Welcome to another episode of the Book Launch Show! This week Tim and Valerie get into the details of numbers and book sales. In the publishing industry you frequently hear about these very specific numbers when it comes to your audience reading or buying your book: 10, 1000, 10,000. Today we discuss what these numbers mean and what they will show and teach you about where you’re at in the marketing process. It is important to remember that selling a book requires a great deal of patience, because this is mostly a slow moving marketing space and you often have to wait a while before you get meaningful results. So if you want to know where these numbers come from and why you need to pay careful attention to them, be sure to join us for this one!
Key Points From This Episode:
- Why selling 1000 copies of your book is your first big breakthrough and what it proves.
- The number of sales required for word of mouth advertising to start being really effective.
- How books are different from other media in terms of their marketing pace and longevity.
- Why the time it takes you to reach certain numbers does not matter as much.
- The reason you need readers, not just buyers, and the problem with free books.
- The self-publishing boom that Kindle brought about and why it fizzled out.
- Timing and genre choice as key considerations for selling books today.
- Why it is necessary for upcoming authors to have basic marketing skills.
- Growing your email list as a productive marketing tool.
- Keeping track of your sales and download numbers on a regular basis.
- And much more!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/
Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl
Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/
Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis
The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/
Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557
The One Thing on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/One-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary-bestselling-ebook/dp/B00D3J2QKW/ref=sr
Your First 1000 Copies on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Your-First-Copies-Step-Step-ebook/dp/B00DMIWAIC
Seth Godin — https://www.sethgodin.com/
Jon Acuff — https://acuff.me/
11/22/63 on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/11-22-63-Stephen-King/dp/1501120603
Stephen King — https://www.stephenking.com/
Needful Things on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Needful-Things-Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1501143786
Book Launch Blueprint on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Book-Launch-Blueprint-Step-Step-ebook/dp/B019JMWGGK
Michael Bunker — https://michaelbunker.com/
Hugh Howey — http://www.hughhowey.com/
[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. This is Tim Grahl and this week, Valerie and I talk about numbers and book sales. There’s these different numbers if you hang around book marketing or book publishing long enough that you’ll hear a lot, right? There is your first 10 readers, your first hundred readers, a thousand and then 10,000.
You know, my first book was titled Your First 1000 Copies. Valerie opens with basically asking me, where did these numbers come from and why are they important? We spend a lot of time talking about that and why they’re there and why they exist and where they’ve come from and it’s really good, you know?
As we kind of come to an episode, it becomes these markers of how you’re doing with book marketing and I think that’s really important because it can feel overwhelming, it can feel slow, book marketing in general is a long, slow slog that takes a while to see results.
You know, one of the things in a blog post that I wrote about recently is it just – it takes about a year for your book marketing efforts to really pay off and I tell a story about the book, The One Thing and how the author worked his ass of for a year before he really saw the numbers start turning around.
It’s a really great episode, I think you’ll enjoy it and I think it will be helpful for you to get a glimpse into where these numbers come from, why they’re important and how you can use those when you’re thinking about getting your own book out into the world. I also want to mention that a lot of you email me a lot about wanting some help with your book launch or your book marketing or building your platform.
I’m not doing that as much anymore and the reason is because I have trained a lot of really smart, really expert book marketing professionals that can help you with that stuff. If you go to booklaunch.com/coaching, there is a list of really smart, really savvy, certified book launch coaches. These are people that went through a ton of training, came to Nashville, spent a lot of time with me getting trained here in Nashville, continue their training and they’re really smart people, really savvy people that have experience and can help you with your book marketing and book launching.
If you were looking for some help with that, I would definitely go to booklaunch.com/coaching and check out them. You can either reach out to one of them or you can just shoot us a note and we will connect you with one that’s right for you. Thanks for looking at that and we’re going to go ahead and jump into this week’s episode that’s all about the numbers of book marketing.
[0:02:58.9] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the book launch podcast. Helping authors launch and market their books.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:03:07.7] VF: Hey Tim, how are you?
[0:03:09.3] TG: I’m good, how are you?
[0:03:10.9] VF: I’m pretty good, thank you. I’m just about finished my Dracula analysis so I’m feeling pretty peppy.
[0:03:19.7] TG: Finishing that big project, I’m sure that feels good.
[0:03:22.2] VF: Yeah, next time, I’m picking a novella, I’m not picking a big behemoth. As I was working this week and I pulled out my copy of Your First 1000 Copies again. I had a question. Why a thousand copies? I can’t believe that I’ve not asked you this before. Because I’ve heard a couple of different variations.
