The School of Greatness - 270 How to Launch a New York Times Bestselling Book

Episode Date: December 31, 2015

"It's going to take everything you've got." - Lewis Howes If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/270

This is episode number 270, all about how to get a book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome, everyone, to the episode today. Thank you so much for joining me.

This is the last episode of 2015. Yes, we made it. You guys made it. We're all still here. We're still kicking. We've had some ups and downs together, but we made it. And I'm super proud of all of you for all that you created, all the results, the success, the love, the joy, the passion, and the struggles that you face this year, because it's not as fun without some of the struggles sometimes. And you've got to go through the struggles to get the success. So always keep that in mind.

But 2016 is going to be a big year. And a lot of people have been asking me to do a recap about how did I do it? How did I get to the top of the New York Times bestseller list? And, you know, first off, I'm going to go over a number of these points. And if you go back to lewishouse.com slash 270, I'm going to have the show notes back there with all the pictures, the notes that I took from years ago, the things that helped me, the tools that helped me get there, notes from my notebook to all the different things that I did to make this happen.

And when I look back on it and reflect on it, you know, a lot of people are asking me, man, you're everywhere. How did you do it? You crushed it. You know, you're everywhere. The book is doing incredible. And I think back to, you know,

it's not just me. It's taken an army of people to make it happen. So it's not just like I did all this myself. And before I even talk about the key strategies of launching the book, it really started off years ago with finding the right agent to support me. Then with the right agent, finding the right publisher. A lot of people who write a book, sometimes their publisher, they get screwed over

by them, and that's why they don't make the New York Times bestseller list. So it's finding the right agent, Steve Hanselman, who's my agent, to finding the right publisher, Rodeo, which is an incredible publisher for me. And the topic that I'm into and the niche that I'm in, they've got an incredible team over there that really supported my vision. And they got behind my vision. And I've heard horror stories from other author friends who, you know, worked with publishers that just did everything against what they wanted to do and didn't support their vision. So before the book, and then finding the right team of people to help write and edit and proofread and do research and do the design and then finding the right team of people to help write and edit and proofread and

do research and do the design and everything that I needed. You know, my photographer, Nick Onken, who helped with the cover of the book and all these different things. So many people were a part of it. My entire team with my company, everyone who supported all the late nights and editing and researching, you know, it took a lot to just get to the place of the book being what it is before it even launches. So that's what you got to think about and have into consideration when you want to launch a book. If you want to be a New York Times bestseller and you want to make it happen, you got to think that there are a lot of people that are going to be involved before you actually

even get the book out there. It's hard to hit the New York Times bestseller list if you're self-publishing. I've seen people do it before, and it's going to be really challenging. If you don't have a huge audience by yourself already, if you're not able to get a lot of press, mainstream press, it's going to be really challenging to do it unless you have about a quarter of a million dollars or more to spend on buying your own books and, you know, kind of gaming the system that way by just buying a bunch of books and making it look like other people bought it. But if you don't have that, then here are some of the strategies. I'm going to give like 10 to 12 main strategies that I had with launching the book. And I wrote this down. This is in my notebook that I had from over a year ago.

And I remember meeting with, you know, talking with Tim Ferriss and Tucker Max and Ryan Holiday and a lot of other people about the strategy. And I wrote down my strategy and shared it with them. And I was like, tell me, am I missing anything? This is something I've been researching for years, right? And I've been researching the best of the best. And I was like, tell me if I'm missing anything. And they're all like, no, you pretty much got it covered.

It's just a matter of executing it. And they gave me a few other creative ideas here and there. But the main big things to push a lot of books is what I'm going to be talking about right now. So I have this listed down. And I'm going to talk about, you know, the top things that really helped push a lot of things at the top, and then we'll go in descending order. So one of the biggest things was the bulk buys. This is the bulk buys from friends, from corporations, from events. Some of them, people just bought a couple thousand copies for their top customers to give away as gifts. And they had

