audience if you'll promote my book to your audience, things like that. But you need to be constantly asking yourself, am I marketing too much in isolation? Because if you are, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
Yeah, yeah. You need to really open it up a bit. And, you know, a lot of times people think, oh, social media is the way to do that. I know how you feel about social media, so I know that is, that is not the tactic that you take. Uh, it's not your favorite, but it's, it's a necessary evil at some point. You know, you do need to have a presence on social media, but social media followers do not then equal buyers, right? I mean, that is not necessarily the case. We have a question about that specifically, so I want to take that from Ryan on LinkedIn. He's, he says that he's working with a first-time author. She has a huge, nearly 850,000, uh, person following on social media. What is the best way to leverage this since this is a new thing for her followers? I guess the book is a new thing.
The New York Times, just, uh, within the last 6 months, I believe it's back in December of 2021, had an amazing article where they did research on this. They dug around and looked at, do social media followers translate into book sales? The answer was a resounding no. In fact, the, the title of the article is Social Media Is an Unreliable Indicator of Book Sales. So to the person asking this question, very fair question. What I would recommend is you need to try to convert as many of those 850,000 social media followers into email subscribers as quickly and as fast as you possibly can. I just came off a book project with an author who had more than that amount and did not hit the bestseller list that she was really hoping to hit. Hmm. So I've seen it with my own eyes where you can have just, you know, incredible amounts of social media followers and they will not translate into book purchasers. And the article that The New York Times did on this, they were, they were tracking celebrities and well-known authors who had anywhere from 3 to 5 million followers on social media and we're still not hitting the bestseller list.
Wow. Right.
So whereas I know multiple authors who have at least 100,000 email subscribers, they're hitting the bestseller list time after time after time. Yeah.
I mean, think about it. The relationship is so different, right, with your email subscribers because they have opted in to hear from you and they are happy, hopefully, to hear from you when you do email them. You know, you and I both do newsletters that come out on Mondays. And so, you know, people hopefully wait and say, "Oh good, it's Monday. Here comes the thing from Rob or the thing from Paula." You know, we hope that that's the case, but that there's an intimacy there. It's much different than if we're talking about social media where there's a million other things coming through and maybe they saw it, maybe they didn't see it. They did not necessarily remember that they're following that person. It takes a little bit more effort to be on someone's email list. So that is, that's great advice to be able to build that email list. And I want to ask you a little bit about the, the launch strategy of a book, because one of the things that when I first found you, I think I read an article that you had written in Writer's Digest many years ago, and that's how I first found you, was about doing a pre-launch, having a pre-launch team, putting together a team of readers or people who are interested in your work to help you get your work out into the world. Talk about this a little bit because not everybody knows what this is.
Well, a launch team is where you get other people to spread word of mouth about your book. You know, how great does that sound? Again, as authors, we sometimes are huddled up in our writer's cave thinking it's all down to us. It never has to be only on your shoulders. You can get your, your fans and your followers to help out. A lot of them would like to help out because if you've written books before or they've been reading your email updates or following what you've got going on social media, they might feel like they've got this, you know, kind of proxy relationship with you where they're a fan, they want to see you succeed, but they're not professional marketers. They don't know what to do, but they do have enthusiasm. That enthusiasm can be channeled in a productive way to help you meet your goals. And what a launch team typically looks like is where you recruit people from your email list or your social media following to say, would you help launch my book with me? Which means you give them a free copy, they get an advanced reader copy or an ARC as we call it in the industry, they get to see and read your book early, which is, you know, that's a huge bonus. That's a huge draw for someone to be on your launch team is that they can see it before anybody else. They read it, they tell you what their favorite parts are, and then they agree to write an Amazon review on your behalf right when the book comes out. And then as your launch progresses, anything that you've got going on, like if you're going to be doing a media interview on radio, TV, or you're going to appear on a podcast, or you've got a an endorsement from a famous person, you can then put that out to your launch team to say, tell your followers all these good things that are going on with my book, and they're helping you spread word of mouth. That's the easy way to describe it. There's a lot more work involved to do so, but it allows you to feel like you're not alone. And again, you're not marketing in isolation anymore. You get your own fans and you empower your own fans to get out there into the world, both face to face and even online. To help promote that you've got this new book out there, that allows you to get exponential reach without having to pay for it.
Yeah. And it, you know, it is different when someone else is talking about your book versus you. Of course you're going to be like, it's the best, you should buy it. It's different when it comes from someone else. So it's nice to have that team behind you to, to take that pressure off, uh, you know, and be able to help you get the book out there. Well, Rob, this has been awesome. Uh, you clearly know your stuff. I really appreciate you being here and I want to show your freebie one more time because it is important to be on Rob's list. I have to say, I have been a person on on your email list for a very, very long time because you share such great little tidbits. You know, one of the things for me that was really interesting too was that, you know, every book should have at least 100 reviews on Amazon. That I learned from Rob because that is, you know, that's the social proof you need to be able to show people that this book is a good one and you should check it out. So Rob's free gift right here is the Insider's Guide to Becoming a New York Times Bestseller. There's a QR code right there so you can just click that and go right there, get on his list. And Rob, thank you again for being here. Appreciate it so much.
Absolutely. Happy to come back anytime.
And all of you, I have a free gift as well. Uh, my checklist to become a go-to media expert. If you go to paularizzo.com/checklist, you will learn everything I know about how to be in traditional and non-traditional media and get whatever it is that you want to talk about out into the world. And, uh, I hope that you join us next time. Thanks for being here.
