Book Launch Strategy: How I Sold More Books on Substack Without Ads or Social Media

Creative on Purpose Live. My name is Scott Perry. I am the publisher of the Creative on Purpose Substack, which is dedicated to helping people navigate the collision between the art of living and work that matters. And our community is made up of solopreneurs, freelancers, bootstrappers, but also people that identify not so much with the business side, but with a creative endeavor like a writing practice or maybe a painting or pottery practice or being a musician or photographer or what have you that maybe don't think of their enterprises in a business sense. And also just a lot of people, many of whom are entering the second half of life or their life's third act and are trying to figure out what's the thing I should be doing now that my career is winding down, or the kids are moving out, or maybe you're experiencing some sort of transition in your relationship status or something like that. And it's a time of, uh, some anxiety, but also a time when you might be thinking about, well, maybe now there's an opportunity for me to do something, um, that is a little bit more focused on what I really want out of life. And maybe you don't know exactly what that is. We have lots of resources to to help people with that. So today, uh, for this broadcast, I want to talk about a little bit about how I successfully launched my latest book, Intrepid: Dare to Make a Difference, on Substack without any additional social media, without Amazon. I did not publish on Amazon, at least not yet. I haven't leveraged any ads, and I have a very small list, a list of just just barely 1,000 subscribers, and yet I had as successful a launch as I've ever had, even with launches where I had a much bigger following, where I promoted quite a bit on social media, where I leveraged Google Ads and YouTube Ads and Facebook Ads. Uh, and my book right now, Intrepid, is outperforming all of my past releases. And so again, when I launched Intrepid— and if you're not familiar with the book, if you look at any of the content that I've published on Creative Art Purpose over the last 2 weeks, you'll see links to the, uh, to the, to the book that you— and you can learn more about what the book is all about. But when I launched Intrepid just a few weeks ago. I had just barely 1,000 subscribers. I have deactivated all of my social media. I haven't been on social media since October 1st of last year. I did not release it on Amazon even though I have a dozen or so books published on Amazon already. I didn't leverage any ads and the launch has been very successful, not because I discovered some sort of growth hack or I bought Guru's funnel template or growth hacking formula. It worked because I got 3 things really dialed in before I even wrote a single chapter of the book or planned a single piece of my promotional plan. And so today I'm just going to tell you what those 3 things are, the results that they produced, and how you can join me next week for a free workshop where I'll do a much deeper dive into what I'm going to share with you right now. And I'll actually walk you through, through the whole philosophy and the principles and the strategy behind writing, promoting, and selling, and selling offers off the back end of a book. So I think the first thing is you know, we have to— when you're thinking, if you're thinking about writing a book and you want to drop something in the chat, or if you've written a book and you want to drop something in the chat, I'd love to hear, like, are there authors here, advancing authors that are looking for ways that they can get their book into more of— in front of more of the right readers? But if you're also maybe an aspiring author, I'd love to hear that. So you could put advancing or aspiring or just not interested, if you want to. But the first thing that I think you need to do if you are thinking about writing a book or thinking about how to continue to leverage an existing book that you've created is what is a book actually? So most of the time what I see and what I've done in the past is treat a book like a product, like like you create it, you build it, you build the sales page, you build the landing page, you build the nurture sequence, you do all the things and you're trying to sell the book as if it is another product or service, another offer that you've created. And a lot of the time, you know, it takes an extraordinary amount of time, attention, money, and effort just to write a book. But then when you're done and exhausted by the whole writing process, then It's like you just finished a marathon and someone walks you to the starting line of the next marathon, and now it's promotion time. And I like to think of my books more of being a delivery system for an idea worth spreading. And so with Intrepid: Dare to Make a Difference, the big idea that I was writing about and that I was helping people Navigate was this idea that if you feel called to make a difference, if you feel like you were born to be and do more and better than what you're currently doing, then the thing that's in your way is not a motivation problem, it's a commitment problem. So the little tagline for the book, Intrepid: Dare to Make a Difference— do you care enough to commit? That's the problem I'm solving, is the commitment problem. And that one reframe and that creating that one little idea virus, to use the terminology of my friend and, uh, and teacher Seth Godin, um, really helped inform and make easier the writing of the book, but also how I went about thinking about, uh, structuring the book, writing the book, delivering the book, but also then the promotion of the book. And again, didn't need a huge audience to sell a lot of copies and to get the word out and to get the, uh, an audience that is spreading