warehouses that they could ship to directly. So they bought them, and then they would ship them out to their customers who either spent thousands of dollars on their products over the years or whatever it may be that they supported by giving back to their customers. So there was that situation with a few people. There were friends that were just said, Hey, I want to buy a hundred copies and give away to my community online. Um, my membership site members, things like that. There were people that, um, you know, bought one for all the attendees of their conferences, right? So I had people say, Hey, I will forego my speaking fee. Um, if you buy a certain amount of copies for your attendees at your events because I do a lot of speaking as well. So this was the biggest thing. This was what helped get a lot of the bulk of the

orders, right? A lot of the sales go through initially to make sure that you get enough to count for the New York Times bestseller list. So I had a lot of people buying, you know, a hundred thousand, you know, 500, whatever it may be, a couple thousand here and there to support that and essentially doing partnerships with their company, with their events and things like that and making that work. So that was one of the top ones. The second thing would be, in my opinion, ones. The second thing would be, in my opinion, is the podcast tour that I did. So I have a list of all the top podcasters that I know, right? And I reached out to them and I've built relationships over the last three years because the School of Greatness podcast has been in the top 50 a number of times in the world on iTunes and it gets over a million downloads a month. So I've been building

relationships with other podcasters, getting on their podcast, they've been on mine, things like that. So I said, okay, I'm going to set out to do a podcast tour, because I know that direct to consumer from a trusted source is the best way to sell books. And it used to be a single author blog was the best way to sell a bunch of books. But now I think a single author, let's say, or single speaker podcast is the best way to do it. Because if people are listening to you for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, they've really built that relationship and trust with you. And if you recommend a book or product or service, they're more likely to buy it based on your recommendation, right? And people will more and more listen to podcasts.

And obviously, blogs are still huge. But I was going after the podcasting game because that's the game I'm playing in. I'm in the podcasting world. So I went on a podcast tour. And I did, I don't even know how many podcasts I did. It had to be, it seemed like a couple of hundred, but it was probably only like 25 to 35 range of major podcasters. And then I did a lot of smaller interviews for some smaller, medium-sized podcasts to see if any of those would push the needle. But really the bigger podcasts, those helped push the needle. Getting on Gary Vaynerchuk's show, getting on Michael Hyatt's show, Pat Flynn, Chalene Johnson, John Lee Dumas, Rich Roll, Rob Bell. I got a big push from his podcast. A lot of other big podcasters out there. Jordan Harbinger's The Art of Charm. So there were a lot of people that supported Michael Stelzner's show.

I'm missing a lot of the big names, but you can go back to lewishouse.com and see some of these podcasts that I got featured on. And really, a lot of those helped push the needle. I wouldn't say that one of them got thousands of sales by one episode, but collectively, I remember getting emails and messages on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram from people saying, I remember getting emails and messages on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram from people saying, Lewis Howes is in every one of my podcasts, in my whole podcast feed that I subscribe to, Lewis Howes is on their show. And they were like, people would send these messages saying, after I saw him on this show and this show and this show and this show, I wasn't convinced, but then he was on this show. And because I'm such a huge fan of that person,

I finally bought the book, right? So you never know where it's going to convert. And maybe you might need to be everywhere all at once, which is what I tried to do as well. So the podcast tour was huge. And I believe moving forward in the next couple of years, that's going to be the key way to generate the maximum amount of sales for your time with your book. The next thing I would say was street team. I had a street team. We did 1,000 people applied to be on the street team. We took 500 of the top 500, and a lot of those members were just so excited. They were so excited to buy the book,

to write reviews for the book on Amazon, which is a big deal. You want to get those reviews up early on. They would promote different social media posts and share the book out to their audiences. Some of these members had very small followings. Others had bigger followings, but they were so committed to getting the word out there

and they were passionate about it. These are your top evangelists, the people that support you the most. I recommend getting a street team, whether it's 25 people, 1,000 people, whatever it may be, where you give them some criteria. And we asked them to write a review. We gave them a free copy of The Galley, which was a pre-release copy that no one else could get. And it wasn't the finished version, but we gave them a paperback bound copy. a free copy of The Galley, which was a pre-release copy that no one else could get. And it wasn't the finished version, but we gave them a paperback bound copy. And we asked them to buy a copy the week of and to share it with their friends.

