How to market a book that exists to market you

The books arrive, and then the question starts

The books arrive in boxes. They are heavier than you expect, and the cover looks better in your hands than it did on screen. The writing is finished, the book exists, and your name is on it.

Then comes a question the writing never answered. What do you do with 900 copies of your own book?

Most of the advice you will find answers a different question, which is how to sell copies. That advice was written for people who earn their living from copies. You wrote this book so the right people would understand how you think before they sit down with you. You wrote it so your field would have something permanent to point at. The book is a credential and a calling card. Marketing it means two things. Get it into the hands of a specific few thousand people. Get yourself into the conversations where those people already listen.

Copies sold is the wrong scoreboard for your book

Start by letting go of the number most authors watch.

The New York Times has reported Circana BookScan figures on how new books sell. The publishing analyst Jane Friedman revisited those numbers while sorting out which sales claims hold up. Of the books publishers released in 2020, 98% sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Those counts come from retail scan data. Direct sales, bulk orders, and much of the ebook market sit outside them. So the true counts run somewhat higher than the figure suggests.

That number matters here for one reason. If you judge your book by copies, you are grading yourself in a competition you never entered. The other entrants are publishers whose business is volume. Your book can sell modestly and still do its job.

A big show will not move your sales rank

The podcast tour is the first thing most authors are sold. The results are worth looking at closely.

John Jennings, a wealth manager who published his first book, wrote down what his appearances produced. One episode on a large investing show drew about 90,000 downloads. His book sold 125 copies that week. Another big show produced few sales. A newsletter with 50,000 subscribers recommended the book, and the week barely registered.

Those numbers tell you what an appearance moves and what it leaves alone. Taken that way, they are useful.

An hour on a show does not transfer someone's attention to a checkout page. It transfers your thinking to a few hundred people who now know how you reason about their problem. Some of them run companies. Some of them book speakers. Some of them will remember you in a year, when the problem you described lands on their desk.

Anna David, who publishes books for entrepreneurs, tells a version of this against herself. Her appearance on national morning television did nothing to her Amazon ranking. Over the following years it brought her a great deal of business.

The question worth asking is how many of the right few thousand people have your book in hand. That number moves when you decide to move it.

Shows and stages are where the book does its work

I produced the Deliberate Leaders Podcast for Deliberate Directions, more than 200 episodes of it. That put me on the receiving end of author pitches for years. A dozen arrived most weeks, and a few of those were good.

The good ones were easy to spot. They came with a one-sheet, a short introduction, and three or four suggested questions. The questions were aimed at what the show's audience cared about. Saying yes required no homework, which made yes easy.

The weak ones could be smelled from the subject line. Thin experience, and questions designed to promote the sender rather than serve the listener. Those were declined without a reply.

Your book helps here, and it helps in a specific way. It gets the pitch read. A host scanning an inbox reads "author of" as proof you can hold a thought for an hour. What gets you booked is the questions. The book earns the look, and the preparation earns the slot. Which shows deserve that preparation depends on where your buyers already listen, and reaching those hosts is a separate craft.

Stages work the same way, one rung up. Conference programmers are buying a session. A book tells them you have the material and will not embarrass them. Send the book with the proposal.

A note on how this runs in my own engagements. The system I build for a client drafts the pitches, the one-sheets, and the excerpts. It works from the material we captured together, and I do the sending myself. Nothing goes out under a client's name from a machine.

Send the book out by the box

Now the part few authors keep up.

Buy your own book in quantity and send it to people by name, every month, permanently. Send it to the client who would hand it to a colleague. Send it to the host whose audience is full of your buyers, and to the person who runs the conference. Send it to the referral source who has been meaning to explain what you do and cannot.

One author who has kept this habit for five years describes giving away roughly 2,000 copies. That runs to 10 or 25 books a month, sent to prospects, podcast hosts, and event planners. What comes back is notes, invitations, and consideration. People rarely throw away a book that arrives with their name on it.

Put a short handwritten line inside the cover and nothing else. No brochure, no follow-up sequence, no request. A gift that arrives with an ask attached stops being a gift. The person on the other end knows the difference.

Now the cost. Most copies you send will produce nothing you can trace. You pay print cost and postage on a few hundred books a year. It buys you presence in rooms you will never see. The trade is worth making, because those are the right rooms. The alternative is a pallet in your garage.

The book should arrive before you do

Send a copy ahead of every serious first conversation. A prospect who has read two chapters arrives already agreeing with you about something. The meeting starts further along.

The book keeps working for years after launch week. It sits in greenrooms, in proposals, and in the hands of people deciding whether to call you. Most of the return sits in those years rather than in the first month.

Excerpts belong where your buyers already read

Your chapters are already written, which means you have a year of material for everywhere else you publish. A chapter becomes an article, a talk, or a newsletter. It becomes the answer you send a client who asks.

There is a newer reason to keep the book's ideas circulating in public. When someone asks a chatbot what to read on your subject, it names books it can recognize. Recognition comes from what exists about a book online. A book that is written about, excerpted, reviewed, and tied clearly to its author can be named. A book that exists only as a retail listing gives an assistant nothing to work with.

What a bestseller campaign buys you

An industry exists to make you a bestselling author, and it is worth understanding before you spend on it.

The mechanics are not secret. You buy several thousand copies of your own book. The purchases are spread across retailers so they read as individual sales, and timed into one reporting week. A firm coordinates it. You pay the firm. You also pay retail for your own copies, which is where most of the money goes.

Two facts have changed the calculation. The Wall Street Journal stopped running its bestseller lists in late 2023, when its data contract expired. That was the list business authors most often bought their way onto, and it is gone. USA Today's list returned in 2023 after a hiatus and is still sold as a target by campaign firms. The New York Times list remains. Its thresholds and its editorial judgment put it out of reach of most campaigns.

The Amazon version is cheaper and softer. Categories on Amazon run deep and narrow, and rankings update hourly. A small burst of sales into a thin category produces a number one badge for an afternoon. That is the screenshot in a hundred bios. Vendors will tell you to capture it for your media kit. That is fair advice about a small asset.

Understand what you are buying. A badge is a claim about a week, or an hour. Many of the buyers you want have watched people they respect do this, and they price the badge accordingly. I would rather your money went into 500 copies mailed to named people. That return is a relationship rather than a line in a bio.

None of this is a judgment on authors who ran a campaign. Plenty did it on a publisher's advice, and some got a strong week out of it. It is a judgment on what the money buys today.

What marketing a book like this will not do

A book is sold as a solution to more problems than it solves. The limits are worth knowing before you spend a year and a print run.

A book does not generate inbound calls by itself. It converts people who are already near you: the referral who was told to call. It works on the prospect comparing three firms, and the programmer choosing between two speakers. It gives those people a reason to choose you, and it rarely creates them.

A book will not shorten a long buying cycle. It works on the confidence of the decision rather than the speed of it.

A book cannot be marketed once. The authors who get returns treat it as a standing habit, a few hours a month for years. The ones who treat launch week as the whole campaign are the ones with the pallet in the garage.

And a book does not excuse you from being present. All of it asks you to show up, on shows, on stages, and in the mail. The book makes the showing up count for more.

Start with the list

Open a document tonight and write names, one per line. The client who would hand your book to a colleague. The host whose audience is your buyer. The conference chair, and the two peers whose opinion moves your market.

Keep writing until you have 200 names.

That list is your marketing plan. Everything else is postage, a calendar, and the willingness to keep going after launch week ends.