the idea of the book and the offer of the book for me. So it's not that you need a big audience. What you need is the smallest viable audience and a means to mobilize that audience to help you write the best book possible, and share the book with more of the people who would benefit from colliding with whatever idea or transformation is on offer through your book. So the 3 things that I referenced at the beginning, uh, this is what I did before I wrote or promoted anything. I answered 3 basic questions. These come directly from Seth Godin's book Business Marketing, which was written as a complementary resource to his workshop, The Marketing Seminar. And some of you know that my history— in fact, I just, I see Lilian is here. He was a fellow Akimbo coach. I became, I was part of the initial Akimbo coach coaching team, and The Marketing Seminar was the first workshop that I was a coach. I was, I was one of the first students in that seminar, but also became one of the first coaches in that seminar. I coached multiple sessions of that, of the marketing seminar. And one of the big takeaways for me, both as a student and as a coach, was this idea of the Marketing Trifecta, answering 3 simple questions. And if you can answer these simple questions, after you come up with what's the idea virus, what's the sticky, attractive, spreadable idea that I'm trying to get out through this book, what you then need to do is answer these 3 questions: What change am I trying to make? Who am I trying to change? And what promise am I making? So if we look at the first question, what change am I trying to make, this is not just what's the book about. It is, what is the transformation on offer? People that read this book will start reading like this kind of person, and when they're done, they will have become this kind of person. And I went— in Intrepid, it was, I will help someone move from being a motivated but frustrated difference maker to a committed practitioner of shipping meaningful work and putting it in the hands of people that whose lives will actually be enhanced by embracing the ideas that you're sharing? What change are you trying to make with the book that you're writing or with the Substack that you're creating? The second question is, who is it for? And the answer is not everyone, and it's not anyone who wants to make a difference. It's, for me, intrepid, Dare to Make a Difference, Do You Care Enough to Commit is written for people who feel that tension around their untapped potential. They feel called to make an impact, to make the difference only they can make in the way only they can make it, and are allergic to all of the digital marketing BS and online guru BS around, you know, hustle culture, grit and grind. Mindset, uh, hacks, tricks like funnels and email strategies and ideal customer avatars and power offers and all the things that most of us are really tired of, of, you know, playing those games. I'm writing for people who are ready to stop playing a game they can't win because it's someone else's game and they're playing the game on someone else's terms. If you're allergic to social media and funnels and ideal customer avatars and scarcity and urgency and force, you know, sticky or I'm sorry, tricky sales ideas, then you shouldn't be doing that. And so I'm saying you can play your game on your terms without compromise. And if you're the kind of person that wants to make the difference only you can make in the way that only you can make it, and make it on your terms without doing anything that you don't want to do, this book is for you. So who is your book for? Who is your Substack for? Not everyone, but specifically what kind of person? What is their worldview? That's what you need to figure out. Then the third question is, what promise are you making? And this is not, uh, not some sort of ridiculous guarantee like, oh, you— if you follow my Substack, I guarantee that you'll make $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month, or that you'll be able to write viral notes on demand that increase your subscriber count, or your promise is a promise that you can actually keep. And the promise that I'm actually able to keep through my book Intrepid is that if you are a purpose-driven difference maker, if you want to do meaningful work with and for people you care about with empathy, with integrity, with clear intention, the 27 questions in this book If you answer them, it will help you create much, a much sharper level of self-trust, a much clearer commitment about what you're trying to do and who it's for, and that it will also offer you a practical path that you can begin to follow to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be with the difference that you seek to make. That There's no magic here. There's no, you know, roulette wheel involved in terms of how you can engineer luck or anything like that. The promise is that this book, Intrepid, asks you one question: Do you care enough to commit? 