And so a lot of those 500 people bought at least one copy. Some people bought 30 copies, 10 copies, 15 copies. They wanted to be a part of it. And it was a powerful thing. So I recommend doing a street team. I also had a bonus page, bonus launch page, where I offered different digital goods, physical goods. I offered to give away my car to someone who bought a certain amount of books. books. I offered to do all these different exclusive one-off things that really money couldn't buy unless you bought a certain amount of books, then you could get these experiences. And I'll have that linked up on the show notes as well. If you go to lewishouse.com

slash 270, you can see the page of all the things I offered. And this is really critical. I think in getting people to support you, if they're going to buy one book, why not try to get them to buy three books? And if they're going to buy three books, why not try to get them to buy 10 books, right? And if they're going to buy 10, why not try to get them to buy 30? And so on and so on. And there are going to be people that are going to want to buy 100 books, 1,000 books, 1,500 books. You never know unless you put it out there. So I say make the offer because you never know who wants to buy something from you unless you put it out there. So the bonus launch page or the land rush, that was a big deal.

The next thing would be press. Press got a lot of attention for me, and I was very grateful. For the last five, six, seven years, I've been networking and building relationships with a lot of journalists and reporters and TV personalities and press. And I've been, what I say, doing the pre-work. I've been doing the practice reps. I've been going on the local news, the regional news, the national news for the last couple of years promoting my business to get myself media trained, experienced so that I can become ready for the big game, the big show, the playoffs when the book comes out and I need to be at my best. So for a couple of years, I knew I was going to come out with a book and I said, okay, I want to get pressed now so I can build these relationships, get on TV, see what it's like so that when my book actually comes out, I'm not this nervous young little puppy dog that's like

drooling and shaking because I have no clue what to say or how to do it. And I have no clue how to react if something goes wrong. I just wanted to get a lot of practice reps for the years leading up and build those relationships so that I could, one, have the relationships to lean on, but also to have some media clips to show the bigger press like, hey, I've been on TV, I've been featured here, here and here, which makes me more credible, right? So the press was a big deal. You know, I got the cover of Experience Life magazine, which was an incredible experience. And, you know, it was in every Barnes & Noble in the country. So that came out during the launch of my book, which was huge. Got on Fox and Friends with my friend Clayton Morris, who

had 2 million people watching live. And within the hour after that happened, it was ranked the number 100 on Amazon. And then it went to number 10 within that hour. And so I definitely saw a spike from that. A know, a lot of other Fox News stations I got on my friend Kimberly Guilfoyle talked about me and held the book up on a primetime Fox News hour and said this book will change your life. I highly recommend you getting it. There are a lot of great press features that supported it. I got on the you know, Good Day New York, Good Day LA, a lot of regional press when I was on my tour. They booked me on TV as well. So I would say finding maybe like the five to 10 big press things that you could do to get on to support promoting and moving the needle. press that I did that did nothing for me. A lot of blogs that was like press related that did nothing and interviews on some radio stations that did nothing. So what I would do if I were

to do it all over again, I'd focus on like, okay, here are the 10 TV shows that I want to get on. And I'm gonna put all my energy to getting on those shows and forget the rest. Because the rest was just a lot of time and energy that probably didn't sell many books at all. So I got some good video clips from it here and there, but it probably wasn't the best thing for me. The next thing I would say is online featured posts and video interviews online. So either written articles or featured video interviews. So this is with Yahoo Health. Michelle Pramaleco at Yahoo

Health did a great video interview with me and got featured on yahoo.com. Then Huffington Post Live, I did something with them. My friend as a producer were there that hooked me up with that, and that got a lot of attention. Fast Company wrote something. Inc. had something. Entrepreneur. A lot of the top websites in my niche all did features about the book or me or something about my brand, which helped as well. Then people who do have the single author blogs like Ramit Sethi and Derek Halpern, Jonathan Fields, and people like that. A lot more people out there who wrote posts. Jeff Goines, again, Michael Hyatt, a lot of these other individuals who wrote articles and featured posts about me on their site and then sent out newsletters to their entire audiences promoting those articles. Those really helped push the needle as well and were huge support, huge support. When single author bloggers write about a whole article about you and share