When we did the love story workshop through Story Grid and Seth Godin came and spoke with us. He talked about 10 copies and he talked about a hundred copies. You talk about a thousand copies and I’ve heard Shawn Coyne talk about 10,000 copies. Why are these numbers magic and why are these the things that we need to go for?
[0:04:09.7] TG: I don’t remember what Seth said about 10 copies.
[0:04:12.8] VF: He was saying that, well, first of all, to give your book to 10 people and see if you just give part of it – part of your book, like the first chapter to 10 people and see if they ask for more.
[0:04:25.1] TG: Yes.
[0:04:25.7] VF: If they don’t, go back to the drawing board. If they do, you might be on to something.
[0:04:31.3] TG: Yes.
[0:04:31.7] VF: Then he said to see if you can get a hundred people interested in it. I think he was breaking it down to the smallest possible unit so as not to overwhelm us all completely.
[0:04:41.2] TG: Yeah. There’s some interesting numbers that pop up across the board. There’s this kind of round number of 250. What you see if you look at the data is that most books sell 250 copies in their first year. Whether they’re traditionally published or self-published. Everybody thinks the numbers will be different, they’re about the same.
The reason for that is we all know about 250 people or are connected to about 250 people. If we just kind of promote our book to the people we know, social media, friends, family, colleagues, you know, all that kind of stuff, you can usually sell about 250 copies of your book. What Seth was talking about is more on the front end of writing the book and creating kind of your first little, should I keep writing, is this interesting?
When I’m talking about is once the book is out. If you sell a thousand copies of your book, you’ve done something interesting which is you’ve gotten about 750 people that don’t know you to buy a copy of your book.
They are under no obligation whatsoever to buy a copy of your book and yet they did. What that means is you have figured something out and you’re doing something to convince strangers to buy your book. Because again, if I come out with a book and I just promote it to the people I’m directly connected to, kind of the easy people, I can get to about a couple of hundred copies and then it will fizzle out and you won’t be able to sell anymore and this is the people that you see posting on Facebook over and over about their book.
Because that’s where they got their initial sales but now that doesn’t work anymore because those people have either bought the book or decided not to buy the book. Where again, once you hit a thousand, you’ve done something, right? This is where you started going on podcast or you’ve spoken somewhere or you’ve gotten somebody to review your book or you’ve done something to break out of your initial sphere of influence.
That’s why a thousand copies is really important. Because if you can figure out how to sell a thousand copies, you have figured out how to get strangers to buy your book and now you just got to keep doing that in order to continue to grow. For me, what I’ve seen is it’s actually harder to sell your first thousand than to sell your next 9,000 because if you get to a thousand copies, you mostly just need to – even if you just keep doing whatever you were doing to build your audience or get in front of enough people to sell a thousand copies.
You just can keep doing that. Let’s say you get a book bob and you sell a thousand copies in one day. Then you just keep doing different forms of advertising and price promotions. You could probably get to 10,000 copies. I find that getting over that initial hump of getting 750 strangers to buy your book is often the hardest. Now, the number 10,000 is, it was one of those numbers that I heard several times in the publishing world of like, that’s – it’s weird.
I heard it in different places. One guy, I knew, in the Christian world, there is this – there’s this LifeWay Christian bookstores, it’s this chain of Christian bookstores that are across the country and they have their own publishing house. They’re one of the few publishing houses that actually own the audience that they’re selling their books to which is one of the things we’ve talked about before.
A friend of mine got basically hired to write this marriage book and when he got hired, they said, we will sell 10,000 copies of this book in the first year and they ended up selling like 10,100 copies. They knew exactly how many books they would be able to sell. That’s one way I found it but I’ve heard it several times where it’s like, if you get a traditional publishing deal, they want you to be able to sell at least 10,000 copies of your book.
Now, if you’ve got some huge advance, they’re expecting a whole lot more than that, but if you just get kind of the run of the mill publishing deal, that’s the number they’re looking for, they want you to hit 10,000 copies. I had never understood where that number came from or why it was important.
Until Shawn explained it to me and he does some kind of reductionist math and there’s 350 million people in the United States and here’s the percentage of those people that are readers and then here’s the percentage of those people and – but the basic idea is if you can get 10,000 people to read your book and give it a try. You will then find out if your book is going to make it or not.
