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Over 15 years Jim Murphy sold 8,000 copies. That’s 533 copies seeded/year. Last year, during an NFL playoff game, Eagles receiver A.J. Brown was seen reading Inner Excellence on the sideline. Over the next two days that book sold 100,000 copies. This is why we talk about putting yourself in a position to get lucky. Jim Murphy says that when you can’t control exactly when your work will get noticed, so just spend your time continue improving your message and craft. 3 Secrets 1. Undervalued…

I tried writing a nonfiction book about impostor syndrome… …but I wasn’t qualified 3 Secrets 1. A pricing idea: When it comes to book pricing over the long run, your strategy should include where your traffic is coming from. If you’re actively marketing your book on podcasts, blogs, etc., you can expect these buyers to be less price sensitive as they have a connection to you. If a lot of your traffic is coming from Amazon Ads, your readers will be MUCH more price sensitive. In fact, if a book…

Most books are dead on arrival. A new book drops every eight seconds—11,000 a day—but most won’t sell enough books in that first week to cover a celebratory pizza. The average book sells less than 300 print copies in its lifetime. Toss in ebooks and audio? Still under 1,000. That’s not a career. That’s a whisper in a hurricane. Even with the big leagues (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, all of them) two-thirds of their books don’t sell 1,000 copies in the first year. Only 6.7% cross…

*currently somewhere over the Pacific Ocean* 3 Secrets 1. What sales will look like that first year: Books that sell well forever look like a compound interest chart for the first few years. Before they get their though, most authors will actually see sales decline after they’ve exhausted all of their initial marketing. We all have this notion that our book will either make it or break it in the first year of being on the market. The truth is…the goal that first year is to just seed copies…

Why did the Australian novel get rejected by the publisher?Because every time there was conflict, the characters just said “No worries” and cracked a beer. 3 Secrets 1. Event Seeding S&H: Take a look at my last newsletter for messaging to events. We’ve had 1,600 copies of BTB requested by 3 events so far as a result of this seeding method. As for S&H you can have this all done by using the “order author copies” feature found on your KDP bookshelf. *FOR SELF PUBLISHED/HYBRID PUBLISHED AUTHORS*…

Hello from Townsville, Australia! How many wallabies can you find? 3 Secrets1. How I’m marketing my own book I love that I get to now use the marketing of my own book to further test and refine the ideas shared here.As I write this, we’ve seeded 700 copies of Before The Bestseller since it’s launch on March 3rd. Our goal is to seed 2,000 copies by June 30th.Our methods of seeding have been as follows:200 Dave Chesson/Reedsy newsletter shout-out FREE100 This list & connections build through it…

You walk into a house that’s been around since the Great Depression. The air is thick with history, like a cedar chest cracked open after decades. You get to the wooden stairs that take you up into the personal library of an old man. From the floor to ceiling, books line every inch of every wall, packed so tightly together you avoid touching anything in fear of getting buried by books set free from this literary crypt. That room belongs to my grandfather. That’s where my appreciation and love…

Headed down under to the homeland. *Aussie wildlife photos coming soon*3 Secrets Seeding Effectively: Why did Rob Fitzpatrick only need to seed 1,000 copies of The Mom Test or Write Useful Books? Because his 1,000 were purely people whose problem he was solving. Promoting your book to your college friends or getting your friends to buy it is like just creating an author website: It’s instantaneous gratification. However, a week or two later, you realize it did nothing to get your book into…