Exactly how I self-published my book, sold 180,000 copies, and nearly doubled my revenue

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Growth Lab:

The Coaching Habit was published on February 29, 2016. (Leap Day! Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?)

In the year since, it’s sold nearly 200,000 copies, including 8,000 ebooks in one week in May. It made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list “organically” (which is to say, accidentally). It received more than 500 reviews on Amazon, 450 of which are five-star. And it’s been the number one book in the business/coaching category for about 95 percent of the year.

. . . .

So perhaps you’re considering writing a book yourself, or you’ve gone as far as to have a first draft in a digital drawer somewhere. We’ve all seen our marketing heroes grow a base of fans, then customers, then empires through “content marketing.” And the big kahuna in content marketing is the book. This is how you officially rise to “Thought Leader” status, it’s how you differentiate yourself from your competitors, you drive revenue, you launch your speaking career, you start hanging out with other cool authors. Easy enough, right?

As with most things involving your business, it’s a bit more complicated than it seems. Writing a book is a long, lonely, and oftentimes unsuccessful endeavor. My “instant success” was anything but. The Coaching Habit was the result of four years of floundering, rejection, and toil. So you don’t make my mistakes, allow me to share everything I used to vault my book from idea to bestseller (with a table of contents to skip to what you’d like to know).

. . . .

Part I: The New York publisher, the big-name agent, and misery

In 2010, I fell into a book deal with a fancy New York publisher. It happened remarkably quickly. I was planning to self-publish my second book and had printed a small run to send out to my friends for their feedback, a final step before I hit the “All In” button and printed several thousand. One of those friends, Nick, sent his copy on to his publisher who got excited and called me. I got excited, and told them they had 48 hours to make an offer, given the impending big print run. They got flustered but made an offer. And in less than a week, we had a deal.

Woo-hoo! (Note: As I’ve subsequently discovered, this is not at all how it normally works.)

Do More Great Work was launched, and it’s done well. In five years, it’s sold about 90,000 copies, and people who like it love it. I had my first experience with a publisher, and it was mostly good. There were the usual disappointments about design compromises (a little gap), and about what they thought of as marketing (a much bigger gap).

Courtesy, as well as my contract, obliged me to offer my next book to this publisher. And this time, rather than “Accidentally Do It Myself” like last time, I thought it was time to get an agent. Because that’s what “Real Authors” have. After talking to a few, I found someone who I considered smart and strategic, and who had an impressive roster of business authors. I signed up… and quickly entered a special kind of purgatory.

The next three years were spent in back-and-forth between me, the agent, and my publisher, and I failed to make any progress. I wrote proposals. The agent turned them down. I wrote more proposals. The agent and the publisher turned them down. I wrote entire books. My editor told me they “loved them” but didn’t “love them.”

So I tried to write the book that I thought they’d think they might love, if they knew what that book was, which they didn’t. Another miserable fail. And I wrote at least one other full-length version of the book somewhere in there as well, also rejected. It was a colossal waste of time that I could have spent growing and improving my business. I had lost my way. It crossed my mind more than once that I should be spending my time on something, anything, more productive. You know, marketing, sales, that sort of thing.

. . . .

Part III: Invest more upfront (and keep more money)

. . . .

Just so you know how the money works, for my first book Do More Great Work, which was published only as a paperback, I was paid an advance of $15,000 (which I was THRILLED about) and a royalty rate of eight percent for full-price books (this does not include those sold at a bulk discount rate).

The book sells for between $10 and $15, depending on how Amazon is feeling, which means I earn about $1 per sale, plus-or-minus 20¢. In the six years since it was originally published, it’s sold about 90,000 copies, meaning I’ve easily earned out my advance, and I get checks once or twice a year from the publisher (checks that get smaller each time).

For The Coaching Habit, I had to invest a bunch of money upfront (more about that above) and had to spend a bunch of money on the launch and ongoing marketing (more about that below). However, the economics of this book, if I can sell it, are much better. It costs me between $1.50 and $2.00 a copy to print it. It costs me money for shipping and storage. Our distributors pay us 60 percent of the sale price. The book sells for between $11 and $15, so that means I earn between about $4 and $6 for each print copy sold. The Kindle version sells for $5, and we get 70 percent of that from Amazon, so about $3.50 per copy sold. That’s anywhere between 300 and 500 percent more than I’d get with a traditional publisher!

Link to the rest at Growth Lab

Here’s a link to Michael Bungay Stanier’s books. If you like an author’s post, you can show your appreciation by checking out their books.

14 thoughts on “Exactly how I self-published my book, sold 180,000 copies, and nearly doubled my revenue”

  1. “Courtesy, as well as my contract, obliged me to offer my next book to this publisher. And this time, rather than “Accidentally Do It Myself” like last time, I thought it was time to get an agent.”

    And it all went to h*ll in a hand-basket from there …

    Once ‘penned’ he wasn’t allowed to write by that same agent and publisher. Never give them control over what you can or can’t write.

  2. I read the whole article–very interesting. Particularly striking is the very large amounts of money he spent in various marketing efforts. I guess this works if you’re a nonfiction writer using the book at least in part to drive clients toward your more lucrative non-book business. For novelists like myself, it would be financial suicide.

  3. I’m with Amy on this one! I just hope newbies don’t read articles like this, skip right over the fact that it’s nonfiction targeted to a specific (and very large) readership, and assume these tactics would work for fiction.