If 10,000 people read it, that’s all you need to make the book keep selling without you ever doing anything. Now, if 10,000 people give it a try and they don’t really like it or wasn’t all that interesting, your book’s going to die. But, if you get 10,000 people to read it and give it a try, that’s all you need to start the word of mouth into it.
Your book will keep selling for a long time automatically. The interesting thing about books is they have a longer shelf life than the majority of the movies or music in general, they have a longer shelf life, they age better. But they also market slower.
The new Marvel movie’s about to come out and everybody’s going to go see it on opening weekend and then a year from now, nobody will be watching that movie. Where with books and most cases, unless it’s written by a celebrity or something, it starts out slow, builds over time and you really don’t see a lot of your marketing, doesn’t pay off for about a year.
Just takes a long time because what happens is, people buy your book and they – I mean, I’ve already had this happen where like, okay, one of the first people I gave my book to is Jon Acuff and it wasn’t till six months later that he read it and started posting about it because he liked it so much. It just took that long, right?
Because he’s you know, he’s a busy guy, he probably get sent books by everybody and so mine was just in a stack and it took a while to get down to my spot in the stack. That’s how books work. Your job is to get 10,000 people to give your book a try, to read your book. My goal would be to sell 10,000 copies. If you can pull that off. The book will probably keep selling long into the future, right? Like Your First 1,000 Copies.
I haven’t touched that book in six years, I have not actively promoted it in five and it just keeps, every day I sell copies of that book because I think of it like a rocket launch. If you stop promoting your book at 3,000 copies, it’s going to crash, no matter what happens. If only 3,000 people ever gave your book a try, it’s not enough to get it out of orbit, to really get it up. Now, once you get it up and now Shawn and Steve’s opinion.
Once you – your job is to get 10,000 people to read it and your job is done. At that point, it’s just up to the gods whether or not it keeps going out into the world. One of the great things about being published by them with my last book is they really don’t care.
They’re not like putting any pressure on me to promote the book or you know, it’s like, we launched it, we got a bunch of people to read it, now the book, you know, it’s like we pushed it out of the nest, it’s up to the book to fly on its own.
Well, I might try to keep promoting it and they’re like okay, fine, whatever, you know? That’s what those numbers are. I think your first job is to sell a thousand copies because then, you figure out some marketing, you figured out how to get strangers to buy your book.
Then your next job is to keep doing things until you get to 10,000 copies sold because now you’ve given your book a shot. Enough people have read it that if it resonates, it will keep selling on its own.
[0:13:18.3] VF: You said something in there, the 10,000 copies is the number that you need to start the word of mouth engine. I think that’s my favorite sentence ever. I like that idea, I really couldn’t wrap my head around that one. Now, here’s a question. That 10,000, is that within a particular timeframe, are you looking to launch with that many, you know, eventually or is that within a year, within the first couple of years, does it matter?
[0:13:53.6] TG: I don’t think it matters because like this morning, I just sold a copy of Stephen King’s 11/22/63, right, I was at Jiu Jitsu and the guy was like, asking me about my favorite – what are you reading right now? I’m like, I’m reading Needful Things by Stephen King. He’s like, “Yeah, I’ve never really read Stephen King”, and I said, “Okay, 11/22/63 is one of my favorite books ever, you should go buy copy.” He’s like “I’m going to buy one as soon as I get out of class.”
Well that book came out in 2011. I read it probably four or five years ago and now I just sold a copy, right? Book came out, let’s see him looking at it. Eight and a half years ago. Took me a few years to read it, then took me a lot of years to tell this guy about it. Now, he’s going to read it sometime in the next month and he might wait three more years to tell somebody about it.
That’s how book marketing works. I don’t’ think it matters. I think you could come out with a book, not do anything, 10 years later, start promoting it, sell 10,000 copies and now it will work. Unless you wrote about like I don’t know, the Trump presidency or something, right? Something that will – god help us, eventually end. You know, unless it’s some kind of timely thing that just won’t be interesting after a certain date like people that wrote books about the Y2K bug, it didn’t matter how many books they sold, after Y2K, nobody would ever buy that again.
Barring anything like that, but of course, you want to sell your book as fast as it can so I just ran a launch the book came out last week and we sold somewhere north of 10,000. Between the preorders and the first week of sales, we broke well over 10,000 copies in the first week. That’s great.
