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I take a photo of my bookshelf I upload that photo to chatGPT I ask chatGPT to tell me what I should read next Is your book on that list? That’s what today is about. BUT FIRST Freshly back from reporting for Uncle duties in Virginia 🫡 Secondly…my good friend Susan Friedmann of the one and only Book Marketing Mentors podcast is hosting Book Marketing Summer Camp. Use code SUMMER50 at checkout for the Basic Bunk level. ($50 OFF) An accountability partner is invaluable so let Susan be that for…

Today is all about going viral thanks to what I learned speaking with Brendan Kane who just released The Guide to Going Viral. Here are the top secrets I pull from our chat. Listen to the full conversation here. 3 Secrets 1. Stop the scroll: Start every video or post with a pattern-disrupting hook that visually or emotionally breaks the scroll. Think weird, bold, contradictory, or highly specific.Kane emphasizes that the first 3 seconds determine whether someone keeps watching. If they don’t…

Want a free private book marketing coach? Specific advice based on how many copies you’ve sold, what your goals are for your book, and what strategy should you be focusing on? We’ve put everything we know into a new feature on our website that has been trained on our combined marketing knowledge.We (of course) appropriately named it BookMark!BookMark is your new book marketing AI coach. I’d love for you to play with him! Just go to www.getshelflife.com and click on the little comment button…

Got my first one star review! “If everyone who wrote a book did this they would all be bestsellers” sounds positive to me! Anyway…Today is all about your Amazon product page (how your book looks to potential readers on Amazon). Thank you Wendy Haan for your question that inspired today’s 3-2-1!Why are we covering this? Whether you’re a traditionally published author with a publisher that handles your listing….. or a self published author in charge of your own publishing…It’s absolutely…

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…