it out, John Acuff is another guy that I'm remembering right now. Again, there's a long list of people that really supported and wrote great posts and featured me and shared it out. posts and featured me and shared it out. That was huge. I would also say I did a webinar tour and kind of like had a bigger affiliates just help promote it out as well. Someone that comes to mind is Chalene Johnson. She is a big podcaster and has a huge audience online. I've never seen someone promote so hard for me in my life. And she sent out a couple of newsletters to her entire email list just about the book. She was periscoping every day the entire launch week, just telling people, giving people away free gifts for buying the book, getting her audience to rally behind it and to buy the book. She was probably one of the biggest supporters of the book, and it was incredible that she got behind it and just buy the book. You know, she was probably one of the biggest supporters of the book and it was incredible that she got behind it and just shared it out. I did other webinars with other people who were affiliates for mine in the past who just said, Hey, I want to have you on a

webinar and promote you to my audience. And that was really effective as well. But finding people who are affiliates, finding people who can get you on a webinar so you can teach free content and then sell your book at the end. And what I would do is sell the bonus page that you have for buying 10 books, 30 books, things like that. Sell that at the end. I also did something that was really effective, was an event. I did a live event with Michael Port, a friend of mine, another author, had a book that came out a couple of weeks before me. And we said, hey, why don't we do a live event in LA? And I think we, and what we did is we said, okay, you buy 10 books, you get a free ticket to the event. So we paid for the event. We paid for the venue. We paid for our own expenses. We just said, hey, buy 10 books, which was essentially

$200. And you get a ticket to the event for free. And we had some other bonuses that we gave away, some digital things for people that came. I think we had like 250 people show up. And it moved like for me, it moved over 1,500 books or somewhere like that. And so that was really powerful. It was a way to get people that wanted to come to an event, wanted to connect with me and Michael Port to support us, but also they got 10 books each for coming, and that was a lot of fun to get a push of books in advance before the book launch. I did a book tour, 15 different cities around the country, and I also went to Montreal in Canada. And I did a big launch party in LA and New York City. And those launch parties were big. I think both of those had 350 people come through the door. So it created a lot of buzz, created a lot of awareness. We had press come, we had influencers. And I think those are good to do, especially if you're younger and maybe, younger and maybe don't have a family and you're, you're open to traveling for a month of your life. Um, you know, it was worth doing. I don't know if I'd do a full tour the next time I might do like a smaller mini tour. Um, and at least just do like a couple of big launch parties and call it a day because it

was exhausting doing a tour, but it was so powerful for me to get that experience and speak that many times in a row in that short of a window. And I felt like it just got better as a speaker and a presenter each book stop and the power of connecting with people in person and nothing beats that. Nothing beats saying hi to people, giving them a hug, seeing them in person and thanking them for supporting you in your book. And it was just a great experience, you know, going all over the country and meeting people who listen to the podcast and feel that support. So that was a big thing. I am forgetting that my podcast, this was one of the biggest things, you know, my podcast, The School of Greatness was a huge factor in generating sales. For two months, if you guys have been listening to

the podcast and have been listeners for a long time, for two, three months before the book came out, I started announcing it. And Chalene Johnson gave me this pointer. She said, every episode, you need to announce it. Tell people to opt in for your newsletter or opt in for, you know, to text something to opt in via text, and to get on a special list to get behind the scenes to get bonuses, things like that. And so I was promoting it constantly on my podcast. And it may be a little too much for some people. But for me, I wanted to make sure that I gave 100% of my effort into making this the best launch I could possibly make it. So my podcast was big. Also on the affiliate side of things, like I talked about,

I did a partnership with AppSumo. And this was a big one. They've got, I think, over half a million or a million email lists. And they did a partnership with me. And I think we sold 1,400 or 1,500 books through their partnership. So that was another big affiliate opportunity there. And I also did something with CreativeLive. I did a CreativeLive workshop and people who bought the course got a book and all these other things. So there are a

lot of great partnership opportunities and affiliate opportunities you can do out there with companies like that. The next thing, I hired a buddy, Jefe Greenheart, and his wife to do a book trailer, a video book trailer. I wanted to make the most epic book launch trailer possible. And we created this one-minute beautiful video that really inspired greatness and told a story. And, you know, we shot for like four or five months all over the country shooting people who are in the book and inspiring. It was like an aspiring Rocky workout montage video essentially. And it was the essence of the book in a one-minute video. And it got a ton of views on YouTube.