Most books don’t do that. For your first 1,000 copies, it took me a year to sell 10,000 copies, it will probably take me about a year to sell 10,000 copies of Running Down a Dream. I don’t think it matters, I’m more interested in – did you sell copies last week? Did you sell copies this week, are you going to sell copies next week?
Because what I see with a lot of people that do huge launches and they sell 10,000 copies of their book is they just stop after that. I’m more interested in like continuing to put the book out into the world, but I don’t think it matters because books just takes a long time to be promoted because they take a long time to read and you know, it just takes a long time to tell other people about the book.
You know about Your First 1,000 Copies and you’ve probably sold copies for me over the last several years but it’s like, you meet an author, you have a conversation, you should read this book. Well, I came out with that book in 2013. If somebody’s hearing about the book for the first time on this podcast and they go buy a copy that took me six years to sell them a copy of the book.
I feel like it’s always the long game with books because they just – that’s what I love about books is like, if they don’t work, if they don’t sell the first month, you know, of movie, if that sucker doesn’t hit the first month, it doesn’t matter, it goes in the trash bin, where books like last forever.
[0:17:24.5] VF: I can build, if I’m looking at Masquerade, the book that I have out now, I can build on the sales I’ve already made from that. I’m not really starting from scratch in terms of sales right now with this – now that I’m focused on actually doing outreach and promotion.
[0:17:43.8] TG: Yeah. I don’t think there’s – Yeah, for sure. I mean, you told me before we started recording that you’ve had people emailing you, wanting you to finish the series, that’s a good sign. I think yeah, because people ask me all the time like what if your book’s been out three years, can you run a launch again? I’m like “Yeah”, you know, sure.
There is no reason you can’t. You know I still get interviewed on podcasts where people want to talk to me about Your First 1,000 Copies and my other Book Launch Blueprint and so people listen to those and they go buy a copy because it is the first they have heard of it. So I look at just keep going until – like I tell an author you can stop once you have sold 10,000 copies, otherwise you should keep going.
[0:18:32.5] VF: So Masquerade right now is entirely digital. My plan is to in the fall come out of a print version, hardback and paperback. It doesn’t matter the format right? It is 10,000 together.
[0:18:47.0] TG: Yeah, so Shawn and Steve, they’re theory is you need 10,000 people to read your book. So they don’t think it matters if people buy it or not. What I found is people tend to not read books that they get for free unless outlying situations like I gave Jon Acuff a copy and because he is a friend of mine he read the book or I had sent a 100 copies to fans with the explicit direction of read the book and leave a review. Otherwise, when people get books for free they tend not to read them, in my opinion.
[0:19:22.5] VF: Right and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago and I heard the phrase Kindle stuffing one time and it’s exactly what it – like I completely understand what that is and I am guilty of it myself and it just sits there on your kindle and you forget about it because you haven’t invested anything whatsoever in it not even a quarter.
[0:19:40.4] TG: Right, yeah Michael Bunker, another author first used that and I was like, “Oh yeah that is a great term for it” because see that was huge. So when Kindles first came out, people probably like you and me bought them, right? I don’t know and you had this and it was kind of clunky and you were in the cutting edge, my first Kindle was a Kindle 2, right? So it is the second version of the kindle. So long time ago and there weren’t a lot of titles on it, right?
This is when they were still fighting with publishing and they were really expensive or just not available on the Kindle and then you had all these self-published authors coming onto the scenes and that is when serializing your novel became really popular like Hugh Howey was probably the first one really strongly successful with it and all of these people were coming out with books and so people like you and me started just buying anything.
Hey, it is 99 cents, what the hell? And we buy it, buy it, buy it but then it became as the market matured, we stopped doing that. We started buying books that we would actually read because we realized we have bought 50 books and read three of them and so early on this was this gold rush with self-publishing of literally all you had to do was come out with a book and it would start selling because all of these people had Kindles and there wasn’t a lot of options for books available.
And the idea of getting a book for 99 cents was just so tantalizing to us readers that have been paying at least eight or nine dollars for a book for their whole lives but then that kind of past and now people even if it is 99 cents they are not going to buy it unless they think they are going to read it because they went through that a while ago. So I like to sell books because to me it increases the likelihood that somebody is going to at least open that sucker up and try the first few pages, and that’s what Sean means.
He wants 10,000 people to give the book a try to actually try to start reading and it, because his belief is sometimes a book hits and sometimes it doesn’t. It could be a perfectly written book but maybe it is the wrong time for the book, right? Was that – The Great Gatsby, right? It didn’t hit for years and it was because what finally made it hit is the army bought like however many copies and sent them to everybody that was out in World War Two and that is when it finally gained traction.