27 different ways in 3 parts that will help you clarify the difference that you're trying to make, craft a path that will enable you to start testing your idea for viability, and, and then will help you craft a— become the kind of person that can commit to seeing the idea all the way through if you do the work, right? So there's the promises, often conditional. You can't make promises that you can't keep, and if your promise depends on the effort of your readers or your clients and their ability to engage with your process in a consistent way. You can't control that. So you have to qualify. If you are ready to do the work and if you are ready to get clear about who you are, what you're really good at, and where you really belong, Intrepid will help you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. So those 3 answers to the marketing trifecta, along with the idea virus, really informed and inspired every decision I made in terms of writing the book, but also in terms of how I went about structuring the promotional strategy, the marketing plan, if you will, behind the book. And that level of clarity made it possible for me to sell more books than I ever have before. Almost all of my books have become, have been Amazon bestsellers within the launch window, within the first week or so of their launch. They've all become Amazon bestsellers, which admittedly is not a huge number of sales. You can become an Amazon bestseller selling much fewer than 100 copies of a book, but I sold well over any number I've achieved on Amazon, all of which required Amazon ads, Facebook ads, social media strategy, etc. I did it without any of that. I launched the book on Lulu, which is a self-publication platform, and I leveraged it with a very small list, and I leveraged it without any social media. I just exclusively leveraged the tools and tactics and strategies that are available through Substack. And, uh, not only did I sell more books than I ever had before, which is, you know, great, but it's even the New York Times bestsellers, very few of them actually make enough in book sales to fund their retirement or anything like that. For me, the book is a means of getting more of the right people subscribed to my Substack, to becoming members of the Circle and Inner Circle community of paid subscribers on my Substack. And working with enough of those people as one-on-one clients through Voxer Velocity or the Cornerman program to earn my annual revenue goal in a very short period of time. I am on track for the third year in a row to earn my annual revenue goal before the end of June of this year. And for those that know my backstory, I, I do that, uh, while I am also a full-time grandparent. I take care of my 8-month-old and 4-year-old grandsons along with my wife 5 days a week, 9 hours a day. I only have a couple hours a day to dedicate to my work, but even though I am working a very limited number of hours, I'm still able to achieve that revenue goal, and the book has been a big part of that. I've already, just through the initial sales, have increased my paid subscriber, uh, count on Substack, and I've got half a dozen people on my waiting list waiting for a spot for, uh, the coaching programs. So just to give you a little peek at how I negotiated all that here on Substack, when I came up with the idea of the book I shared it initially with my Circle and Inner Circle paid subscribers, and I simply asked if they would be interested in receiving an early edition or, you know, an early reader copy of the book— advanced reader copy, they call it in the business, an ARC— in exchange for helping me promote a couple of posts and a couple of notes here on Substack. And so I have about 60 paid subscribers. Over 33% of them raised their hand and said, I would love to read your book and I would love to help you promote it. So I had my, you know, sometimes we call that a street team in the business. I don't really think of it that way. The— I called it the Founding Fellowship. These are the people that are fans of my work already that are willing to invest in doing a little bit of work in terms of reading the book, reading an advanced copy, and give me feedback, but also doing a little boosting of the, the, the book on posts and on notes. But also they helped create the initial blurbs, the testimonials that made up the foreword of the book. And gave me promotional, you know, provided promotional material that I could use promoting the book ahead of publication, during publication, and again going forward now that the book is out there in the world. The other thing, and many of you here have seen some examples of this, but there's there's also folks here that have helped me promote the book by having, by hosting a Substack Live and having me be a guest talking about the book. But when, if you're like me and you have a relatively small distribution network, you know, I have 1,000 plus or minus subscribers, my open rates are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30, 40%. So 300, 400 people are seeing the, the, the information about the book being out there in the world. It's not a huge distribution network. However, I have done many events, hosted many lives with some of the bigger influencers and bestsellers here on Substack, and because I had done a great job of sharing their Substack and their work with my audience and promoting their work and being a fan of their work. All of them, all the ones that I asked, were willing to host a live where they had me on, shared me and my work with their audience. And so I leveraged the distribution networks of people that have far greater, far greater permission asset in terms of the size of their list and the reach of their work. So another strat— that's just another strategy that I used to get the word out, and it was really successful. Um, I think between the, the lives I did last week with David McElroy, who has a great publication called How to Write for a Living, and Claudia Faith, who has a great publication called Wander Wealth, uh, They were responsible for selling over a dozen books just during the live broadcast, uh, during the time that I was on a live broadcast with them. So what are the relationship assets that you can use to tap into other people's distribution work to help you get the word out? So that's just a little bit of a peek behind the curtain as to how I had a very successful launch of my most recent book, uh, using exclusively the, the tools and tactics and strategies that Substack makes available. And we are going to do a much bigger dive into the details of all of this in a free workshop next Wednesday. If you are interested in getting information or attending