It got a ton of views on Facebook. And people really talked about how inspiring that was for them to have that book trailer. We also did a Facebook ad campaign. I didn't spend a lot of money on this, but I wanted to make sure that people just saw the book. They saw my face during the book launch. And if they clicked on something before, then they'd get retargeted and see it on Facebook as well

to continue that process. Something we did do that wasn't as effective was I did an online virtual summit. And we did this summit called Unleash Your Greatness Summit. And it was actually great content, but we launched it like two weeks after the book launch. Maybe it was two or three weeks after the book launch. And it was hard to get the traction for it because I'd already promoted the book so hard for a couple of months that trying to promote something different, this online summit where I'd interviewed 27 influencers, was a challenge. And we made money and it was great and we had a lot of people on there. But I think we missed it a huge opportunity to really blow it up because I just didn't have the bandwidth to promote it anymore. And so I think I would have timed that differently and doing an online summit around a

book. Another big thing that we did was social media promotion, right? Social media has been huge. I was doing contests on Snapchat. I was doing daily Periscope sessions, hashtag scope of greatness and hashtag bedtime banter for those that watch my Periscopes. I was doing Facebook live videos. I was promoting it all over Pinterest and Instagram. Instagram really got me a lot of sales. I had some big Instagram influencers promoting Scooter Braun, who's got a couple million. I had other people sharing the book on there as well. So social media was a big, big help in generating sales because you could see people who were commenting. And even during Christmas, so many people posted a photo of

the book that they had got from Christmas gifts, and they put it all on there and that was huge for me. So that was a ton of fun to use social media and to see people posting the book themselves on social, which would create more viral sales as well in that process. Two final things that I'll talk about. I'm trying to go over all my notes because there's a ton of different stuff here. One of the things I would say is creative marketing. I put this down and I was just like, okay, what type of creative marketing could I do? And I would say to think about all the different things that you could do that could be a creative marketing piece. Guys like Ryan Holiday talk about this and how you can really kind of manipulate the media or create something unique or interesting that could get a lot of buzz and attention and press.

So think of ways when you're that you could do it yourself. The last thing that really supported making it a New York Times bestseller was having a book launch manager and not trying to do it all on your own because there's a lot of moving parts. And so I hired a guy, Daniel Decker, who really supported me in just the logistics of the launch. So I had all these different things, 10, 12, 15 different points that I wanted to cover and all these different sales coming in from all these different places. And I just wanted to have someone that could see it all with a bird's eye view and support the logistics of managing the entire launch. And Daniel was amazing. He helped manage all of the street team and the coordination of that, setting it up, managing them, telling me when to post things, helping with when to start promoting this stuff for my newsletter and all the social media stuff and the strategy behind marketing it, how to make sure we direct people and say, hey, go buy at Barnes & Noble this week and go buy at Amazon today and go buy in your local bookstore to make sure that we are able to support the spread of sales and distribution of sales across all the different retailers.

Because if you buy your books from one place or other people buy all your books from one place, then the New York Times list doesn't see that as credible. So you just want to make sure that you have the strategy in place that you're setting it up to win the best way possible. And these were the main points from my book launch that were really effective in generating sales. Again, it starts with having a great proposal and a great idea, a great agent, a great publisher, a great proposal and a great idea, a great agent, a great publisher, a great writing and editing team, the whole team that comes together to really support you in actually creating the book. Because you've got to have a great book first, right?

You've got to have a great book first that people want to read. And that takes a whole team. You can't do that on your own. Then from there, you want to create the strategy a year to two years prior to actually the book coming out. You don't want to do this a couple months before and say, okay, how do I get press now? That's not going to happen. I was doing this years before. Before I even met my agent, I was preparing for a book launch. And that was four years ago when I gave him a proposal, right? So you want to really make sure that you don't try to do this half-assed.