But it had been out for years and years by that point. So you know Shawn and Steve believe strongly in the muse and that sometimes you write a book and the universe and your muse just don’t get along, you know? And then there’s books that like if we are talking about genre, I forgot like somebody wanted to write a book that was like I forgot. It was a mix of two genres that Shawn and I were talking about. He said it was the most commercially unviable book, like genre pick.
Just like if you write poetry you are probably not going to sell 100,000 copies of your poetry you know what I mean? It is just the wrong time and so there is certain genres that you know writing a Western right now is not going to work the way writing a thriller would just because. So you can write the best Western on the planet, it probably is not going to sell as well as a mediocre thriller, but my thing is if that you work hard on a book and you put it out into the world, try to get 10,000 people to buy that book.
Even for 99 cents and then you get to see and I believe that too many authors come out with their book, it doesn’t sell very well for the first month, they get really embarrassed so they start promoting it and then they never find out if book, they never give the book a chance. To me, it’s like you give birth to this thing, this baby, it doesn’t walk in the first month and you’re like, “Well this one is fucked up. I am just going to…” you know? That is what it feels like.
So many authors do that, cause I’m like, the amount of pain I go through to produce a book, I am going to do everything I can to make it work. I am not going to give up. It is fascinating to me that I see authors that work on a book for two years come out with it. It doesn’t sell well immediately and they just drop it and move on to writing the next book and it just breaks my heart you know? So that is kind of my thing, is like, if you don’t know how to sell a thousand copies you should first try to learn marketing well enough to sell a thousand copies.
Then at that point your goal is, how am I going to sell 10,000 copies? How am I going to take this thing I’ve built that sold the first thousand and get to the next 10?
[0:24:41.2] VF: But that includes – so, for Masquerade the first part is a free download from my site. They are not paying money for that one but they are paying an email address. So there is some sort of cost and they have to actually go proactively to my site to get it. So I am thinking that the likelihood of those people at least opening the book and giving it a try is pretty high because they have to actually work to get it.
So in that case, do the free downloads count as part of that 10,000 or in my mind totally separate them or am I splitting hairs?
[0:25:22.6] TG: Well yeah, I mean the 10,000 is just like, you want to make it to California and I say shoot for the Pacific ocean and you will probably hit it, you know what I mean? There is no magic. If you sell 9500 copies or you get 9500 readers it will probably work as well, you know? So it is more like I am just keeping a rough number in my head of what I pulled off. So let’s say you sell 7,000 and you give away 5,000 you know? Well that is like 12,000 but you know some of those were giveaways. So that rounds to about 10,000, like it is more like, get a really big pile of people to give it a shot.
[0:26:14.3] VF: Right, well this is why that cross promotion that I tried way back when did not work because it was a numbers game and people were focused on the 10,000 rather than the fact that it is 10,000 people who actually read the book, who actually open the cover and give it a try because that is what you are looking for. People who read this genre to try to your book and if it is good enough they’ll tell someone, right?
[0:26:40.9] TG: Yeah, well it is like these authors that band together and do box sets of 12 books to hit the USA Today list or something. It’s like well you know nobody is probably going to read your book. Let’s all be honest about what we are doing here, you know? You are gaming a system so you can call yourself an USA Today bestseller, which is fine. I am not passing a moral judgment on that. What I am saying is we both know nobody is going to read all 12 of those.
So I would say lying to yourself about this is not helpful, so what you are trying to do is can I honestly tell myself that 10,000 people have cracked the cover of this book and read the first page. If not, then I need to keep going, you see what I mean?
[0:27:36.5] VF: Yeah, absolutely and it is the thing that I like, well I like a lot of stuff about this, but one of the things that I like about this is that it gives you a target to shoot for. It gives me a target to shoot for. So rather than it just being this foggy concept of I’ve got to try and sell something to somebody somewhere somehow, when I have a goal insight I at least know the direction I am going in rather than just wondering around. So 10,000 books –
[0:28:09.2] TG: That’s why I harp so much on email list right? Part of it is the truth that an email list is the best way to get your audience’s attention and drive action. The other part is it cuts through all the bullshit of like if I Google right now book marketing, the first article underneath the ads it comes up is a 119 book marketing ideas that can help authors increase sales and there is so many things. I mean if you read the article it is even worse, because about a 112 of those are complete waste of time.
