How to Launch a New York Times Bestselling Book

The School of Greatness

• Episode: How to Launch a New York Times Bestselling Book
• Website: The School of Greatness
• Feed URL: http://lewishowes.com/feed/podcast/
• Duration: 00:34:43
• Published: 2015-12-30 00:31

I've been talking about doing this for weeks and the time has finally come! Here it is: the full behind-the-scenes breakdown of my entire book launch for The School of Greatness book. I had been planning this book launch for years (no joke) and I was as excited as the next person to see how it would all go down. Here are my original notes, in pre-planning mode a year ago, about how I was going to attack this book launch. I put my heart and soul into it, plus countless hours, no sleep, and HUSTLE. In the end, I fell one spot shy of my goal to hit #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List - the book came in at #2 for the entire month in the Business category (and #3 for the actual launch week). I'm pretty happy about it :) It's been a wild ride, full of ups and downs. I feel so much gratitude for every person who supported me and the message of greatness in spreading it to a bigger audience than ever before. As one expression of my gratitude, I wanted to pull back the covers and give you the full rundown of how we put together this launch, what worked, what didn't, and what I learned. My hope is that you will set yourself a massive goal, like I did 8 years ago, and that these insights will support you in achieving that yourself. Here we go: TOP WAYS WE MARKETED THE BOOK 1. BULK BOOK ORDERS In exchange for my normal speaking fee, I accepted several requests to speak at events with the agreement that the host would order the value of my speaking fee in books. This was big since I was able to get thousands of orders from these events and the event attendees got to each receive a copy as part of their ticket price. I also got multiple companies and individuals to buy large orders of books to give to their clients, employees, etc. which added up fast. 2. PODCAST TOUR I lined up A LOT of podcasts to come on as a guest. A lot of these were friends of mine, like Michael Hyatt and Gary V, who are awesome and did it because we're friends. Some were people I hadn't heard of, but they offered to buy a bulk order of books in exchange for me coming on. In total, I did 29 podcast interviews. I know. It was a lot. But that got the word out to all of those podcast audiences. It pays to leverage other people's audiences. 3. STREET TEAM I did a call out a couple months before the book launch to all my followers to see who the superfans were. They showed up in a big way and I had over 1000 applicants who wanted to be on the street team. In the end, we took 500 (who got an advance copy of the book) and they all promoted the book big time on their own social channels. Big shout out to the street team for their support! 4. BONUS OFFERINGS LANDING PAGE We made a huge list of book bonuses, giving a ton of extra value for those who purchased more than one book. You can see that full list of bonuses HERE. 5. PRESS I started lining up major press opportunities in January of this year - 10 months ahead of time. I networked and leveraged every possible opportunity to get on major news shows like Fox, as well as local news stations in the cities I visited on the book tour. I ended up doing about 10 TV interviews, which was great for exposure to audiences I would not have gotten in front of otherwise. Influencers like Kimberly Guilfoyle have really loyal followings, and one shout out from them goes a long way. Being featured on the cover of Experience Life Magazine was a highlight for sure. 6. GUEST POSTS In addition to the TV and podcast interviews I did, I got a ton of requests and opportunities to do written interviews and guest posts on all sorts of blogs, news sites, and websites. There was literally no way I could have written all these on my own, so my team really supported me on this one and I looked over a lot of these without having to actually write them from scratch. Overall, I was either featured in or wrote original pieces for over 35 different publications. 7.