You don't say, okay, I'm just going to show up and write a great book, and then people are going to buy it because they care about it. No. You've got to have an audience, and you've got to leverage other people's audiences. And that means you can't be asking for things all the time from people. You've got to make sure you're giving, giving, giving for years. This is what I did. I gave for years and years and then I asked when I had something really important to me and I didn't ask people to promote me other times.

I asked when I had a book. Another thing I did, just a side note, is with my podcast, I felt like it was very important to have a podcast and to have something, to have a platform. It's important to have your own platform if you want to be a New York Times bestseller. It's going to be really hard if you don't have a platform. So start building one now. And I had interviewed, at the time, 154 people that I had interviewed on my podcast. So I literally just printed off a list. I've got all these papers right in front of me right here.

I printed off a list of every one of the names. And then I went one by one, emailed, text, or called all of them and said, hey, I've got a book coming out. And I said, I would love your support and whatever would be the best way to get this out there to your audience. And then I just followed up with people. I had my own system. I had spreadsheets. I had everything on how to follow up with each one of these people that I'd already promoted myself. I'd promoted their books. I'd sold a lot of their books, their products, promoted whatever they were doing. And I never asked them for anything. And so I reached out

and finally asked them for something. And the interesting thing that I discovered is during this book launch is I really found out kind of like who my friends were and who would back me. And there were people earlier in the year who said, yes, I'm going to commit to supporting you and promoting you and buying books and getting the message out. And they've made these commitments that didn't follow through. And when the time came, they made excuses. Or they wouldn't get back to me. Or they were, you know, missing or whatever it was. And so it was really interesting to see, you know,

the people that I have supported over the years who didn't want to support me back for whatever reason. And some of them did have good reasons. They had their own thing happening, and that's fine. And then there was, you know was people that stepped up in major ways that didn't have to that really touched my heart and blew me away and made me so appreciative that they cared that much. And so it was interesting to see, you know, as feedback for me, how do I show up to other people that I've supported? Do I show up as someone that they want to support back or not? Or did I not create that great of a relationship with them? Or did they just back out because they wanted to back out, whatever it may be, right?

It was just good feedback for me. So those were some of the things that, again, really supported me. I've got other notes. You can see images from my workbooks and my pages and my notes back at lewishouse.com slash 270. I am very excited for the results that we have created with this book. It's been incredible. It hit number two on the New York Times bestseller list. For the whole month on the business book section, it hit number three the first week, and then it dropped a few and went down week two. But for the

whole month, it hit number two. For me, my dream was to be number one New York Times bestseller. That didn't happen, but I'm still so grateful for number two. And it's a blessing to know that all the hard work actually paid off. And it was on the New York Times bestseller list for a number of weeks. It hit the USA Today bestseller list for a number of weeks, Wall Street Journal list for a number of weeks, Publishers Weekly. It hit every major list that it could possibly hit. It took a full-team effort and a full-court press strategy and execution. And it was years in the making.

It wasn't just like it happened randomly. It was very intentional, and it was a lot of hard work. So that's what I hope you guys take away from launching a book. If you want to just get a book out there, great. It's not as hard as if you want to be a New York Times bestseller and hit every major list there is out there because that takes going full core press, that takes going all in. Unless you're some huge celebrity or some mega influencer like Tim Ferriss that gets a few million hits to his site every month and has a massive platform already, unless you're one of those, it's going

to take everything you've got in a full strategy and execution plan. And you're not going to be able to do it on your own. I had probably 30, 40 people, you know, working with me throughout, you know, a few month period just to make it happen. And it took a lot of execution. So with that, I hope this was useful information. I hope it was helpful. And if you have a book coming out, then hopefully you can use this as a resource. If you know someone who's an author who's going to be launching a book, please send them this link, lewishouse.com slash 270. And post this on your social media on Facebook, on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, everywhere online. Share this with your friends.

Again, lewishouse.com to see all the show notes, all the links, all the images, pictures, and all that stuff on how we did this and made it happen. You guys are incredible. I appreciate you so much. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you. Outro Music