|
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 10,000.
And self-published? The average title sells 250 copies—total. Not per month. Not per year. Ever.
This isn’t a book market. It’s a book graveyard.
Let’s change that!
3 Secrets
1. Update on Event Seeding: 3 events have now offered to give away free copies of Before The Bestseller to their attendees.
Wild Deadwood Reads 2025,
Baltimore Book Festival,
and Detroit Festival of Books.
Together this will be 400 copies. One of the events asked for 1,000. That would be an immediate $5,000+ investment! SO, I offered them 100 copies which they gladly accepted.
To me,
and here’s the useful part for you,
I’m thinking not giving away books to every attendee makes the book more valuable through scarcity, seeds a smaller group within the bigger group who hopefully might by a copy, and creates FOMO for those who didn’t get a free one, BUT maybe that’s wishful thinking. Time will tell!
2. Increasing book share-ability: If you’re serious about maximizing the reach of your book, tie in an accountability partner component to what you’re teaching and offer to send a free copy to them too. Again, increasing the share-ability of your book.
3. Curse of knowledge: The curse of knowledge prevents your book from being recommended. It’s when you’re such an expert at something that you forget what it’s like to be a beginner.
This results in the forcing of your reader to “drink from a firehose”. It’s overwhelming and they might not actually learn anything despite you being the ultimate expert on the topic.
That’s why beginner beta readers are so important. They can tell you what’s stopping them from turning to the next page, when the information isn’t clear, or when you’re missing a step that you think is obvious.
Why is this in a marketing NL? You can seed copies in the hands of readers all day, if they wouldn’t recommend it, it won’t accomplish anything.
Nir Eyal got his beta readers by offering to put their names in the back of the book as contributors. I just did this with BTB and it worked extremely well.
2 Links (or 12)
- Want to hear my unscripted views and opinions on publishing and book marketing?
Are you free next Tuesday, June 10th, at 10am PST?
Yes?
Then I’d love you to join me live being hosted by Niche Pressworks to go off script and show you the behind the scenes of marketing Before The Bestseller.
I’ve already learned so much more about book marketing since releasing my own book and will be sharing for the first time what I’ve learned in hopes that you can apply it to your book marketing before everyone else does it.
Sign up for FREE here 🙂
https://nichepressworks.com/alex-strathdee
- I’m honestly shocked at how many have joined us for this series. I’m releasing the entire audiobook for Before The Bestseller in 2 episodes per week over the next 9 weeks. Listen along here. Topics covered so far:
What you need to know before spending an hour or dollar on marketing your book
Make marketing your book much easier
Building your marketing team
Your Author Twin and Time Hacks
Email Lists for Authors
FREE Reader Seeding
Amazon and Amazon Ads
Meta Ads
Additional Pay-to-Play Strategies
Organic Social Media
Podcast Guesting
1 Quote
“I write to discover what I know.”
— Flannery O’Connor
with love and sincere appreciation,
Alex
BeforeTheBestseller | ShelfLife
alex@getshelflife.com
|