that workshop or getting access to the replay, you can drop a, a comment here on the live, or you can, if you're listening to this in replay, just drop, you can drop 'I'm ready' in the comments of this episode, and I will make sure that I add you to the guest list next Wednesday when we do a much more structured formal workshop talking about how you can successfully write, publish, and promote a book in a very short period of time. Everything that I did around writing Intrepid and setting up the promotion and executing the promotion was established within 2 weeks. It ran for several weeks before publication and, and will continue to run for several weeks after the publication, but really the entire book, the entire promotional plan, all crafted and delivered within just a couple of weeks. So fantastic. So Dr. Sherry, I see your note here that you'd like to attend the workshop, and Betty, I see that you are as well. I'll write your names down so that I— because I think this chat won't be available And Betty and Dr. Sherry, I think you already are subscribers to Creative on Purpose, but if you're not, go ahead and subscribe because I will take that email address to add you to the guest list. Um, and so again, for anybody else that's interested in learning more about how you can, uh, how you can, can come ideate, ideate a book, create a book, launch a book, promote a book, and use it as a resource for building an audience of more of the right people and less of the wrong people for your Substack publication or your email list, and eventually to become clients in whatever backend offers or services, products that you have. We'll cover that again on Wednesday. Candice says she's also interested. I'll make sure I get you written down. Um, I didn't see any questions coming in. I see Elizabeth Walker is here, and I know that she has a copy of the book already, so I appreciate that. Yes, the book is indeed delivered. And, uh, let's see, I see Lilian is here from the Purple Community and a friend from Akimbo Workshops. It's great to have you all here. I'm gonna hang out for about 30 more seconds just to see if any questions come in, but If not, then we'll go ahead and wrap up. But I'll just take a minute to conclude with the first step with— the first step in writing a book and launching a book successfully is to be clear about the intention behind the book. If the book is a product that you're hoping is going to make you rich and famous, then I wish you the very best of luck with that. I probably will not be able to help you do that because I have not written a book that has made me rich or famous. But if you want, want to write a book that helps you clarify and, uh, your ideas and package them in a way that is easily understood by other people and use the book to help spread an idea worth spreading that will help you increase your audience of the kind of people that will benefit, whose lives will be enhanced by colliding with your ideas and the difference that you'll make, and perhaps turn some of those readers into customers or clients, then you have to start with creating an idea that is interesting enough and sticky enough and easily spread by the people that you're writing for. And after you do that, if you create that idea virus, then the next step is answering the 3 marketing trifecta questions: What change am I trying to make with this book? Who am I trying to change with this book? And what promise am I making through this book? And if you get those 3 questions answered along with your idea virus established, uh, then The writing of the book will happen very quickly and much more easily than you can possibly imagine. And then when it comes to the promotion, it's really about thinking about the promotion not as marketing in the way that we usually think about it, or sales in the way we usually think about it, but how can I share the news or the ideas that I'm, I'm promoting through this book, sharing through this book? How can I share the ideas and the, and, uh, the process that I'm delivering through the book with the right people? The kind of people who not only will provide me with the feedback to continue to iterate and improve the work, but also will be the evangelicals who help get the book in front of more of the right kind of people. Excuse me. All right. Oh, Dr. Sherry is waiting on her copy. They, uh, Lulu is— if you bought, if you purchase through the Lulu interface, then, um, it should be published in 3 to 5 days. And I'm seeing people post pictures with the book, and it seems like they're getting the book in, in 7 to 10 days. So if, if it's not been quite a week or quite 10 days, you should have it soon. Um, if you want to know where to purchase the book, Betty, go to my Substack and just click on— there's a post, recent post called I Made This for You. There's a link in that post that will lead you to the Lulu sales page. Every purchase of the paperback includes a link that will get you the ebook edition and the audiobook edition and a reader guide, so you get a lot of value for the— along with the purchase of the paperback. And the paperback looks pretty, pretty darn good, if I do say so. There it is right there. And so again, a really high-impact book. It's only about 100 pages long, but delivers a ton of transformation in just an hour's worth of reading. Uh, we'll take longer to actually wrestle with and answer the questions. You're very welcome, Betty. I appreciate that. All right, gang, no, no more questions seem to be coming in. I really appreciate the gift of your time and attention. I hope that I'll see some of you in the workshop on Wednesday, and Otherwise, I'll see some of you through the Substack publication or in the Circle or Inner Circle community calls. So until next time, be well, do good, have fun, and thanks a lot for being here.