Dan Martell hit Wall Street Journal bestseller by pre-selling 4,000 copies, then scaling to 12,000 bulk orders through tiered packages like masterminds and VIP days. A 150-person launch team provided feedback, 76 podcast interviews added 3,000 sales, and partner newsletters contributed another 3,000. He sold roughly 21,000 copies in the first month.
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You hit Wall Street Journal bestseller. What was the like strategy? Was there, I'm assuming there was some sort of strategy behind that. There really, you know, it's kind of a weird thing. So what happened, Tyler, is like, I, I wrote the book, I told my publisher, look, I'm going to, I'm going to pre-sell 4,000 copies to my customers or audience, right? And I'm going to do about 35 podcast interviews. Like I know the value of my time because I wrote a book teaching people this. I asked them what would make them happy. I look at what the value of my time is, what would the input require on my time? And that was the equation. This is what changed about 2 months before update. So January 17th, let's call it mid-November. We put together a book launch team, and this is the first time outside of like 20-some people that we'd had the book read. But those 20 people knew me, so their feedback was like super supportive and positive. I kind of discounted it. I was like, these are people that are friends of mine. Like, they're not going to give me critical feedback. But when we launched the book team, the launch team, I think we had about 150 people in it, and they started reading the digital version, and then they started posting the feedback. I mean, honestly, I didn't know if I had a good book or not. I don't know. You've written books. Like the more you read the book, the more I thought it sucked, which is a weird idea, but it's true. And it wasn't until those people were reading it and then coming back in the Facebook group and just be like, holy crap, this is the best book I've ever read. This is the top 5 business books. And they were saying all these positive things that I then realized I can't waste this opportunity to put as much resources I can behind it. Mid-November, I made the decision to bring in my buddy, Daniel Decker, who's awesome. Daniel came in and helped me put together the book summit, email copy. He really— he became my book launch manager. So I essentially pre-sold bulk orders, about 12,000 copies. So I went from 4,000 to 12,000 in literally another— it took me about 4 weeks. What was unique about my book packages is I didn't sell any in-person keynotes because I knew, again, buy back time. What's my time worth? Well, flying to do a keynote to sell 300 books, it just makes zero sense. I might as well just buy the books myself. So I put together these different bulk packages that I thought were generous and valuable, but just didn't require me to travel. So like online masterclass, half-day in-person VIP days here where I live, and a 2-day mastermind for people that invested significant to buy in bulk orders. And I use those packages to sell. I think there's like marketing packages and then sales packages, right? So anything that's, I'd say over 50 copies, maybe 25 copies, that has to be sold. Everything below that can be marketed. I worked with my buddy, Clay Abare, who's a genius around this stuff. He's the one that kind of gave me some frameworks for like, don't put too many packages together, make them really useful. The bonuses were all aligned with the book content. So that was the bulk orders. And it was literally just sell by chat, texting and messaging on Facebook and Instagram, everybody I ever met that I thought I could be value added that I can call in the favor. So I like full on called in every favor and I left no rock unturned. So that was about 12,000 copies. The book summit, we put it together last minute, like 6 weeks before the launch date. We did it a week before Pub Week. Daniel ran the whole thing. We did a funnel where you had to buy a copy of the book to get a ticket to attend. I think we ended up with about, I'm guessing to the register, it might've been 300 or 400 people registered. So technically, 300 or 400 books, but we had an upsell. So it was like, buy a book copy to go to this summit. And we had all these great speakers, Jeff Walker and Taylor Welch, and just awesome people, Jasmine Star. Ryan Levesque, Stu McLaren, like just amazing people that I personally turn to for advice. And once they registered, then there was an upsell to buy 4 more and then get access to some of the recordings. That's what we did. It was the recordings was the upsell for the 4 books. If you bought 4, you get the recordings of the summit. And then what happened was, is our Facebook ads didn't work. We thought we'd have about 3,000 people attend. I think we had about 900 when we went live because we had a live page that people could just share publicly if they were attending. And we streamed it. It was about 4 or 5 hours, the summit. That was really valuable. And we sold 1,480 copies of my book at the summit with the marketing bulk orders. So, the right side of the page, you had the summit in the center. Right side, we'd have all these packages. And then the partner email, that was a fun one. My buddy, Todd Herman, he wrote The Alter Ego Effect. He's one of my best friends. I remember the conversation with him. He's like, you got to get in people's newsletters. Like, Dan, podcasts are cool, but nothing will sell better than being in people's newsletters. Once I get the bulk order sales done, like 2 months prior. The 3 weeks leading up to Pub Week and even the first week and the second week was me just then going back and asking, literally, this is my process. Do you have a newsletter? Yeah. Why? What's up? Any chance you might mention my new book in your newsletter? Yeah, I'd love to. Send me what you got. And I had a swipe file for copy and images. And I probably got into about 25 newsletters, pretty significant ones. And that probably sold another 3,000 copies of my book. So that was a big strategy. My internal email and social probably sold 1,500 copies. Our Facebook ads didn't work. We messed up our ads, didn't have enough time to execute them right. So lesson learned there. And then the podcast tour, I went from 35 I committed to, and I think today as we talk, I'm at 76. And I would say that probably pushed or moved about 3,000 copies. So like right now, if you add all those numbers up, I think it works out not even— there's been more organics, but I think I sold 21,000 copies of my book almost a month later. So yeah.
