How to Sell Your Book Before You Write It

Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp Day 2: From Story Idea to $1,000 in Book Sales

I sold 99 copies of my book for $3.99 each before I released it. I had no mailing list. Barely any fans. And I didn’t even post once on social media.

To top it all off, this was my first book ever published in that subgenre (post-apocalyptic survival fiction). Here’s that book’s pre-order inside my Kindle Direct Publishing Dashboard:

The trick? I sold my book to readers before I wrote it. Sounds like magic, but today I’m going to show exactly how you can too.

This is Day 2 of 5 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp. You can complete Day 1 here all about how to find the audience you are writing for and understand what stories they like. Now that you have decided your target audience it’s time to have them pre-order your book… before you spend ~100 hours writing a book that might not sell.

The goal for this bootcamp is in <5 minutes a day to help you take a story idea to $1,000 in book sales and beyond with as little stress, time, and money as possible. I created this bootcamp to make the Author Marketing Superpowers even more accessible and easy to use.

Each day is based on one of the five types of marketing superpowers covered inside 50 Author Marketing Superpowers (you can read for free here and get the physical deck with beautiful illustrations here).

Now, let’s get into Day 2 all about the Teleportation Powers: Share Your Story.

If you can’t sell your book, don’t write it

A maxim I learned working at MrBeast that I’ve seen hold true – your story idea is the ceiling for how well it can sell. Or in other words, packaging (your book cover and blurb) is a massive factor in your book’s success.

Without a book cover and packaging that converts your target readers, your story is dead in the water before readers even get to page 1. Your idea aligning with the expectations of a target readership is often 80% of the battle.

If the premise of our story and how we convey that in our cover and blurb is so important, then why do we wait until after we write our story to create these?

Better yet, why do write our story at all until we know if our book cover and blurb will sell to our target readers?

After my disastrous mistake in Day 1 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp costing me thousands of dollars and tons of stress, I was determined to do it differently.

Here’s what I did.

• I commissioned my cover designer to make a cover for my book Mad World

• I wrote a blurb for the book myself

• Then I posted the cover and blurb on Amazon (although you can do this on your direct store as well… and I even prefer this method now!) and set a pre-order date for a year in the future. My plan was to change the pre-order release date to be earlier if the book sold, and if it didn’t, I planned to swap out the cover, blurb, and title for a new one and try selling that.

• Lastly, I created some simple Facebook Ads and spent $5 a day advertising the book. For every $5 I spent, I got 1.5 sales on average. Just enough money to get close to breaking even.

• This was on a book with no reviews and it wasn’t even available in Kindle Unlimited yet (it was when it released), which is where well over half of authors’ income in the subgenre came from.

Nuts, right? Well… I nailed a cover and blurb that readers wanted. In short, my story idea sold. Here’s that cover and blurb:

And this wasn’t an insane conversion rate. It was above average, but it’s definitely possible to do even better than I did.

Seeing that I was basically breaking even on my ad spend for book 1, I was very confident that with read-through to future books and Kindle Unlimited page read income, I’d be swimming in profit.

This is an amazing place to begin writing your story from.

You already know it’s going to sell to readers. You have a high degree of confidence you will make back any money you spend on the editing and design of your story.

This is what the Testing Trick, one of the Teleportation Powers, is all about.

And by unleashing a series of Teleportation Powers, you too can sell your book before you write it.

Now, in a reply, share with us what you did to complete the following steps:

Step #1: Story Suit: what story packaging (book cover and blurb) will resonate with your target readers? Create a cover and book blurb for your story idea. The goal should be to have your Story Suit feel familiar to your target readers but stand out in a particular way so that readers have a reason to read your story.

Hint: you can even create multiple book blurbs and covers and test which works better. No need to go too overboard here, but more testing can be a good thing!

Step #2: Publishing Sales Models: how will you sell your story’s pre-order to readers? There’s Amazon, wide retailers, and direct on your own website. Ultimately, there are pros and cons to each pathway. Your goal is to pick which one will work best for you and your story and post your story’s packaging for pre-order there.

You should be charging for this pre-order a similar amount that you’d charge for your book at launch. We need to test if readers are willing to pay for your story!

Hint: I almost always recommend authors sell pre-orders directly on their website (such as Shopify, Payhip, etc.) for 3 reasons:

1. You can change your pre-order date and even cancel pre-orders + refund readers without any penalty. Amazon penalizes authors for moving dates further back for pre-orders (hence why I set mine a year in the future) and doesn’t let you cancel it without losing privileges to pre-order in the future. On your direct site, it’s your bookstore and your rules.

2. You get cash up front immediately and the emails of all your readers. On Amazon, you have to wait till after the pre-order to charge the readers and another 60 days to receive the cash. This makes it very hard to fund any marketing or production costs from your initial sales. Meanwhile, on your direct site, you can charge readers immediately. Here’s an example of a fellow science fiction author,

   Nat Eliason
   , offering pre-orders of his new book on his website.

3. You can always put your book on the retailers later. Nothing is stopping you from publishing your book on Amazon when it’s ready and even enrolling your book in Kindle Unlimited.

Step #3: One-Time Marketing Events: how will you get the eyeballs of your target readers on your pre-order page? Now that you have your pre-order set up, you are ready to share your story with the world. A ton of the Teleportation Powers (you can read them all for free here), such as Book Marketing Plan, Copy Cooker, and The Promotion Elements, cover specific ways to improve your marketing for your story.

One-Time Marketing Events are all about taking away the pressure to figure out a huge marketing campaign for your story. At this stage, your goal is not to sell thousands of books (yet). Your goal is to see if you can reliably and sustainably garner sales from your target readers, either by running a small ad campaign, running a virtual event, doing a swap with another author, or creating content on an online platform (for me I choose ads… you only need to choose one!).

Now you know how to sell your story before you write it and have even honed in on a marketing activity that will allow you to (hopefully) continue selling your book.

Wohoo! At this point, you did the impossible. You found Readers First before you even wrote your story.

But, there’s a great danger lurking here.

I thought that after the pre-order sales were rolling in, I was set. This was the book series that would finally make me a full-time income as an author.

Except, despite selling nearly 1,000 copies of the first book in my series over the next few months (not counting page reads in Kindle Unlimited) and writing two more books in the series, I never turned more than a couple hundred dollars a month in profit.

I burned out. And pivoted my career to creating content on YouTube and livestreaming (I call it my quarter life crisis, you can learn about that here).

Luckily, this doesn’t have to happen to you.

There’s another set of superpowers that we must unleash to ward off the greatest villain of publishing. And it’s exactly what I’ll be sharing with you tomorrow for Day 3 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp.

The wheels fall off in this one… and I hope by me sharing this disaster, you can avoid it happening to you.

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick

P.S. If you are a paid member of Author Sidekick Plus we have a workshop today on the Reader Growth Engines, the three scalable ways to market your story. You can join now for just $5/month and you’ll get an email in a few hours with your exclusive access 💙.