In 2020, I accomplished one of my bucket list items: I became a best-selling author.
And yes, I did it all the old fashioned way before the rise of artificial intelligence.
This wasn’t something that I thought could ever be possible until I was well into my career. But I read a book called Published by Chandler Bolt, where he outlined the exact process on how he became a #1 best selling author on Amazon. This opened my eyes on what was actually possible. But just because I could conceptualize the process in theory was no guarantee of success.
I wish I could claim that I came up with the idea for the book from scratch, but the idea was actually my wife’s. She had this idea for a book that she wanted to write, but it wasn’t really going anywhere. The topic for the book was about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ health code commonly known as the Word of Wisdom. My wife had struggled with debilitating and life threatening health issues, and so we worked to implement these principles into our lives, and to our astonishment, her health issues reversed themselves. So of course she wanted to write a book about it.
She asked me to take a look at her initial draft, and I found that she had a lot of good information – it just wasn’t structured the right way. So I asked if I could help her out, and she agreed.
After reviewing the contents of her draft, I realized that it needed a complete re-write, and it needed a more compelling narrative to drive the self-help content.
This was right at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, so we had a lot of time on our hands.
The Process
A mentor of mine that I had worked with in a previous job called me and told me not to do this. He told me that most books don’t sell. He said it would be a massive waste of time and begged me not to do it.
I appreciated his concern, but respectfully, he was wrong.
So we set a goal to get it out in 3 months.
We worked tirelessly to get the first draft finished.
We compiled a team of editors who believed in our book.
We built a small launch team, dedicated to helping us reach our goal.
We created memes with compelling quotes from the book and then shared these to groups. These people then went to our website and signed up for our email list to be notified when the book launched.
The Results
When launch day finally came, we set the price of the e-book to be free. Then we had everyone who had helped and had already read the book download it and leave a review. And pretty soon, we reached #1 in the religion category.
This was one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life.
But apparently it wasn’t difficult enough to deter us, because we ended up doing it again a couple of years later with another book in the Health category.
And that mentor of mine was caring enough to let me know his concerns and how it would impact the bottom line of our struggling health coaching business.
But that book was the best things that we ever did for our business. It brought in more clients than any of our other efforts, even years later.
What I Learned
Through all of this, I learned a few things.
1) The Amount Of Time You Have Is The Time It Takes
People think it’s so crazy that we were able to do this in such a short amount of time.
But I think it’s because we gave ourselves such a short time frame that we were able to pull it off at all.
We had to be so granular with the milestones we had to hit and so meticulous with our time.
It became our obsession, and so we poured all of our blood, sweat, and tears into it.
The results speak for themselves.
2) Go With Your Gut
Everyone around me was telling me this wasn’t a good idea.
We had just started a business, clients were cancelling due to COVID, and new clients were drying up.
All of this screamed that we should abandon ship and do something different.
But both my wife and I felt like this was the right move.
A mentor that I really looked up to told me I should give it up.
But I followed my gut and made that asymmetric bet.
And it paid off.
3) Provide Value And Others Will Promote For You
When we were building a launch team, we gave people who were interested exclusive access into our process and behind the scenes details.
We showed them our concepts for the cover design. We had them help pick the title of the book. And we provided value beyond just letting them read an advance copy.
And do you know what? They showed up in a massive way when it was time to launch the book. We could not have done it without them.
This showed me the value of having a team behind you that believes in the product or service you’re providing that can help get the word out at a very low cost.