    Another concern I have is that new writers will come across advice that, even if it applies to fiction, is based on results obtained five or more years ago, during the ebook Gold Rush. Many very successful authors who got their break during that period don’t realize how drastically times have changed and are still offering the same advice.

  4. “I wanted my book to be the next level, better than anything you could find at your bookstore.” What book is better than… I’m sorry, but… what?

    “And I had to be prepared to invest, to spend at least $20,000.” Whoa!

    I was reading this with a baffled look on my face til I got to the part where he “asked Seth Godin to introduce me to his editor” I realized then that this was a guy with money, connections, and maybe didn’t know much about what it takes to publish book besides what his publishers taught him.

    I mean he paid a high-priced cover artist to go through 20 iterations of a non-fiction cover, and settled on something that looks like a theme template from blogger.com. Not the it’s a bad cover, but… holy sh**…

    S5,000 for a proofreader on a 249 page non-fiction book. Wow.

    Then you get to the real secrets – have a long running popular podcast that fits directly with the theme of your book, hire a $15K publicist, run a promo on Bookbub. Got it. Thanks.

    Not to begrudge his success, and I’m sure it’s good book…. but I agree with Jacqueline. I hope a new writer without this kind of platform doesn’t read that article in a vacuum.

    • @ STH

      “I hope a new writer without this kind of platform doesn’t read that article in a vacuum.”

      Really. But at least he didn’t sign with ASI or one of the other vanity presses. And the results show — he IS selling a lot of books!

  5. Simple steps to self-publishing success that anyone can follow!

    1. Set aside a least $20,000 for expenses. (You’ll probably need even more.)

    2. Do a regular podcast for 6 years prior to publishing so you build an audience.

    3. Get major names in your topic of interest to write positive blurbs for you. Don’t worry if they all aren’t famous (get those too), less well known leaders from major recognizable corporations will work also.

    4. Don’t forget to get on those airport shelves!

    Easy.

    Now, if you have a little bit more money to spend, here’s another approach:

    1. Set aside at least one million dollars for expenses.

    2. Spend $100,000 on covers, editing and promotion.

    3. Date Katy Perry for three years to make sure you have a good social media following. (Estimated budget for dating: $400,000.)

    4. Spend $500,000 to rent Elton John to play a concert at you book launch party.

    5. Make sure your book is in the front window of every book store in America!

    (Just teasing. It is interesting to read how the other half lives.)

  6. I remember Steve Martin’s take on get rich quick schemes from the ’80s:

    “How to Make a Million Dollars in Real Estate

    First, get a million dollars.”

  7. i think you guys are too hard on him. I took a look at his article and think that it seems like a good plan for the type of book he was writing and his reason for writing it. And he was very upfront about that. If you are not writing the same type of book for the same type of reason, his specific steps are not very helpful.

    but I think anyone can take a lesson from the idea to think about what your goals are and what success would look like to determine if it is worth it to you. And then to think about lots of ways to achieve that and try to implement the best ones.

    • I agree with what you saying here, and like I said, I don’t begrudge his success and I’m sure it’s a good book… but I think the complaints here are that his article is mostly about how to score a run in baseball the easy way.

      “First, be on third base. Then…” You know?

      • Well I don’t think he just ended up on 3rd base and that it was easy.
        I think that he got himself to 3rd base so he could then make it look easier ….. but he did a lot of additional work to get this particular book to be a success.

        for example all his contacts did not just magically happen… he built those up thru his work and then was able to utilize them to get the book some hype. Another lesson that may or may not apply to the type of book you write.

        • Agreed. No one is saying that he didn’t work hard or is undeserving in any way. All I and others here are saying is that this is not an applicable blue print for anyone who has does not already have a platform like the one he spent years building prior to writing this particular book. The criticism is that he is underselling the platform in favor of the procedures he used. Nothing wrong with anything that he did and his success is certainly deserved.

    • I couldn’t resist a little snark. But I did find the piece interesting and worth reading.

      The emphasis so far in self-publishing has been the struggling writer being able to quit their day job. The outsider who was shut out of the traditional publishing system who succeeds on their own.

      But this shows that traditional publishing is also failing successful published individuals who have plenty of resources to compete with them head on. (Like getting into airport shelves.) The most interesting part to me was how he had a pretty nice selling traditionally published work, and then got tired of having his time wasted by agents and editors who simply got in the middle and stopped him from publishing new work.

      So he went around them in a big way and succeeded in a big way. How long before some other major writers come to the conclusion they can do it on their own and make a lot more money too?

      If you can go around traditional publishers and get into airports, what is the purpose of them anymore?

  8. Found something useful.

    “Except that I couldn’t shake off the idea that this could be a really good book, if I only stopped trying to write the book that I thought they thought I thought they thought I thought they thought I should write.”

    That’s the truth. I’ve been there myself. Trying over and over again to pitch a book, writing outlines and synopses and trying to come up with that certain “thing” that the publishers wanted so they would *love* the book. I’ve been in that purgatory, which is why I’m so glad that I can write the book I want to write in the way I want to write it and make myself happy with what I self-publish.

    But yeah, the rest of the article about his success is pretty much unrepeatable and specific to one market that he was already successful in. Not really something another author can emulate. And I didn’t really enjoy his dismissive attitude about self-published works.

    And I wonder how true the “industry rule of thumb” still is. If 93% of the books sell less than a thousand copies.

Comments are closed.