But the worst part of it is now you have a 119 things you are supposed to be doing. That is not helpful to anybody and so my thing is like have one goal, build an email list. Now that is your litmus test. If what you are doing is getting people on your email list, then you should do it. If what you are doing is not getting people on your email list, you probably shouldn’t do it. So that to me and so it is the same thing with these sales numbers.
There is no magic in selling a thousand copies. Your life is not, you are not going to wake up the day you sell your thousand copies and something has changed you know? But it is an indicator that you are going in the right direction. Again, continuing to use the road map thing, like if you are heading to California and you started in New York and you find yourself in Illinois that is an indicator that you are going in the correct direction, right? You still haven’t like – nothing has changed.
You are not where you want to be but you are on the path, where if you are six months in to quote marketing your book and you have only sold 200 copies, you are doing something wrong. So it doesn’t mean you are a bad person. It just means what you’re doing is not working, you need to find something else to do and so yeah, that is the kind of place I land with that.
[0:30:12.3] VF: All right, so I am shooting for 10,000 copies in readers hands. I can do that.
[0:30:15.8] TG: Yeah, how many would you say you have now?
[0:30:17.1] VF: Oh you asked me this before. I think it was something – when I looked at it before wasn’t it something like 1,600 and I haven’t looked since?
[0:30:25.1] TG: I don’t remember.
[0:30:27.1] VF: I am really bad at this. I don’t like to look and I need to get in the habit of doing this but I think it was around 1,600 when we started and then I would have to check to see how many others have been sold since then. So I am on the path. I just need to move further down it.
[0:30:46.8] TG: Okay, and then like, I mean one thing that you could do when you are ready to really get cranking is start keeping track on a weekly basis and how many books did I sell on the last week or how many new downloads did get have both numbers? And because it is like having a budget or it is like getting on the scale every day, right?
[0:31:15.6] VF: God forbid.
[0:31:17.8] TG: Yeah, I mean forcing yourself to do that is like I have to face this thing now every day. Like I work with a nutritionist and I have to report my daily weight to him. So the first thing I do in the morning is I get up and I use the restroom and then I get on the scale. It is exactly the same every morning and that forces me, like now when I go to eat something I’m like, “Well I am going to have to get on the scale in the morning and see the result of what I am doing right now.”
So you are cranking on this thing, I think you should be looking at your numbers every week. So when I came out with Your First 1000 Copies about four months in, I decided to start the 10,000 book challenge of trying to sell 10,000 copies in the first year my book was out and every week, I would send my sales figures to my email list. Now it is a little different because I was teaching book marketing so it was relevant people cared what I was selling as oppose to most people don’t.
But it was a way for me to hold myself accountable where each week I’m like, “Okay what am I going to do? Because in a week, I am going to send out an email and if it is three sales, that is embarrassing.” So I think if you are finishing the last book in the series, you have done 1,600, if we are talking again a year from now and you’ve only sold 3,000, something has gone wrong.
[0:32:54.1] VF: Yeah, most of those came in the beginning when I was actually doing things and then I stopped marketing because I was just wondering around and I focused on the craft. So most of those came in the beginning and then there was a big lull and when I say lull, I mean I flat line.
[0:33:13.3] TG: Yeah, I mean but that is what we’ve been trying to –
[0:33:15.4] VF: So now it is ramping back up, right?
[0:33:18.4] TG: Yeah but I think holding yourself to looking at we should start this spreadsheet where each week before we get on the podcast, you have to fill in how many downloads you’ve had and how many books you’ve sold, and it is a way to hold me accountable because what I am telling you and you are doing what I am telling you and those numbers aren’t going up there is a problem and I don’t want to do this in theory you know?
I want to do this for real. So I think it would be good when you kind of because you are finishing Dracula, you’ve been updating your website. You are finishing the last book, you are doing a lot of things in preparation, but this should turn into, “Hey look I am selling more books.”
[0:34:03.7] VF: Absolutely. I like to sell books because I like money. I am pro-money, let’s get more money.
[0:34:13.4] TG: Yeah.
[0:34:15.4] VF: All right, so that sounds like homework. I’ll get a spreadsheet set up and we’ll just start filling the puppy in.
[0:34:22.8] TG: All right, that sounds good.
[0:34:23.9] VF: Thank you, Tim.
[0:34:24.9] TG: All right, thanks Valerie.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:34:26.9] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.
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[END]
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